Famous Tinker Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tinker poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tinker poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tinker poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...He was a traveling tinker lad
And I was a gypsy jade,
Yet never were two so gay and glad,
And a perfect pair we made;
Bruises I've known since life began,
Blows and the love that smothers:
But I'd rather have the curse of my man,
Than the kisses of all others.
When Black Mike called me a lousy *****
Jim was so mad, like hell 'e
Flammed, and Mike lay there in the ditch
With a...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...;
I think it better not to think too deeply nor too much;
But just to dream and take delight in all I hear and see,
The tinker in the tavern, with his trollop on his knee;
The ivied church, the anvil clang, the geese upon the green,
The drowsy noon, the hush of eve so holy and screne.
This is my world, then back again with heart of joy I go
To cottage walls of mellow stain, and garden all aglow.
III
For all I've been and all I've seen I have no vain regret
One comes to Litt...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.
That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a lon...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...grate
To iron-bind the wheels of state;
The quack forbears his patients' souse,
To purge the Council and the House;
The tinker quits his moulds and doxies,
To cast assembly-men and proxies.
From dunghills deep of blackest hue,
Your dirt-bred patriots spring to view,
To wealth and power and honors rise,
Like new-wing'd maggots changed to flies,
And fluttering round in high parade,
Strut in the robe, or gay cockade.
See Arnold quits, for ways more certain,
His bankrupt-perj'rie...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...rs are the most sickening
of all the louts!
yellow-toothed, slump-shouldered,
gutless, flea-bitten and
obvious . . . in tinker-toy rooms
with their flabby hearts
they tell us
what's wrong with the world-
as if we didn't know that a cop's club
can crack the head
and that war is a dirtier game than
marriage . . .
or down in a basement bar
hiding from a wife who doesn't appreciate him
and children he doesn't
want
he tells us that his heart is drowning in
vomit. hell, all our hea...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...field;
A sabre instead of a scythe to wield:
War! Red War!
Rich and poor, lord and boor,
Hark to the blast of War!
Tinker and tailor and millionaire,
Actor in triumph and priest in prayer,
Comrades now in the hell out there,
Sweep to the fire of War!
Prince and page, sot and sage,
Hark to the roar of War!
Poet, professor and circus clown,
Chimney-sweeper and fop o' the town,
Into the pot and be melted down:
Into the pot of War!
Women all, hear the call,
The pitil...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...alehouse under Cotswold,
He had made sure of his very Cleopatra,
Drunk with enormous, salvation-con temning
Love for a tinker.
How, while he hid from Sir Thomas's keepers,
Crouched in a ditch and drenched by the midnight
Dews, he had listened to gipsy Juliet
Rail at the dawning.
How at Bankside, a boy drowning kittens
Winced at the business; whereupon his sister--
Lady Macbeth aged seven--thrust 'em under,
Sombrely scornful.
How on a Sabbath, hushed and compassionate--
...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...es the great gloom
And flutters it o'er the mount's summit
In airy gold fume!
All is over! Look out, see the gipsy,
Our tinker and smith,
Has arrived, set up bellows and forge,
And down-squatted forthwith
To his hammering, under the wall there;
One eye keeps aloof
The urchins that itch to be putting
His jews'-harps to proof,
While the other, through locks of curled wire,
Is watching how sleek
Shines the hog, come to share in the windfalls
—An abbot's own cheek!
All is over! W...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...r pair of heels.
Body and spirit are twins; God only knows which is which;
The soul squats down in the flesh, like a tinker drunk in a ditch.
More is the whole than a part; but half is more than the whole;
Clearly, the soul is the body; but is not the body the soul?
One and two are not one; but one and nothing is two;
Truth can hardly be false, if falsehood cannot be true.
Once the mastodon was; pterodactyls were common as cocks;
Then the mammoth was God; now is H...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...down nor hurt by the most mighty adverse
potentate unless the townsmen gave consent thereto."--Bunyan's Holy War.)
A tinker out of Bedford,
A vagrant oft in quod,
A privet under Fairfax,
A minister of God--
Two hundred years and thirty
Ere Armageddon came
His single hand portrayed it,
And Bunyan was his name!
He mapped for those who follow,
The world in which we are--
"This famous town of Mansoul"
That takes the Holy War.
Her true and traitor people,
The gates alo...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...t the longing grows and grows,
And I've got to glut the Wanderlust again.
Soldier, sailor, in what a plight I've been!
Tinker, tailor, oh what a sight I've seen!
And I'm hitting the trail in the morning, boys,
And you won't see my heels for dust;
For it's "all day" with you
When you answer the cue
Of the Wan-der-lust.
The Wanderlust has got me . . . by the belly-aching fire,
By the fever and the freezing and the pain;
By the darkness that just drowns you, by the wail of ho...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...I
The Roaring Tinker if you like,
But Mannion is my name,
And I beat up the common sort
And think it is no shame.
The common breeds the common,
A lout begets a lout,
So when I take on half a score
I knock their heads about.
From mountain to mountain ride the fierce horsemen.
All Mannions come from Manannan,
Though rich on every shore
He never lay behind four walls
He ha...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...las;
But de time dat is de fines',
Whethah fiel's is green er brown,
Is w'en de rain 's a-po'in'
An' dey 's time to tinker 'roun.
Den you men's de mule's ol' ha'ness,
An' you men's de broken chair.
Hummin' all de time you 's wo'kin'
Some ol' common kind o' air.
Evah now an' then you looks out,
Tryin' mighty ha'd to frown,
But you cain't, you 's glad hit 's rainin',
An' dey 's time to tinker 'roun'.
Oh, you 'ten's lak you so anxious
Evah time it so't o' stops.
W...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...kind word to all he meets.
Besides, he is void of all pride,
And wouldn't feel ashamed
To be seen with a beggar
Or a tinker walking by his side.
Fellow-citizens of Dundee,
Isn't it really very nice
To think of James Scrymgeour trying
To rescue fallen creatures from the paths of vice?
And in the winter he tries to provide
Hot dinners for the poor children of Dundee,
Who are starving with hunger no doubt,
And in the most abject poverty.
He is a little deaf, no doubt,
B...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
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