Famous Tips Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Morning News

by Marilyn Hacker
 Spring wafts up the smell of bus exhaust, of bread
and fried potatoes, tips green on the branches,
repeats old news: arrogance, ignorance, war.
A cinder-block wall shared by two houses
is new rubble. On one side was a kitchen
sink and a cupboard, on the other was
a bed, a bookshelf, three framed photographs.

Glass is shattered across the photographs;
two half-circles of hardened pocket bread
sit...Read more of this...

A Certain Lady

by Dorothy Parker
 Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head, 
And drink your rushing words with eager lips, 
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red, 
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips. 
When you rehearse your list of loves to me, 
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed. 
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see...Read more of this...

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)

by Ezra Pound
 "Vocat aestus in umbram" 
Nemesianus Es. IV. 

E. P. Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre 

For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"
In the old sense. Wrong from the start --

No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born
In a half savage country, out of date;
Bent resolutely on...Read more of this...

Making Good

by Robert William Service
 No man can be a failure if he thinks he's a success;
he may not own his roof-tree overhead,
He may be on his uppers and have hocked his evening dress -
(Financially speaking - in the red)
He may have chronic shortage to repay the old home mortgage,
And almost be a bankrupt in his biz.,
But though he skips his dinner,
And each day...Read more of this...

Song of Perfect Propriety

by Dorothy Parker
 Oh, I should like to ride the seas,
A roaring buccaneer;
A cutlass banging at my knees,
A dirk behind my ear.
And when my captives' chains would clank
I'd howl with glee and drink,
And then fling out the quivering plank
And watch the beggars sink.

I'd like to straddle gory decks,
And dig in laden sands,
And know the feel of throbbing necks
Between my knotted hands.
Oh, I...Read more of this...

City Gent

by Craig Raine
 On my desk, a set of labels
or a synopsis of leeks,
blanched by the sun
and trailing their roots

like a watering can.
Beyond and below,
diminished by distance,
a taxi shivers at the lights:

a shining moorhen
with an orange nodule
set over the beak,
taking a passenger

under its wing.
I turn away, confront
the cuckold hatstand
at bay in the corner,

and eavesdrop (bless you!)
on a hay-fever of brakes.
My Caran d'Ache...Read more of this...

The Nowhere Man

by Pritish Nandy
1
Come, let us pretend this is a ritual.  This hand
in your hair, your tongue seeking mine: this
cataclysmic despair.  Let us pretend tonight that
you are mine.  Forever.  For when daybreak returns, we
shall realise once more that forever means an
empty room, a tired night swirling into nowhere,
when I shore up to your tattered skyline.

2
At midnight I move in...Read more of this...

To Be Blind

by A S J Tessimond
 Is it sounds
 converging,
Sounds
 nearing,
Infringement,
 impingement,
Impact,
 contact
With surfaces of the sounds
Or surfaces without the sounds:
Diagrams,
 skeletal,
 strange?

Is it winds
 curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
 erecting the architecture of a world?

Is it
 orchestration of the finger-tips,
 graph of a fugue:
Scaffold for colours:
 colour itself being god?...Read more of this...

The King

by Rudyard Kipling
 "Farewell, Romance!" the Cave-men said;
 "With bone well carved he went away,
Flint arms the ignoble arrowhead,
 And jasper tips the spear to-day.
Changed are the Gods of Hunt and Dance,
And he with these. Farewell, Romance!"

"Farewell, Romance!" the Lake-folk sighed;
 "We lift the weight of flatling years;
The caverns of the mountain-side
 Hold him who scorns our hutted piers.
Lost hills whereby we...Read more of this...

Who am I?

by Carl Sandburg
 My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of
universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I
reach my hands and play with pebbles of
destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 11: Conversation: Undertones

by Conrad Aiken
 What shall we talk of? Li Po? Hokusai?
You narrow your long dark eyes to fascinate me;
You smile a little. . . .Outside, the night goes by.
I walk alone in a forest of ghostly trees . . .
Your pale hands rest palm downwards on your knees.

'These lines—converging, they suggest such distance!
The soul is drawn away, beyond horizons.
Lured out to what?...Read more of this...

Courage

by Claude McKay
 O lonely heart so timid of approach, 
Like the shy tropic flower that shuts its lips 
To the faint touch of tender finger tips: 
What is your word? What question would you broach? 

Your lustrous-warm eyes are too sadly kind 
To mask the meaning of your dreamy tale, 
Your guarded life too exquisitely frail 
Against the daggers of my...Read more of this...

My Rival

by Rudyard Kipling
 I go to concert, party, ball --
 What profit is in these?
I sit alone against the wall
 And strive to look at ease.
The incense that is mine by right
 They burn before her shrine;
And that's because I'm seventeen
 And She is forty-nine.

I cannot check my girlish blush,
 My color comes and goes;
I redden to my finger-tips,
 And sometimes to...Read more of this...

The Gateway

by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
 Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices 
To hear this city of cells, my body, sing. 
The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces 
Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring. 

And the sweet waters without intermission 
Climb to the tips of its green tenement; 
The breasts have borne the grace of their...Read more of this...

On Violets Wafers Sent Me When I Was Ill

by Sidney Lanier
 Fine-tissued as her finger-tips, and white
As all her thoughts; in shape like shields of prize,
As if before young Violet's dreaming eyes
Still blazed the two great Theban bucklers bright
That swayed the random of that furious fight
Where Palamon and Arcite made assize
For Emily; fresh, crisp as her replies,
That, not with sting, but pith, do oft invite
More trial of the tongue; simple,...Read more of this...

There was an Old Man of Melrose

by Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of Melrose,Who walked on the tips of his toes;But they said, "It ain't pleasant to see you at present,You stupid Old Man of Melrose." ...Read more of this...

Zara, The Bather

by Victor Hugo
 ("Sara, belle d'indolence.") 
 
 {XIX., August, 1828.} 


 In a swinging hammock lying, 
 Lightly flying, 
 Zara, lovely indolent, 
 O'er a fountain's crystal wave 
 There to lave 
 Her young beauty—see her bent. 
 
 As she leans, so sweet and soft, 
 Flitting oft, 
 O'er the mirror to and fro, 
 Seems that...Read more of this...

God Needs Antonio

by George Eliot
 Your soul was lifted by the wings today
Hearing the master of the violin:
You praised him, praised the great Sabastian too
Who made that fine Chaconne; but did you think
Of old Antonio Stradivari? -him
Who a good century and a half ago
Put his true work in that brown instrument
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master's...Read more of this...

Two Little Boots

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Two little boots all rough an' wo',
Two little boots!
Law, I 's kissed 'em times befo',
Dese little boots!
Seems de toes a-peepin' thoo
Dis hyeah hole an' sayin' "Boo!"
Evah time dey looks at you—
Dese little boots.
Membah de time he put 'em on,
Dese little boots;
Riz an' called fu' 'em by dawn,
Dese little boots;
Den he tromped de livelong day,
Laffin' in his happy way,
Evaht'ing he had...Read more of this...

A Tree Telling of Orpheus

by Denise Levertov
 White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began
I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and...Read more of this...

The Puritans Ballad

by Elinor Wylie
 My love came up from Barnegat, 
The sea was in his eyes; 
He trod as softly as a cat 
And told me terrible lies.

His hair was yellow as new-cut pine 
In shavings curled and feathered; 
I thought how silver it would shine 
By cruel winters weathered.

But he was in his twentieth year, 
Ths time I'm speaking of; 
We were...Read more of this...

Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines

by Dylan Thomas
 Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright...Read more of this...

Renascence

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line 
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from; 
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains...Read more of this...

Before the Altar

by Amy Lowell
 Before the Altar, bowed, he stands
With empty hands;
Upon it perfumed offerings burn
Wreathing with smoke the sacrificial urn.
Not one of all these has he given,
No flame of his has leapt to Heaven
Firesouled, vermilion-hearted,
Forked, and darted,
Consuming what a few spare pence
Have cheaply bought, to fling from hence
In idly-asked petition.
His sole condition
Love and poverty.
And while the moon
Swings slow across the sky,
Athwart a...Read more of this...

June Dreams In January

by Sidney Lanier
 "So pulse, and pulse, thou rhythmic-hearted Noon
That liest, large-limbed, curved along the hills,
In languid palpitation, half a-swoon
With ardors and sun-loves and subtle thrills;

"Throb, Beautiful! while the fervent hours exhale
As kisses faint-blown from thy finger-tips
Up to the sun, that turn him passion-pale
And then as red as any virgin's lips.

"O tender Darkness, when June-day hath ceased,
-- Faint Odor from the day-flower's...Read more of this...

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