Famous Tin Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Birthday Poem

...Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name....Read more of this...
by Kooser, Ted


A Childs Christmas In Wales

...ds in
the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays
resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her
son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland,
though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Pati...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

Ballad of the Moon

...
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her amrs,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings."
"Let me dance, my little one.
When the gypsies come,
they'll find you on the anvil
with your lively eyes closed tight.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
I can feelheir horses come."
"Let me be, my little one,
don't step on me, all starched and white!"

Closer...Read more of this...
by García Lorca, Federico

Carol of Occupations

...escape me, and none shall wish to escape me. 

I bring what you much need, yet always have,
Not money, amours, dress, eating, but as good; 
I send no agent or medium, offer no representative of value, but offer the value itself. 

There is something that comes home to one now and perpetually; 
It is not what is printed, preach’d, discussed—it eludes discussion and print; 
It is not to be put in a book—it is not in this book;
It is for you, whoever you are—it is no farther fro...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Childhood

...re was nothing to see, 
Nothing to do, 
Nothing to play with, 
Except that in an empty room upstairs 
There was a large tin box 
Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta, 
Of the Declaration of Independence 
And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada. 
There were also several packets of stamps, 
Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots, 
Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak, 
Indians and Men-of-war 
From the United States, 
And the green and red portraits 
Of Kin...Read more of this...
by Aldington, Richard


Cloud

...If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. 
-Thich Nhat Hanh 

Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and
murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadows of a cloud cross-
ing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried
into a plaid handkerchief. You were the sky without a hat. Your
heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a...Read more of this...
by Cisneros, Sandra

Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding

...ith frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's co...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Gioconda And Si-Ya-U

...d under such a heavy sentence
that as the paint on my face cracks out of boredom
I'm forced to keep grinning without letting up.
Because
 I am the Gioconda from Florence
whose smile is more famous than Florence.
I am bored with the Louvre Museum.
And since you get sick soon enough 
 of conversing with the past,

I decided 
 from now on
to keep a diary.
Writing of today may be of some help
 in forgetting yesterday...
However, the Louvre is a strange place.
Here you might find
...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim

Middle Passage

...eath, 
our and their own. Some try to starve themselves. 
Lost three this morning leaped with crazy laughter 
to the waiting sharks, sang as they went under." 

Desire, Adventure, Tartar, Ann: 

Standing to America, bringing home 
black gold, black ivory, black seed. 

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones 
New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. 

Jesus Saviour Pilot Me 
Over Life's Tempestuous Sea 


We pray that Thou wilt gr...Read more of this...
by Hayden, Robert

Paradiso (Italian)

...rti,
pi? al principio loro e men vicine;
 onde si muovono a diversi porti
per lo gran mar de l'essere, e ciascuna
con istinto a lei dato che la porti.
 Questi ne porta il foco inver' la luna;
questi ne' cor mortali ? permotore;
questi la terra in s? stringe e aduna;
 n? pur le creature che son fore
d'intelligenza quest'arco saetta
ma quelle c'hanno intelletto e amore.
 La provedenza, che cotanto assetta,
del suo lume fa 'l ciel sempre quieto
nel qual si volge quel c'ha maggio...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante

Part 7 of Trout Fishing in America

...us eternity, but the lake itself was filled with

thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore

and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time.

 The minnows were an Idaho tourist attraction. They

should have been made into a National Monument. Swimming

close to shore, like children they believed in their own im-

mortality .

 A third-year student in engineering at the University of

Montana attempted to catch some of the minnows but he went

about it all wrong...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Scars on Paper

...one, I think, she called, alone, upon
her courage, tried in ways she'd not have wished
by pain and fear: her courage, extinguished.

The pain and fear some courage extinguished
at disaster's denouement come back
daily, banal: is that brownish-black
mole the next chapter? Was the ache enmeshed
between my chest and armpit when I washed
rogue cells' new claw, or just a muscle ache?
I'm not yet desperate enough to take
comfort in being predeceased: the anguish
when the Harlem doc...Read more of this...
by Hacker, Marilyn

Song of the Broad-Axe

...l bone! limb only one, and lip only one! 
Gray-blue leaf by red-heat grown! helve produced from a little seed sown! 
Resting the grass amid and upon,
To be lean’d, and to lean on. 

Strong shapes, and attributes of strong shapes—masculine trades, sights and sounds; 
Long varied train of an emblem, dabs of music; 
Fingers of the organist skipping staccato over the keys of the great organ. 

2
Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind;
Welcome are lands of pine and oak; ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Break Away

...the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
sucking with love a...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Hammers

...he lead and silver Winter days,
All through the copper of Autumn hazes.
Tap to the red rising sun,
Tap to the purple setting sun.
Four years pass before the job is done.
Two thousand oak trees grown and felled,
Two thousand oaks from the hedgerows of the Weald,
Sussex had yielded two thousand oaks
With huge boles
Round which the tape rolls
Thirty mortal feet, say the village folks.
Two hundred loads of elm and Scottish fir;
Planking from Dantzig.
My! What timber goes into a s...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Lovers of the Poor

...arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. 
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their love, so barbarously fair.
Whose mothers taught: You'd bet...Read more of this...
by Brooks, Gwendolyn

The Schooner Flight

...ing
for the houses, the street, that whole fucking island.

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
>From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when I was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load.
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big time bohbohl,
coolie, ******, Syrian and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival - 
I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road....Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

Trout Fishing in America

...t trout fishing.

 I'd like to get it right.

 Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear

snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

 Imagine Pittsburgh.

 A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings,

 trains and tunnels.

 The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!



The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:

 I remember with particular amusement, people with three-

cornered hats fishing in the dawn.








 KNOCK ON WOOD (PART TWO)
 One spring afternoon as a chi...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

V

...ady, of a sort,
and we'll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop 
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill's
the place I may well rest if there's a s...Read more of this...
by Harrison, Tony

White

...lor of the bride
And that of blindness,

Touch what I can
Of the quick,

Speak and then wait,
As if this light

Will continue to linger
On the threshold.



All that is near,
I no longer give it a name.

Once a stone hard of hearing,
Once sharpened into a knife...

Now only a chill
Slipping through.

Enough glow to kneel by and ask
To be tied to its tail

When it goes marrying
Its cousins, the stars.



Is it a cloud?
If it's a cloud it will move on.

The true shape of this t...Read more of this...
by Simic, Charles

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