Famous Tricks Poems by Famous Poets

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

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To A Shade

by William Butler Yeats
 If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
And the gaunt houses put on majesty:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their...Read more of this...

Flight

by Robert William Service
 On silver sand where ripples curled
I counted sea-gulls seven;
Shy, secret screened from all the world,
And innocent as heaven.
They did not of my nearness know,
For dawn was barely bright,
And they were still, like spots of snow
In that pale, pearly light.

Then one went forth unto the sea
That rippled up in gold,
And there were rubies flashing free
From out its wing-unfold;
It ducked and...Read more of this...

Behold the tricks this wheeling dome doth play,

by Omar Khayyam
Behold the tricks this wheeling dome doth play,
And earth laid bare of old friends torn away!
O live this present moment, which is thine,
Seek not a morrow, mourn not yesterday!...Read more of this...

White Christmas

by Robert William Service
 My folks think I'm a serving maid
Each time I visit home;
They do not dream I ply a trade
As old as Greece or Rome;
For if they found I'd fouled their name
And was not white as snow,
I'm sure that they would die of shame . . .
Please, God, they'll never know.

I clean the paint from off my face,
In sober black I...Read more of this...

The Country of the Blind

by C S Lewis
 Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men, 
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long 
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few, 
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date, 
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would...Read more of this...

The still beauty of summer evenings

by Emile Verhaeren
The still beauty of summer evenings on the greenswards where they lie outspread holds out to us, without empty gesture or words, a symbol of rest in gladness.
Young morning and its tricks has gone away with the breezes; noon itself and the velvet skirts of its warm winds, of its heavy winds, no longer sweeps the torrid plain; and this...Read more of this...

More and More

by Margaret Atwood
 More and more frequently the edges
of me dissolve and I become
a wish to assimilate the world, including
you, if possible through the skin
like a cool plant's tricks with oxygen
and live by a harmless green burning.

I would not consume
you or ever
finish, you would still be there
surrounding me, complete
as the air.

Unfortunately I don't have leaves.
Instead I have eyes
and teeth and other non-green
things...Read more of this...

Priscilla

by Robert William Service
 Jerry MacMullen, the millionaire,
Driving a red-meat bus out there --
How did he win his Croix de Guerre?
Bless you, that's all old stuff:
Beast of a night on the Verdun road,
Jerry stuck with a woeful load,
Stalled in the mud where the red lights glowed,
Prospect devilish tough.

"Little Priscilla" he called his car,
Best of our battered bunch by far,
Branded with many a bullet...Read more of this...

A Melancholy Song

by Mother Goose
Trip upon trenchers,
And dance upon dishes,
My mother sent me for some barm, some barm;
She bid me go lightly,
And come again quickly,
For fear the young men should do me some harm.
Yet didn't you see, yet didn't you see,
What naughty tricks they put upon me?
They broke my pitcher
And spilt the water,
And huffed my mother,
And chid her daughter,
And kissed my sister instead of...Read more of this...

Lines Written In The Fannie Farmer Cookbook

by Elizabeth Bishop
 You won't become a gourmet* cook 
By studying our Fannie's book-- 
Her thoughts on Food & Keeping House 
Are scarcely those of Lévi-Strauss. 
Nevertheless, you'll find, Frank dear, 
The basic elements** are here. 
And if a problem should arise: 
The Soufflé fall before your eyes, 
Or strange things happen to the Rice 
--You know I love to give advice....Read more of this...

A Game of Fives

by Lewis Carroll
 Five little girls, of Five, Four, Three, Two, One:
Rolling on the hearthrug, full of tricks and fun. 

Five rosy girls, in years from Ten to Six:
Sitting down to lessons - no more time for tricks. 

Five growing girls, from Fifteen to Eleven:
Music, Drawing, Languages, and food enough for seven! 

Five winsome girls, from Twenty to Sixteen:
Each young man that...Read more of this...

Little Willie

by Eugene Field
 When Willie was a little boy,
No more than five or six, 
Right constantly he did annoy
His mother with his tricks. 
Yet not a picayune cared I
For what he did or said, 
Unless, as happened frequently, 
The rascal wet the bed.
Closely he cuddled up to me, 
And put his hands in mine, 
Till all at once I seemed to be
Afloat...Read more of this...

two south coast poems (a) this morning i came within sound of the sea

by Rg Gregory
 for a man whose eyes till now were a bed of rock
whose hands were drier than deserts
the sea's voice drove fear up through the valley
the tributaries meandering inside me longing for outlet
shrivelled even as their own courses became straight

my demand for ocean died now the ocean approached

the clouds put up with a lot of invective from me today
not a...Read more of this...

Lycidas

by John Milton
 In this Monody the author bewails a learned Friend, unfortunately
drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637;
and, by occasion, foretells the ruin of our corrupted Clergy, 
then in their height.


YET once more, O ye laurels, and once more,
Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,
I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,
And with forced fingers rude
Shatter...Read more of this...

Carlos

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Last night I knelt low at my lady’s feet.
One soft, caressing hand played with my hair, 
And one I kissed and fondled. Kneeling there, 
I deemed my meed of happiness complete.

She was so fair, so full of witching wiles –
Of fascinating tricks of mouth and eye; 
So womanly withal, but not too shy –
And all my heaven was compassed...Read more of this...

A Spring Wooing

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Come on walkin' wid me, Lucy; 't ain't no time to mope erroun'
Wen de sunshine 's shoutin' glory in de sky,
An' de little Johnny-Jump-Ups 's jes' a-springin' f'om de groun',
Den a-lookin' roun' to ax each othah w'y.
Don' you hyeah dem cows a-mooin'? Dat 's dey howdy to de spring;
Ain' dey lookin' most oncommon satisfied?
Hit 's enough to mek a body...Read more of this...

The Next War

by Robert Graves
 You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father’s hay 
With bows and arrows and wooden spears, 
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers, 
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end? 
Boys, from the first time you prod 
And thrust with spears of curtain-rod, 
From the first time you tear and slash 
Your long-bows from the...Read more of this...

Lyman frederick and jim

by Eugene Field
 (FOR THE FELLOWSHIP CLU 

Lyman and Frederick and Jim, one day,
Set out in a great big ship--
Steamed to the ocean adown the bay
Out of a New York slip.
"Where are you going and what is your game?"
The people asked those three.
"Darned if we know; but all the same
Happy as larks are we;
And happier still we're going to be!"
Said Lyman
And Frederick
And...Read more of this...

Lady Clare

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
IT was the time when lilies blow, 
And clouds are highest up in air, 
Lord Ronald brought a lily-white doe 
To give his cousin, Lady Clare. 

I trow they did not part in scorn- 
Lovers long-betroth'd were they: 
They too will wed the morrow morn: 
God's blessing on the day! 

'He does not love me for my birth, 
Nor for...Read more of this...

Be not beguiled by world's insidious wiles;

by Omar Khayyam
Be not beguiled by world's insidious wiles;
O foolish ones, ye know her tricks and guiles;
Your precious life-time cast not to the winds;
Haste to seek wine, and court a sweetheart's smile....Read more of this...

Fair way

by Ehsan Sehgal
"Dedicate your affection in fair way to get someone's affection, never use tricks that are sensitive and weakness of somebody, may the respose is positive, but the real and true attention and affection is in doubts, as this concept, you are the loser."
Ehsan Sehgal...Read more of this...

81. Song—For a' that

by Robert Burns
 THO’ 1 women’s minds, like winter winds,
 May shift, and turn, an’ a’ that,
The noblest breast adores them maist—
 A consequence I draw that.


Chorus For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
 And twice as meikle’s a’ that;
 The bonie lass that I loe best
 She’ll be my ain for a’ that.


Great love I bear to a’ the fair,
 Their humble...Read more of this...

Bianca Among The Nightingales

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold,
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
The olives crystallized the vales'
Broad slopes until the hills grew strong:
The fireflies and the nightingales
Throbbed each to either, flame and song.
The nightingales, the nightingales.

Upon the angle of its shade
The cypress stood, self-balanced high;
Half up,...Read more of this...

Sea Fever

by John Masefield
 I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, 
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, 
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking, 
And a gray mist on the sea's face, and a gray dawn breaking. 

I must go...Read more of this...

Magna Carta

by Marriott Edgar
 I'll tell of the Magna Charter
As were signed at the Barons' command 
On Runningmead Island in t' middle of t' Thames 
By King John, as were known as "Lack Land." 

Some say it were wrong of the Barons 
Their will on the King so to thrust, 
But you'll see if you look at both sides of the case 
That...Read more of this...

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