Famous Totem Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Totem poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous totem poems. These examples illustrate what a famous totem poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Mueller, Lisel
...er's bed
for my husband, exchanged for a mule,
my daughter, lost in a drunken bet.
I might have been stretched on a totem pole
to appease a vindictive god
or left, a useless girl-child,
to die on a cliff. I like to think
I might have been Mary Shelley
in love with a wrong-headed angel,
or Mary's friend. I might have been you.
This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;
still we have made...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
..., you flapper, you floater,
you gull that grows out of my back in the drreams I prefer,
stay near. But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye
where I stand in stone shoes as the world's bicycle goes by.
4. ANGEL OF HOPE AND CALENDARS
Angel of hope and calendars, do you know despair?
That hole I crawl into with a box of Kleenex,
that hole where the fire woman is tied to her chair,
that hole where leather men are wringing their necks,
where the sea has tur...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...iped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong."
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: --
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And every single one of them is right!"
. . . . . . .
Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker fresh and bone more frail; ....Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ose graves we know not,
Only know they are our fathers.
Of what kith they are and kindred,
From what old, ancestral Totem,
Be it Eagle, Bear, or Beaver,
They descended, this we know not,
Only know they are our fathers.
"Face to face we speak together,
But we cannot speak when absent,
Cannot send our voices from us
To the friends that dwell afar off;
Cannot send a secret message,
But the bearer learns our secret,
May pervert it, may betray it,
May reveal it unto others...Read more of this...
by
Ammons, A R
...the
marmoreal), contemptible cat ****, penguin ****,
hermit crab ****, prairie hen ****, cougar ****, eagle
**** (high totem stuff), buffalo **** (hardly less
lofty), otter ****, beaver **** (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw ****, alligator **** (that floats the Nile
along), louse ****, macaque, koala, and coati ****,
antelope ****, chuck-will's-widow ****, alpaca ****
(very high stuff), gooney bird ****, chigger ****, bull
s...Read more of this...
by
Murray, Les
...ssed char louvres
of the ice-plant's timber tower streaming with
heavy rain all day, above the droughty paddocks
of the totem cows round whom our lives were dancing....Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...The engine is killing the track, the track is silver,
It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless.
Its running is useless.
At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields,
Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs,
Swaying slightly in their thick suits,
White towers of Smithfield ahead,
Fat haunches and blood on their minds.
...Read more of this...
by
Hicok, Bob
...ave me a shot
of something that was a lusher
apology. The person
who drove me home
said my smile was a smeared
totem that followed
his body that night as it arced
over a cliff in a dream.
He's always flying
in his dreams and lands
on cruise ships or hovers
over Atlanta with an ********.
He put me to bed and the drugs
wore off and I woke
to cannibals at my extremities.
I woke with a sense
of what nails in the palms
might do to a spirit
temporarily...Read more of this...
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