Famous Tennis Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tennis poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tennis poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tennis poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surry twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I'm engaged to M...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops
a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...y are,
As bribes to teach them how to execute
Sixteen sexual positions on the sand;
This makes them join (the boys) the tennis club,
Jive at the Mecca, use deodorants, and
On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub
By private car.
Such uncorrected visions end in church
Or registrar:
A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch;
Nippers; the widowed mum; having to scheme
With money; illness; age. So absolute
Maturity falls, when old men sit and dream
Of naked native girls who b...Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...ashed quite clean, seeking the home
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
Walking towards them through some dappled park
As if on water that unfocused she
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
Who now stands newly clear,
Smiling, and recog...Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...ke a snail;
in another room someone tries to eat a shoe;
meanwhile an adolescent pads up and down
the hall in his white tennis socks.
A new doctor makes rounds
advertising tranquilizers, insulin, or shock
to the uninitiated.
Six years of such small preoccupations!
Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
O my hunger! My hunger!
I could have gone around the world twice
or had new children - all boys.
It was a long trip with little days in it
and no new places.
In her...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...nursery
Soap scented fingers I long to caress.
Were you a prefect and head of your dormit'ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?
Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.
Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and ...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...entless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts --
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory....Read more of this...
by
Gluck, Louise
...Well, I'll
tell you. She was a handsome, self-assured woman,
a practicing physician, 48, bright, in great shape,
played tennis every Friday night,
didn't drink, smoke, or take drugs,
and was looking for a Romeo with brains.
So naturally I didn't phone her"...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
...e plays the best.
She’s such an ace at archery.
She’s queen of the canoe.
She’s tough to top at taekwondo
And table tennis too.
She dominates the diving board.
She tromps the trampoline.
At lifting weights and wrestling
She’s the best you’ve ever seen.
She speeds across the swimming pool
To slake the summer heat.
On BMX and mountain bike
She simply can’t be beat.
She’s highest in the high jump,
And a champ at hammer throwing,
Magnificent in marathons,
Remarkab...Read more of this...
by
Nesbitt, Kenn
...e Power, if she consid-
ered the book to be a religious text of some sort.
The girl said, "No."
I bought a pair of tennis shoes and three pairs of socks at
a store in McCall. The socks had a written guarantee. I tried
to save the guarantee, but I put it in my pocket and lost it.
The guarantee said that if anything happened to the socks
within three months time, I would get new socks. It seemed
like a good idea.
I was supposed to launder the old socks and send them...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.
To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis-playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.
At sundown on my tricycle
I tour the Borough’s edge,
And icy as an icicle
See bicycle by bicycle
Stacked waiting in the hedge.
Get down from me! I thunder there,
You spaniels! Shut your jaws!
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear,
Suspenders torn asunder there
And butt...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...es.
Out of the window I saw zebras and rattlesnakes and wildebeests and cougars and woodchucks on the lawns and in the tennis courts. I worried how, after the storm, we would put the animals back in their cages, and get to the mainland....Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...ng on of hands
or the black sacrament.
It's a ceremony
but like any other sport
it's full of rules.
It's like a musical tennis match where
my mouth keeps catching the ball.
Then I lie on; my altar
elevated by the eight chemical kisses.
What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum-
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb....Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...r tree, the holy tree,
Tree of all attributes.
Now on the lawn
The olives fall by thousands, and I delight
To shed my tennis shoes and walk on them,
Pressing them coldly into the deep grass,
In love and reverence for the total loss....Read more of this...
by
Shapiro, Karl
...flop beside you, hear you sigh;
And then with what supreme caress,
You'd tuck me up into my press.
Fair tigress of the tennis courts,
So short in sleeve and strong in shorts,
Little, alas, to you I mean,
For I am bald and old and green....Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...him even to death,
Or baser courses, children of despair.'
'Poor boy,' she said, 'can he not read--no books?
Quoit, tennis, ball--no games? nor deals in that
Which men delight in, martial exercise?
To nurse a blind ideal like a girl,
Methinks he seems no better than a girl;
As girls were once, as we ourself have been:
We had our dreams; perhaps he mixt with them:
We touch on our dead self, nor shun to do it,
Being other--since we learnt our meaning here,
To lift t...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...with a broken wall
And the back bare and hard from children’s play,
The privet was matted with shards of glass, worn tennis balls and broken toys,
So tattered I cut it back to the wall, I sat on the top step and read,
Watching the children play in the sand I’d trundled in barrow loads
From the builder’s yard, a make-do sandpit which drew the whole street,
West Indian, English and Asian built temples together. Our sandalled
Bearded neighbour was the first to complain, ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
.... We could
hear the ocean, not far off, and boats
firing up their engines, and the shouts
of couples in white on the tennis courts.
I thought, Yes, this is the beginning
of another summer, and it will go on
until the sun tires of us or the moon
rises in its place on a silvered dawn
and no one wakens. My brother flung
his fork on the polished wooden floor
and cried out, "My eggs are cold, cold!"
and turned his plate over. I laughed
out loud, and Mother slapped my f...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...oetid forest, as brief flame.
This world, with far too many people in,
starts on the TV logo as a taw,
then ping-pong, tennis, football; then one spin
to show us all, then shots of the Gulf War.
As the coal with reddish dust cools in the grate
on the late-night national news we see
police v. pickets at a coke-plant grate,
old violence and old disunity.
The map that's colour-coded Ulster/Eire's
flashed on again as almost every night.
Behind a tiny coffin with two bearers
me...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...sure.
So that when you find you have worked so comfortably that your waistline is a
menace,
You correct it with golf or tennis.
Whereas is in an uncomfortable job like piano-moving or stevedoring you
indulge,
You have no time to exercise, you just continue to bulge.
To sum it up, young man, there is every reason to refuse a job that will make
heavy demands on you corporally or manually,
And the only intelligent way to start your career is to accept a sitting
position paying a...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
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