Famous Timber Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Timber poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous timber poems. These examples illustrate what a famous timber poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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Denis

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Denis, whose motionable, alert, most vaulting wit 
Caps occasion with an intellectual fit. 
Yet Arthur is a Bowman: his three-heeled timber ’ll hit 
The bald and b?ld bl?nking gold when ?ll ’s d?ne 
Right rooting in the bare butt’s wincing navel in the sight of the sun.
. . . . . . . ....Read more of this...

Liberty Tree

by Thomas Paine
In a chariot of light from the regions of day,
The Goddess of Liberty came;
Ten thousand celestials directed the way,
And hither conducted the dame.
A fair budding branch from the gardens above,
Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.
The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it...Read more of this...

The Truce of the Bear

by Rudyard Kipling
 Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.

Eyeless, noseless, and lipless -- toothless, broken of speech,
Seeking a dole at the doorway he mumbles his tale to each;
Over and over...Read more of this...

To An Old Mate

by Henry Lawson
 Old Mate! In the gusty old weather, 
When our hopes and our troubles were new, 
In the years spent in wearing out leather, 
I found you unselfish and true -- 
I have gathered these verses together 
For the sake of our friendship and you. 

You may think for awhile, and with reason, 
Though still with a kindly regret, 
That...Read more of this...

The Paroo

by Henry Lawson
 It was a week from Christmas-time, 
As near as I remember, 
And half a year since, in the rear, 
We'd left the Darling timber. 
The track was hot and more than drear; 
The day dragged out for ever; 
But now we knew that we were near 
Our camp - the Paroo River. 
With blighted eyes and blistered feet, 
With...Read more of this...

Hudsons Last Voyage

by Henry Van Dyke
 June 22, 1611 

THE SHALLOP ON HUDSON BAY 

One sail in sight upon the lonely sea
And only one, God knows! For never ship 
But mine broke through the icy gates that guard 
These waters, greater grown than any since
We left the shores of England. We were first, 
My men, to battle in between the bergs
And floes to these wide...Read more of this...

The Amateur Rider

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Him goin' to ride for us! Him -- with the pants and the eyeglass and all. 
Amateur! don't he just look it -- it's twenty to one on a fall. 
Boss must be gone off his head to be sending out steeplechase crack 
Out over fences like these with an object like that on his back. 
Ride! Don't tell...Read more of this...

The Dream Of Wearing Shorts Forever

by Les Murray
 To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass, 

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches, 

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah -...Read more of this...

Timber Wings

by Carl Sandburg
 THERE was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkley’s timber.

Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on the walnuts and the hazel.

 There was a wild pigeon.

There was a summer came year by year to Hinkley’s timber.

Rainy months and sunny and pigeons calling and one pigeon best of all who came.

 There was a summer.

It is so long...Read more of this...

The House of Christmas

by G K Chesterton
 There fared a mother driven forth 
Out of an inn to roam; 
In the place where she was homeless 
All men are at home. 
The crazy stable close at hand, 
With shaking timber and shifting sand, 
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand 
Than the square stones of Rome. 

For men are homesick in their homes, 
And strangers...Read more of this...

Four Quartets 2: East Coker

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 I

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and...Read more of this...

The Timber

by Henry Vaughan
 Sure thou didst flourish once! and many springs, 
Many bright mornings, much dew, many showers, 
Pass'd o'er thy head; many light hearts and wings, 
Which now are dead, lodg'd in thy living bowers. 

And still a new succession sings and flies; 
Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot 
Towards the old and still enduring skies, 
While the...Read more of this...

The Deacons Masterpiece Or The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay: A Logical Story

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, 
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it -- ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, --
Have you ever heard of that, I say?

Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus...Read more of this...

The Plantsters Vision

by John Betjeman
 Cut down that timber! Bells, too many and strong,
 Pouring their music through the branches bare,
 From moon-white church towers down the windy air
Have pealed the centuries out with Evensong.

Remove those cottages, a huddled throng!
 Too many babies have been born in there,
 Too many coffins, bumping down the stair,
Carried the old their garden paths along.

I have a Vision...Read more of this...

Song of the Artesian Water

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Now the stock have started dying, for the Lord has sent a drought; 
But we're sick of prayers and Providence -- we're going to do without; 
With the derricks up above us and the solid earth below, 
We are waiting at the lever for the word to let her go. 
Sinking down, deeper down, 
Oh, we'll sink it deeper...Read more of this...

Australian Engineers

by Henry Lawson
 Ah, well! but the case seems hopeless, and the pen might write in vain; 

The people gabble of old things over and over again. 

For the sake of the sleek importer we slave with the pick and the shears, 

While hundreds of boys in Australia long to be engineers. 



A new generation has risen under Australian skies, 

Boys with...Read more of this...

Im Scared Of It All

by Robert William Service
 I'm scared of it all, God's truth! so I am;
It's too big and brutal for me.
My nerve's on the raw and I don't give a damn
For all the "hoorah" that I see.
I'm pinned between subway and overhead train,
Where automobillies swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again --
I'm scared of the terrible town.

I want to go...Read more of this...

The Great Grey Plain

by Henry Lawson
 Out West, where the stars are brightest, 
Where the scorching north wind blows, 
And the bones of the dead gleam whitest, 
And the sun on a desert glows -- 
Yet within the selfish kingdom 
Where man starves man for gain, 
Where white men tramp for existence -- 
Wide lies the Great Grey Plain. 

No break in its awful horizon,...Read more of this...

Knee-Deep in June

by James Whitcomb Riley
 Tell you what I like the best -- 
'Long about knee-deep in June, 
'Bout the time strawberries melts 
On the vine, -- some afternoon 
Like to jes' git out and rest, 
And not work at nothin' else! 

Orchard's where I'd ruther be -- 
Needn't fence it in fer me! -- 
Jes' the whole sky overhead, 
And the whole airth...Read more of this...

Localities

by Carl Sandburg
 WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.

Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices,
Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets,
The fly-by-night towns of Bull Frog and Skiddoo,
The night-cool limestone white of Death Valley,
The straight drop of eight hundred feet
From a shelf road in the Hasiampa Valley:
Men and places they...Read more of this...

Faithless Nelly Gray

by Thomas Hood
 A Pathetic Ballad

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Now as they bore him off the field,
Said he, 'Let others shoot;
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-second Foot.'

The army-surgeons made him limbs:
Said he, 'They're only pegs;
But there's as wooden members quite,
As represent my legs.'

Now...Read more of this...

The Man From Snowy River

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 There was movement at the station, for the word has passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away,
And had joined the wild bush horses—he was worth a thousand pound,
So all the cracks had gathered to the fray.
All the tried and noted riders from the stations near and far
Had mustered at the homestead overnight,
For the bushmen love hard...Read more of this...

The Butter Factory

by Les Murray
 It was built of things that must not mix:
paint, cream, and water, fire and dusty oil.
You heard the water dreaming in its large
kneed pipes, up from the weir. And the cordwood
our fathers cut for the furnace stood in walls
like the sleeper-stacks of a continental railway.

The cream arrived in lorried tides; its procession
crossed a platform of workers' stagecraft: Come here
Friday-Legs!...Read more of this...

Morning Work

by D. H. Lawrence
A gang of labourers on the piled wet timber
That shines blood-red beside the railway siding
Seem to be making out of the blue of the morning
Something faery and fine, the shuttles sliding,

The red-gold spools of their hands and faces shuttling
Hither and thither across the morn's crystalline frame
Of blue: trolls at the cave of ringing cerulean mining,
And laughing with work, living their...Read more of this...

A Song In Storm

by Rudyard Kipling
 Be well assured that on our side
 The abiding oceans fight,
 Though headlong wind and heaping tide
 Make us their sport to-night.
 By force of weather, not of war,
 In jeopardy we steer.
 Then welcome Fate's discourtesy
 Whereby it shall appear
 How in all time of our distress,
 And our deliverance too,
 The game is more than the player...Read more of this...

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