Famous Tropical Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tropical poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tropical poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tropical poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Tebb, Barry
...lliol
One at the Royal College, I have cast my lot
With Lady Luck, I own no property but a book.
In Roundhay’s Tropical World Nepalese Trumpets
Glow in red and yellow like mendicant priests,
The waterfall roars like Lodore and I am more
Myself here than anywhere.
11
The morning sun is melting
The dome of Leeds Town Hall,
Frost on Kirkstall Abbey stone
Is falling into the Aire;
At fifty-four my dreams
Have ceased, the bowling green
At Eastend Park...Read more of this...
by
Guillen, Rafael
...ion
tamag?s: a venomous serpent
guanaco: a pack animal, used insultingly to indicate the native laborers
ceiba: a tall tropical hardwood tree...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...enters.
Birds of passage sailed through the leaden air, from the ice-bound,
Desolate northern bays to the shores of tropical islands,
Harvests were gathered in; and wild with the winds of September
Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel.
All the signs foretold a winter long and inclement.
Bees, with prophetic instinct of want, had hoarded their honey
Till the hives overflowed; and the Indian bunters asserted
Cold would the winter be, for ...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...?
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked".
But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!
But the danger was past--they had landed at last,
With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:
Yet at f...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...ckets
twice the size of a man's.
The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze
like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes down
to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:
Job's Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,
parti-colored pectins and Ladies' Ears,
arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,
the buried Indian Princess's skirt;
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.
Thirty or more buzza...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...eneck clams out of season.
She is more than that. She is your have to have,
has grown you your practical your tropical growth.
This is not an experiment. She is all harmony.
She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy,
has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast,
sat by the potter's wheel at midday,
set forth three children under the moon,
three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo,
done this with her legs spread out
in the terrible months in th...Read more of this...
by
Sitwell, Dame Edith
...The allegro ***** cocktail-shaker,
"Why did the cock crow,
Why am I lost,
Down the endless road to Infinity toss'd?
The tropical leaves are whispering white
As water; I race the wind in my flight.
The white lace houses are carried away
By the tide; far out they float and sway.
White is the nursemaid on the parade.
Is she real, as she flirts with me unafraid?
I raced through the leaves as white as water...
Ghostly, flowed over the nursemaid, caught her,...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...of Quince rejoice with Onychipuncta a gem of the jasper kind.
Let Manly, house of Manly rejoice with the Booby a tropical bird.
Let Fage, house of Fage rejoice with the Fiddlefish -- Blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus in the fish's mouth.
Let Benning, house of Benning rejoice with the Sea-Egg. Lord have mercy on the soul of Benning's wife.
Let Singleton, house of Singleton rejoice with the Hog-Plumb. Lord have mercy on the soul of Lord Vane...Read more of this...
by
Arp, Jean
...br> in what shape has thy lovely great soul taken
flight. hast thou changed to a star or a chain made of water in a tropical
whirlwind or a teat of black light or a transparent brick in a drum that
howls for its craggy existence.
now the soles of our feet and the crowns of our heads have dried up and
the fairies are lying half-charred on the funeral piles.
now the black bowling alleys thunder in back of the sun and no one is
setting a compass or spinning the whe...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...he night and the room was filled
with steam rising off the sheet, and there was jungle stuff,
abandoned equipment and tropical flowers, on the floor and
on the furniture.
I took the sheet into the bathroom and plopped it into the
tub and turned the cold water on it. Their dog came in and
started barking at me.
The dog barked so loud that the bathroom was soon filled
with dead people. One of them wanted to use my wet sheet
for a shroud. I said no...Read more of this...
by
Roethke, Theodore
...in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses stabled in great green caves.
Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing of the things you know so well....Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...he sharp heat-lightnings of her face
Presaging ill to him whom Fate
Condemned to share her love or hate.
A woman tropical, intense
In thought and act, in soul and sense,
She blended in a like degree
The vixen and the devotee,
Revealing with each freak of feint
The temper of Petruchio's Kate,
The raptures of Siena's saint.
Her tapering hand and rounded wrist
Had facile power to form a fist;
The warm, dark languish of her eyes
Was never safe from wrath's su...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...gine a future.
I wanted the density of history,
which I confused with the smell of the book:
Babylon's ziggurat tropical with ferns,
engraved watercourses rippling;
the Colossus of Rhodes balanced
over the harbormouth on his immense ankles.
Athena filled one end of the Parthenon,
in an "artist's reconstruction",
like an adult in a dollhouse.
At Halicarnassus, Mausolus remembered himself
immensely, though in the book
there wasn't even a sketch,
only ...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...ded.
Arduous and trying was the work the British had to do,
Yet with a hearty goodwill they to it flew;
While the tropical sun on them blazed down,
But the poor soldiers wrought hard and didn't frown.
The bombardment was opened on the 30th of June,
And from the British battleships a fierce cannonade did boom;
And continued from six in the morning till two o'clock in the afternoon,
And with grief the French and Spaniards sullenly did gloom.
And by the 26th of...Read more of this...
by
Strand, Mark
...
"Break his legs," says one of my aunts,
"Now give him a kiss." I do what I'm told.
The trees bend in the bleak tropical wind.
The baby did not scream, but I remember that sigh
when I reached inside for his tiny lungs and shook them
out in the air for the flies. The relatives cheered.
It was about that time I gave up.
Now, when I answer the phone, his lips
are in the receiver; when I sleep, his hair is gathered
around a familiar face on the pillow; w...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...?
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes:
A thing, as the Bellman remarked,
That frequently happens in tropical climes,
When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."
But the principal failing occurred in the sailing,
And the Bellman, perplexed and distressed,
Said he had hoped, at least, when the wind blew due East,
That the ship would not travel due West!
But the danger was past--they had landed at last,
With their boxes, portmanteaus, and bags:
Yet at...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...ip hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.
The day is blazing. It is very mournful.
The flowers in this room are red and tropical.
They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for
tenderly.
Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.
There is very little to go into my suitcase.
There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am ...Read more of this...
by
Wylie, Elinor
...cas,
Birds as bright as sparkles of wine
Fly in the nite to the Argentine,
Birds of azure and flame-birds go
To the tropical Gulf of Mexico:
They chase the sun, they follow the heat,
It is sweet in their bones, O sweet, sweet, sweet!
It's not with them that I'd love to be,
But under the roots of the balsam tree.
Just as the spiniest chestnut-burr
Is lined within with the finest fur,
So the stoney-walled, snow-roofed house
Of every squirrel and mole and mouse
...Read more of this...
by
Hillringhouse, Mark
...ants.
If I imagined like a child walking with my mother,
the store part rainforest, and closed my eyes
I was in som tropical country:
that feathered blue against the orange of forgotten sunsets
after the rain-washed streets erased the footprints
of tired mothers who waited in line
under the red and gold transom
to cash their welfare checks.
And maybe we're all feeling the same rage,
seeing the up-turned fish tanks stacked against the parakeet cages,
sunlight catching...Read more of this...
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