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Famous Tiny Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...
it darted about in a desperate dance. 

The plaster on the ground floor crashed. 

Nerves, 
big nerves, 
tiny nerves, 
many nerves! ¨C 
galloped madly 
till soon 
their legs gave way. 

But night oozed and oozed through the room ¨C 
and the eye, weighed down, could not slither out of 
the slime. 

The doors suddenly banged ta-ra-bang, 
as though the hotel¡¯s teeth 
chattered. 

You swept in abruptly 
like ¡°take it or leave it!¡± 
Ma...Read more of this...



by Milligan, Spike
...say it in the dark
(The word you see emits a spark)
Only say it in the day
(That's what my grandma used to say)

Young Tiny Tim took her advice
He said it once, he said it twice
he said it till the day he died
And even after that he tried
To say Bazonka! every day
Just like my grandma used to say.

Now folks around declare it's true
That every night at half past two
If you'll stand upon your head
And shout Bazonka! from your bed
You'll hear the word as clear as day
Just ...Read more of this...

by Walker, Alice
...Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise....Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...here
Stand separate in sweet austerity,
Dotting the unmown grass with silver stars,
And here and there a daffodil waves tiny scimitars.

Hither the billow brought him, and was glad
Of such dear servitude, and where the land
Was virgin of all waters laid the lad
Upon the golden margent of the strand,
And like a lingering lover oft returned
To kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned,

Ere the wet seas had quenched that holocaust,
That self-fed flame, tha...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...g their swift flight, from ebon streak,
The moon put forth a little diamond peak,
No bigger than an unobserved star,
Or tiny point of fairy scymetar;
Bright signal that she only stoop'd to tie
Her silver sandals, ere deliciously
She bow'd into the heavens her timid head.
Slowly she rose, as though she would have fled,
While to his lady meek the Carian turn'd,
To mark if her dark eyes had yet discern'd
This beauty in its birth--Despair! despair!
He saw her body fading gaun...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...sleep; how should this child
Remember this?' and kiss'ed him in his cot.
But Annie from her baby's forehead clipt
A tiny curl, and gave it: this he kept
Thro' all his future; but now hastily caught
His bundle, waved his hand, and went his way. 

She when the day, that Enoch mention'd, came,
Borrow'd a glass, but all in vain: perhaps
She could not fix the glass to suit her eye;
Perhaps her eye was dim, hand tremulous;
She saw him not: and while he stood on deck
Waving,...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...there gently floats 
 The sound of a guitar of Inspruck; notes 
 Which blend with chimes—vibrating to the hand— 
 Of tiny bell—where sounds a grain of sand. 
 A man's voice mixes with the melody, 
 And vaguely melts to song in harmony. 
 
 "If you like we'll dream a dream. 
 Let us mount on palfreys two; 
 Birds are singing,—let it seem 
 You lure me—and I take you. 
 
 "Let us start—'tis eve, you see, 
 I'm thy master and thy prey. 
 My bright steed shall pleas...Read more of this...

by Walker, Alice
...d disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.


Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise. ...Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician

For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin
In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes
Seemed not to touch the floor. With one last prayer

Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition
He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man's face.
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture

And said, "Arise and breathe!" And still the body
Lay as before. Impossible to tell
In words how Elliot's eyebrows flailed...Read more of this...

by Neruda, Pablo
...ve vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.

Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.

As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again....Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...mminent death to man that barb'd sublimity 
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be. 
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior, 
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares 
With living men some secrets in a privacy 
Forever ours, not theirs....Read more of this...

by Soto, Gary
...
A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted -
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickle in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn't say anything.
I took the nickle from
My ...Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French i...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...nts carried in parades; 
here's a splendid golden staff some ranking officer waved, 
topped with a golden pyramid and a tiny, 
inquisitive sphinx. No one's worn this stuff 
for years, and it doesn't seem worth buying; 
where would we put it? Still, 

I want that staff. I used to love 
to go to the library -- the smalltown brick refuge 
of those with nothing to do, really, 
'Carnegie' chiseled on the pediment 
above columns that dwarfed an inconsequential street. 
...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...ed of Wessex men
And given their country, field and fen,
To the devils of the sea.

And he saw in a little picture,
Tiny and far away,
His mother sitting in Egbert's hall,
And a book she showed him, very small,
Where a sapphire Mary sat in stall
With a golden Christ at play.

It was wrought in the monk's slow manner,
From silver and sanguine shell,
Where the scenes are little and terrible,
Keyholes of heaven and hell.

In the river island of Athelney,
With the riv...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.

It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innocently,
yet guiltily,
as my five-year-old daughter
picked gum off the sidewalk
and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.

For me it was love found
like a diamond
where carrots grow--
the glint of diamond on a plane wing,
meaning...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...r the singer is divine;

The little laugh of water falling down
Is not so musical, the clammy gold
Close hoarded in the tiny waxen town
Has less of sweetness in it, and the old
Half-withered reeds that waved in Arcady
Touched by his lips break forth again to fresher harmony.

Spirit of Beauty, tarry yet awhile!
Although the cheating merchants of the mart
With iron roads profane our lovely isle,
And break on whirling wheels the limbs of Art,
Ay! though the crowded factorie...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...one knight, 
But newly-entered, taller than the rest, 
And armoured all in forest green, whereon 
There tript a hundred tiny silver deer, 
And wearing but a holly-spray for crest, 
With ever-scattering berries, and on shield 
A spear, a harp, a bugle--Tristram--late 
From overseas in Brittany returned, 
And marriage with a princess of that realm, 
Isolt the White--Sir Tristram of the Woods-- 
Whom Lancelot knew, had held sometime with pain 
His own against him, and now yearne...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...the brood, 
However deep you might embower the nest, 
Some boy would spy it.' 
At this upon the sward 
She tapt her tiny silken-sandaled foot: 
'That's your light way; but I would make it death 
For any male thing but to peep at us.' 

Petulant she spoke, and at herself she laughed; 
A rosebud set with little wilful thorns, 
And sweet as English air could make her, she: 
But Walter hailed a score of names upon her, 
And 'petty Ogress', and 'ungrateful Puss', 
And swor...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...wall

At Rawdon in the bungalow by the cross-roads where we met?

Three decades on and yet I cannot say for sure the destiny

That made us meet was dark or light, some sound or sight

‘Beyond our mortal vision’, some immaterial infinity,

A double helix on the heels of both that made my south

Your north and jerked the compass till we knew

Not day from night nor wrong from right.



Only a week ago you took me to the house you came from

Thirty years before. Together...Read more of this...

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