Famous Verb Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Display Of Mackeral

...re that they were living: 

all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, 

in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless, 

which is the price of gleaming....Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark


A Fire-Truck

...iren-blast
That sends all else skittering to the
 curb,
Redness, brass, ladders and hats hurl
 past,
 Blurring to sheer verb,

Shift at the corner into uproarious gear
And make it around the turn in a squall
 of traction,
The headlong bell maintaining sure and
 clear,
 Thought is degraded action!

Beautiful, heavy, unweary, loud,
 obvious thing!
I stand here purged of nuance, my
 mind a blank.
All I was brooding upon has taken
 wing,
 And I have you to thank.

As you howl bey...Read more of this...
by Wilbur, Richard

A Sea Dirge

...ou are very unwell in the boat,
 How do you like the Sea?

There is an insect that people avoid
 (Whence is derived the verb "to flee").
Where have you been by it most annoyed?
 In lodgings by the Sea.

If you like your coffee with sand for dregs,
 A decided hint of salt in your tea,
And a fishy taste in the very eggs--
 By all means choose the Sea.

And if, with these dainties to drink and eat,
 You prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,
And a chronic state of wet in your fe...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

Fra Lippo Lippi

...
Found eyes and nose and chin for A's and B's, 
And made a string of pictures of the world 
Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun, 
On the wall, the bench, the door. The monks looked black. 
"Nay," quoth the Prior, "turn him out, d'ye say? 
In no wise. Lose a crow and catch a lark. 
What if at last we get our man of parts, 
We Carmelites, like those Camaldolese 
And Preaching Friars, to do our church up fine 
And put the front on it that ought to be!" 
And hereupon he bad...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Going to him! Happy letter!

...ing to him! Happy letter! Tell him--
Tell him the page I didn't write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.

Tell him just how the fingers hurried
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow-
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.

"Tell him it wasn't a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily


Grammar

...Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of f...Read more of this...
by Hoagland, Tony

I Sit By The Window

...e.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destory the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in ...Read more of this...
by Brodsky, Joseph

Lesson In Grammar

....

No, by "sentence" we mean, quite simply, words
Put together like the parts of a machine.
Now remember we must have a verb: verbs
Are words of action like Murder, Love, or Sin.
But these might be nouns, depending
On how you use them –
Already the plot is thickening.

Except when the mood is imperative; that is to say
A command is given like Pray, Repent, or Forgive
(Dear me, these lessons get gloomier every day)
Except, as I was saying, when the mood is gloomy –
I mean impe...Read more of this...
by Scannell, Vernon

The Captain of the Push

...long. 

And the captain crooked his finger at a stranger on the kerb, 
Whom he qualified politely with an adjective and verb, 
And he begged the Gory Bleeders that they wouldn't interrupt 
Till he gave an introduction -- it was painfully abrupt -- 
`Here's the bleedin' push, me covey -- here's a (something) from the bush! 
Strike me dead, he wants to join us!' said the captain of the push. 

Said the stranger: `I am nothing but a bushy and a dunce; 
`But I read about the Blee...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

The General Prologue

...Chaucer, changed to the Talbot.

5. In y-fall," "y" is a corruption of the Anglo-Saxon "ge"
prefixed to participles of verbs. It is used by Chaucer merely to
help the metre In German, "y-fall," or y-falle," would be
"gefallen", "y-run," or "y-ronne", would be "geronnen."

6. Alisandre: Alexandria, in Egypt, captured by Pierre de
Lusignan, king of Cyprus, in 1365 but abandoned immediately
afterwards. Thirteen years before, the same Prince had taken
Satalie, the ancient Attali...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Grammar Lesson

...A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.
An adjective is what describes the noun.
In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

of and with are prepositions. The's
an article, a can's a noun,
a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.

A can can roll - or not. What isn't was
or might be, might meaning not yet known.
"Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

is ...Read more of this...
by Kowit, Steve

The Sea

...se you are very unwell in a boat,
How do you like the SEA.

There is an insect that people avoid
(Whence is derived the verb `to flee')
Where have you been by it most annoyed?
In lodgings by the SEA.

If you like coffee with sand for dregs,
A decided hint of salt in your tea,
And a fishy taste in the very eggs - 
By all means choose the SEA.

And if, with these dainties to drink and eat,
You prefer not a vestige of grass or tree,
And a chronic state of wet in your feet,
Then ...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

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