Famous Switch Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Switch poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous switch poems. These examples illustrate what a famous switch poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edwin Brock
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
All wars are useless to the dead
My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell
My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot...Read more of this...
by
Vernon Scannell
The bar he went inside was not
A place he often visited;
He welcomed anonymity;
No one to switch inquisitive
Receivers on, no one could see,
Or wanted to, exactly what
He was, or had been, or would be;
A quiet brown place, a place to drink
And let thought simmer like good stock,
No mirrors to distract, no...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the...Read more of this...
by
John Ashbery
Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet andsalutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
CURS’D be the man, the poorest wretch in life,
The crouching vassal to a tyrant wife!
Who has no will but by her high permission,
Who has not sixpence but in her possession;
Who must to he, his dear friend’s secrets tell,
Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell.
Were such the wife had fallen to my part,
I’d break her spirit or I’d break...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Want to trade me, do you, mistah? Oh, well, now, I reckon not,
W'y you could n't buy my Sukey fu' a thousan' on de spot.
Dat ol' mare o' mine?
Yes, huh coat ah long an' shaggy, an' she ain't no shakes to see;
Dat's a ring-bone, yes, you right, suh, an' she got a on'ry knee,
But dey ain't no use in talkin',...Read more of this...
by
Natasha Trethewey
Here, she said, put this on your head.
She handed me a hat.
you 'bout as white as your dad,
and you gone stay like that.
Aunt Sugar rolled her nylons down
around each bony ankle,
and I rolled down my white knee socks
letting my thin legs dangle,
circling them just above water
and silver backs of minnows
flitting here then there between
the sun spots and the shadows.
This...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
Here's a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someine gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah there's more sky in these parts than say
ground. Hence her voice's pitch
and her stare stains your...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
HOW wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite,
How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white,
How Genius, th’ illustrious father of fiction,
Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction,
I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle,
I care not, not I—let the Critics go whistle!
But now for a Patron whose name and whose glory,
At once may illustrate and honour...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
Once played to attentive faces
music has broken its frame
its bodice of always-weak laces
the entirely promiscuous art
pours out in public spaces
accompanying everything, the selections
of sex and war, the rejections.
To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans
it transmits an ideal body
continuously as theirs age. Warrens
of plastic tiles and mesh throats
dispense this aural money...Read more of this...
by
Denise Duhamel
We must have clamored for the same mother, hurried for
the same womb.
I know it now as I read that my birthday is his.
Since the first time I saw his picture, I sensed something—
and with a fierce bonding and animosity
began following his career.
Look where I am and look where he is!
There is a book documenting his every haircut
while...Read more of this...
by
Hugo Williams
The smell of ammonia in the entrance hall.
The racing bike. The junk mail.
The timer switch whose single naked bulb
allowed us as far as the first floor.
The backs of your legs
as you went ahead of me up the stairs.
The landing where we paused for breath
and impatient key searching.
The locks which would never open quickly enough
to let us in.
The green of...Read more of this...
by
Erica Jong
I want to understand the steep thing
that climbs ladders in your throat.
I can't make sense of you.
Everywhere I look you're there--
a vast landmark, a volcano
poking its head through the clouds,
Gulliver sprawled across Lilliput.
I climb into your eyes, looking.
The pupils are black painted stage flats.
They can be pulled down like window shades.
I switch on a light in your iris.
Your brain...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Win' a-blowin' gentle so de san' lay low,
San' a little heavy f'om de rain,
All de pa'ms a-wavin' an' a-weavin' slow,
Sighin' lak a sinnah-soul in pain.
Alligator grinnin' by de ol' lagoon,
Mockin'-bird a-singin' to be big full moon.[Pg 192]
'Skeeter go a-skimmin' to his fightin' chune
(Lizy Ann's a-waitin' in de lane!).
Moccasin a-sleepin' in de cyprus swamp;
Need n't wake de gent'man, not...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
I
He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too...Read more of this...
by
Denise Levertov
A night that cuts between you and you
and you and you and you
and me : jostles us apart, a man elbowing
through a crowd. We won't
look for each other, either-
wander off, each alone, not looking
in the slow crowd. Among sideshows
under movie signs,
pictures made of a million lights,
giants that move and again move
again, above a cloud of thick smells,
franks, roasted nutmeats-
Or...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Dunn
if you believe nothing is always what's left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies-
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.
He wished when he had had the track alone
He had attacked it with a club or stone
And bent some rail wide open like switch
So as to wreck the engine in...Read more of this...
by
Andre Breton
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
One of these days…
they will need winding.
Rabelais in red boards,
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers,
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing…
To be said against them…
Or for them…
In the cool of the night...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
october stops the pretence
that somehow summer
should still be loitering around
it walks through the garden
hanging the spiders up
between fences and flowers
it throws rather more dew
on the ground than is
good for the shoes and then
has the nerve to let on
frost is sniffing its way
southwards - some mornings
it can be caught at the windows
looking in with a shrug
it's spotted a shiver or...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
"The spirits do not like the light,"
The medium said, and turned the switch;
The little lady on my right
Clutched at my hand with nervous twitch.
(She seemed to be a pretty *****.)
The moustached women on my left,
With spirits on hr heavy breath,
Lasciviously leaned her heft
On me as one who languisheth.
The sordid room was still as death.
"A shape I see," the medium...Read more of this...
by
Donald Justice
One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a
hired assassin.
-- John D. MacDonald
You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.
My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered,
And I...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
The bloom was off the economic recovery.
"I just want to know one thing," she said.
What was that one thing? He'll never know,
Because at just that moment he heard the sound
Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there,
It was dark. His hand went to the wall
But the switch wasn't where it was supposed to be
Which felt like...Read more of this...
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