Famous Tuft Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Penmaen Pool

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 For the Visitors' Book at the Inn


Who long for rest, who look for pleasure
Away from counter, court, or school
O where live well your lease of leisure
But here at, here at Penmaen Pool? 
You'll dare the Alp? you'll dart the skiff?— 
Each sport has here its tackle and tool:
Come, plant the staff by Cadair cliff;
Come, swing the sculls on Penmaen...Read more of this...

The Summer Rain

by Henry David Thoreau
 My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read, 
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large 
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed, 
And will not mind to hit their proper targe. 
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too, 
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again, 
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor...Read more of this...

The Landrail

by John Clare
 How sweet and pleasant grows the way
Through summer time again
While Landrails call from day to day
Amid the grass and grain

We hear it in the weeding time
When knee deep waves the corn
We hear it in the summers prime
Through meadows night and morn

And now I hear it in the grass
That grows as sweet again
And let a minutes notice pass
And now tis...Read more of this...

In The Back of the Real

by Allen Ginsberg
railroad yard in San Jose 
I wandered desolate 
in front of a tank factory 
and sat on a bench 
near the switchman's shack. 

A flower lay on the hay on 
the asphalt highway 
--the dread hay flower 
I thought--It had a 
brittle black stem and 
corolla of yellowish dirty 
spikes like Jesus' inchlong 
crown, and a soiled 
dry center cotton...Read more of this...

The Sign-Post

by Edward Thomas
 The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hill-top by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: "You would not have doubted so
At twenty." Another voice gentle with...Read more of this...

The Cymbaleer's Bride

by Victor Hugo
 ("Monseigneur le Duc de Bretagne.") 
 
 {VI., October, 1825.} 


 My lord the Duke of Brittany 
 Has summoned his barons bold— 
 Their names make a fearful litany! 
 Among them you will not meet any 
 But men of giant mould. 
 
 Proud earls, who dwell in donjon keep, 
 And steel-clad knight and peer,...Read more of this...

Picture Puzzle Piece

by Shel Silverstein
 One picture puzzle piece
Lyin' on the sidewalk,
One picture puzzle piece
Soakin' in the rain.
It might be a button of blue
On the coat of the woman
Who lived in a shoe.
It might be a magical bean,
Or a fold in the red
Velvet robe of a queen.
It might be the one little bite
Of the apple her stepmother
Gave to Snow White.
It might be the veil...Read more of this...

Foster The Light

by Dylan Thomas
 Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,
Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,
But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;
Master the night nor serve the snowman's brain
That shapes each bushy item of the air
Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.

Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel's eggs,
Nor hammer back a season in the figs,
But graft these...Read more of this...

Peter

by Marianne Moore
 Strong and slippery,
built for the midnight grass-party
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away--
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units
in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth
to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills.
He lets himself be...Read more of this...

Where'er you see a rose or tulip bed,

by Omar Khayyam
Where'er you see a rose or tulip bed,
Know that a mighty monarch's blood was shed
And where the violet rears her purple tuft,
Be sure a black-moled girl hath laid her head....Read more of this...

Indications The

by Walt Whitman
 THE indications, and tally of time; 
Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs; 
Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts; 
What always indicates the poet, is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their
 words; 
The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark—but the words
 of
 the
 maker of...Read more of this...

Market days

by Jonas Mekas
 Mondays, way before dawn,
before even the first hint of blue in the windows,
we'd hear it start, off the road past our place,
over on the highway nearby,
in a clatter of market-bound traffic.

Riding the rigs packed with fruit and crated live fowl,
or on foot, with cattle hitched to tailgates slowing the pace,
or sitting up high, on raised seats
(the women all wore...Read more of this...

In Back Of The Real

by Allen Ginsberg
 railroad yard in San Jose 
 I wandered desolate 
in front of a tank factory 
 and sat on a bench 
near the switchman's shack. 

A flower lay on the hay on 
 the asphalt highway 
--the dread hay flower 
 I thought--It had a 
brittle black stem and 
 corolla of yellowish dirty 
spikes like Jesus' inchlong 
...Read more of this...

The Ape And I

by Robert William Service
 Said a monkey unto me:
"How I'm glad I am not you!
See, I swing from tree to tree,
Something that you cannot do.
In gay greenery I drown;
Swift to skyey hights I scale:
As you watch me hang head down
Don't you wish you had a tail?

"Don't you wish that you could wear
In the place of stuffy clothes,
Just a silky coat of hair,
Never shoes...Read more of this...

The Grave Of The Kitchen Mouse

by Philip Levine
 The stone says "Coors" 
The gay carpet says "Camels" 
Spears of dried grass 
The little sticks the children gathered 
The leaves the wind gathered 

The cat did not kill him 
The dog did not, not the trap 
Or lightning, or the rain's anger 
The tree's claws 
The black teeth of the moon 

The sun drilled over and over 
Dusk...Read more of this...

The Woodlark

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Teevo cheevo cheevio chee:
O where, what can th?at be? 
Weedio-weedio: there again! 
So tiny a trickle of s?ng-strain; 
And all round not to be found
For brier, bough, furrow, or gr?en ground 
Before or behind or far or at hand 
Either left either right 
Anywhere in the s?nlight. 
Well, after all! Ah but hark—
‘I am the little w?odlark.
. . ....Read more of this...

The Tuft of Flowers

by Robert Frost
 I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must...Read more of this...

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 LIKE souls that balance joy and pain, 
With tears and smiles from heaven again 
The maiden Spring upon the plain 
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain. 
In crystal vapour everywhere 
Blue isles of heaven laugh'd between, 
And far, in forest-deeps unseen, 
The topmost elm-tree gather'd green 
From draughts of balmy air. 

Sometimes the linnet piped his song: 
Sometimes...Read more of this...

With Scindia to Delphi

by Rudyard Kipling
 More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
A Maratta trooper tells the story: --


The wreath of banquet overnight lay...Read more of this...

In Lupum

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 BEYOND the gates thou gav'st a field to till;
I have a larger on my window-sill.
A farm, d'ye say? Is this a farm to you,
Where for all woods I spay one tuft of rue,
And that so rusty, and so small a thing,
One shrill cicada hides it with a wing;
Where one cucumber covers all the plain;
And where one serpent rings himself...Read more of this...

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