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Famous Tins Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Heaney, Seamus
...stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard...Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...in, sniffing all the way to the 

Tradesmens’ entrance.



Back at the shop on brass rails were clumps of bananas,

Tins of under-the-counter Grade ‘A’ salmon and their

Aunt Mary had her chiropodist’s surgery over the shop;

When I got a verucca at the baths she scraped it away

Week after week till it bled into nothing.



Up Easy Road was the Maypole with its tiled tapestry of

Village Green, flower-decked maypole and dancing children

Like little Shirley Temples w...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...drop to the waterless channel
 And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
 The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,
 And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
 As the sheep click past to the fold --
And the click of the restless girders
 As the steel contracts in the cold --

Voices of jackals calling
 And, loud in the hush between
A morsel of dry earth falling
 From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And th...Read more of this...

by Benet, Stephen Vincent
...ercely. Violent and bold 
A sudden tempest of mad, shrieking sins 
Scarlet screamed out above the battered gold 
Of tins and picture-frames. I held my breath. 
He tugged another hard -- and sapphire skies 
Spread in vast quietude, serene as death, 
O'er waves like crackled turquoise -- and my eyes 
Burnt with the blinding brilliance of calm sea! 
"We're selling that lot there out cheap!" said he....Read more of this...

by Forche, Carolyn
...Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
open our rooms to a moment
of almonds, olives and wind
when we did not yet know what we were.
The days in Mallorca were alike:
footprints down goat-paths
from the beds we had left,
at night the stars locked to darkness.
At that time we were learning
to dance, take our clothes
in our fingers and open
ourselves to thei...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...k,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.

With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...he sailor home from sea,
  The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
  Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
  Out of the window perilously spread
  Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
  On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
  Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
  I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
  Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
  I too awaited the expected guest.                            ...Read more of this...

by Hannah, Sophie
....
That mine are clouded eyes...
say whiteness, whiteness, that's the shade...
That paint is tins apart
might mean some progress can be made
in worlds outside the heart....Read more of this...

by Sassoon, Siegfried
...step by step, 
He winked his prying torch with patching glare 
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, 
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; 
And he, exploring fifty feet below 
The rosy gloom of battle overhead. 
Tripping, he grapped the wall; saw someone lie 
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug, 
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. 
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply. ...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
..., 
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town, 
to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags 
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons; 
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowed fierce as 
the dials of a million radios, 
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid 
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston. 
He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music 
of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes 
put aside. He had to heal 
th...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest. 
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A smal...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...ng aimless, like little perambulating pebbles scattered in the garden,
Not knowing each other from bits of earth or old tins.

Except that papa and mama are old acquaintances, of course,
Though family feeling there is none, not even the beginnings.

Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, sisterless
Little tortoise.

Row on then, small pebble,
Over the clods of the autumn, wind-chilled sunshine,
Young gaiety.

Does he look for a companion?

No, no, don't think it...Read more of this...

by Harrison, Tony
...skin's name?

Where there were flower urns and troughs of water
And mesh receptacles for withered flowers
are the HARP tins of some skinhead Leeds supporter.
It isn't all his fault though. Much is ours.

5 kids, with one in goal, play 2-a-side.
When the ball bangs on the hawthorn that's one post
and petals fall they hum Here Comes the Bride
though not so loud they'd want to rouse a ghost.

They boot the ball on purpose at the trunk
and make the tree shed ...Read more of this...

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