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Famous Tulips Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Lowell, Amy
...Guarded within the old red wall's embrace,
Marshalled like soldiers in gay company,
The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!
Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,
With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of purple batteries, every gun in place.
Forward they come, with flaunting colours spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
To...Read more of this...



by Sandburg, Carl
...he wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.
Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Twenty years old … thirty … forty …
Forty-five and the doctors fathom nothing, the doctors quarrel, the doctors use silver tubes feeding twenty-four quarts of blood into the veins, the respects of a prize-fighter, a cab driver.
And a little mouth moans: It is easy to die when they are dying so many grand deaths ...Read more of this...

by Cisneros, Sandra
...you were an ocean, roiled and
murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadows of a cloud cross-
ing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a man who cried
into a plaid handkerchief. You were the sky without a hat. Your
heart puffed and flowered like sheets drying on a line.


And when you were a tree, you listened to the trees and the tree
things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a red
bicycle. You were the spidery Ma...Read more of this...

by Piercy, Marge
...Purple as tulips in May, mauve 
into lush velvet, purple 
as the stain blackberries leave 
on the lips, on the hands, 
the purple of ripe grapes 
sunlit and warm as flesh. 
Every day I will give you a color, 
like a new flower in a bud vase 
on your desk. Every day 
I will paint you, as women 
color each other with henna 
on hands and on feet. 

Red as hen...Read more of this...

by Pope, Alexander
..." 
A Park is purchas'd, but the Fair he sees 
All bath'd in tears--"Oh odious, odious Trees!" 

Ladies, like variegated Tulips, show; 
'Tis to their Changes half their charms we owe; 
Fine by defect, and delicately weak, 
Their happy Spots the nice admirer take, 
'Twas thus Calypso once each heart alarm'd, 
Aw'd without Virtue, without Beauty charmed; 
Her tongue bewitch'd as oddly as her Eyes, 
Less Wit than Mimic, more a Wit than wise; 
Strange graces still, and stranger fl...Read more of this...



by Dyke, Henry Van
...lowed their sandy beds,
And fill the earth with faint perfume,
The breath that Spring around her sheds.
And now the tulips break in bloom! 

A sea, a rainbow-tinted sea,
A splendor and a mystery,
Floods o'er the fields of faded gray:
The roads are full of folks in glee,
For lo, -- to-day is Easter Day!...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...I neither spin nor toil.
Three stories down below,
a choreman tends our coffin length of soil,
and seven horizontal tulips blow.
Just twelve months ago,
these flowers were pedigreed
imported Dutchmen, now no one need
distunguish them from weed.
Bushed by the late spring snow,
they cannot meet
another year's snowballing enervation.

I keep no rank nor station.
Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small."...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...etheart, and spring!
Starfire lights your heart's blossoming.
In the intimate dark there's never an ear,
Though the tulips stand on tiptoe to hear,
So give; ripe fruit must shrivel or fall.
As you are mine, Sweetheart, give all!
Starfire sparkles, your coronal....Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...e at the waters edge--Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.Y. Hospital's oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms. Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances're 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles. Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Th...Read more of this...

by Meredith, George
...ours and for colour,
Covert and the nightingale; she knows not why.

Kerchiefed head and chin she darts between her tulips,
Streaming like a willow grey in arrowy rain:
Some bend beaten cheek to gravel, and their angel
She will be; she lifts them, and on she speeds again.
Black the driving raincloud breasts the iron gateway:
She is forth to cheer a neighbour lacking mirth.
So when sky and grass met rolling dumb for thunder
Saw I once a white dove, sole light of ea...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...ve
is that I am no more."
Rain! Heavy, thudding rain!

V
The roses bloom at Malmaison. And not 
only roses. Tulips, myrtles,
geraniums, camelias, rhododendrons, dahlias, double hyacinths.
All the year through, under glass, under the sky, flowers bud, expand, 
die,
and give way to others, always others. From distant countries 
they have
been brought, and taught to live in the cool temperateness of France.
There is the `Bonapartea' from Peru; the `Napole...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...t knowing
where the talk will lead, but willing to take my chances.
Furthermore I shall enumerate some varieties of tulips
(Bacchus, Tantalus, Dardanelles) and other flowers
with names that have a life of their own (Love Lies Bleeding,
Dwarf Blue Bedding, Burning Bush, Torch Lily, Narcissus).
Mostly, as I've implied, it's the names of things
that count; still, sometimes I wonder and, wondering, find
the path of least resistance, the earth's orbit
around the sun's deli...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of 
the water and dance, dance,
and their reflections wobble d...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...he beauty, at the glare
Of tints. At either end was set a wide
Path strewn with fine, red gravel, and such shows
Of tulips in their splendour flaunted everywhere!

28
From side to side, midway each path, there ran
A longer one which cut the space in two.
And, like a tunnel some magician
Has wrought in twinkling green, an alley grew,
Pleached thick and walled with apple trees; their flowers
Incensed the garden, and when Autumn came
The plump and heavy apples crowding s...Read more of this...

by Swift, Jonathan
...,
He soon would learn to think like me
And bless his ravished sight to see
Such order from confusion sprung,
Such gaudy tulips raised from dung....Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...by his job, his job.

The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.

Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...ift things that she dreamed of were done
She limps along in an aged whiteness;
A storm of birds in the Asian trees
Like tulips in the air a-winging,
And the gentle waves of the summer seas,
That raise their heads and wander singing,
Must murmur at last, "Unjust, unjust";
And "My speed is a weariness," falters the mouse,
And the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust,
And the roof falls in of his tunnelled house.
But the love-dew dims our eyes till the day
When God shall come ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the ana...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...had their Towrs,
And all the Garrisons were Flow'rs,
When Roses only Arms might bear,
And Men did rosie Garlands wear?
Tulips, in several Colours barr'd,
Were then the Switzers of our Guard.

The Gardiner had the Souldiers place,
And his more gentle Forts did trace.
The Nursery of all things green
Was then the only Magazeen.
The Winter Quarters were the Stoves,
Where he the tender Plants removes.
But War all this doth overgrow:
We Ord'nance Plant and Powder s...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...I 

When tulips bloom in Union Aquare, 
And timid breaths of vernal air 
Go wandering down the dusty town, 
Like children lost in Vanity Fair; 

When every long, unlovely row 
Of westward houses stands aglow, 
And leads the eyes to sunset skies 
Beyond the hills where green trees grow; 

Then wearly seems the street parade, 
And weary books, and weary trade: 
I'm onl...Read more of this...

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