Famous Whittled Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Adolescence

...re themselves in a green embrace.
A silken rain fell through the spring upon them.
In the park she fed the swans and he
whittled nervously with his strange hands.
And white was mixed with all their colours
as if they drew it from the flowering trees.

At night his two finger whistle brought her down
the waterfall stairs to his shy smile
which like an eddy, turned her round and round
lazily and slowly so her will
was nowhere—as in dreams things are and aren't.

Walking along a...Read more of this...
by Bidart, Frank


Anseo

...g was spoken;
He would arrive as a matter of course
With an ash-plant, a salley-rod.
Or, finally, the hazel-wand
He had whittled down to a whip-lash,
Its twist of red and yellow lacquers
Sanded and polished,
And altogether so delicately wrought
That he had engraved his initials on it.


I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
In a pub just over the Irish border.
He was living in the open,
in a secret camp
On the other side of the mountain.
He was fighting for Ireland,
Making thi...Read more of this...
by Muldoon, Paul

Bric-a-Brac

...bout -- 
Little landscapes, done in beads. 
Little morals, woven out, 
Little wreaths of gilded grass, 
Little brigs of whittled oak 
Bottled painfully in glass; 
These are made by lonely folk. 

Lonely folk have lines of days 
Long and faltering and thin; 
Therefore -- little wax bouquets, 
Prayers cut upon a pin, 
Little maps of pinkish lands, 
Little charts of curly seas, 
Little plats of linen strands, 
Little verses, such as these....Read more of this...
by Parker, Dorothy

Questions of Travel

...ively, 
on what connection can exist for centuries 
between the crudest wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear 
and, careful and finicky, 
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. 
--Never to have studied history in 
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages. 
--And never to have had to listen to rain 
so much like politicians' speeches: 
two hours of unrelenting oratory 
and then a sudden golden silence 
in which the traveller tak...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Dorchester Giant

...r mouths with your 'lection treat,
And wait till your dad comes home." 

So the giant pulled him a chestnut stout, 
And whittled the boughs away; 
The boys and their mother set up a shout. 
Said he, "You're in, and you can't get out, 
Bellow as loud as you may." 

Off he went, and he growled a tune 
As he strode the fields along 
'Tis said a buffalo fainted away, 
And fell as cold as a lump of clay, 
When he heard the giant's song.

But whether the story's true or not, 
It is...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell


The Hard Times In Elfland

...boys (I cried),
When Christmas morns their eyes unclose,
Find empty stockings gaping wide!

"Then hewed and whacked and whittled I;
The wife, the girls and Kris took fire;
They spun, sewed, cut, -- till by and by
We made, at home, my pack entire!"

(He handed me a bundle, here.)
"Now, hoist me up: there, gently: quick!
Dear boys, DON'T look for much this year:
Remember, Santa Claus is sick!"...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

The Lobster

...marketplace, asleep
Except for certain tentative gestures
Of their antennae, or their imperial claws
Pegged shut with a whittled stick at the wrist. 

We inlanders, buying our needful food,
Pause over these slow, gigantic spiders
That spin not. We pause and are bemused,
And sometimes it happens that a mind sinks down
To the blind abyss in a swirl of sand, goes cold
And archaic in a carapace of horn,
Thinking: There's something underneath the world. 

The flame beneath the pot...Read more of this...
by Nemerov, Howard

The Monument

...les spring out,
(slanted like fishing-poles or flag-poles)
and from them jig-saw work hangs down,
four lines of vaguely whittled ornament
over the edges of the boxes
to the ground.
The monument is one-third set against
a sea; two-thirds against a sky.
The view is geared
(that is, the view's perspective)
so low there is no "far away,"
and we are far away within the view.
A sea of narrow, horizontal boards 
lies out behind our lonely monument,
its long grains alternating right ...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Puritans Ballad

...ng thereon; 
His face was as brown as a foreign sail 
Threadbare against the sun.

His arms were thick as hickory logs 
Whittled to little wrists; 
Strong as the teeth of a terrier dog 
Were the fingers of his fists.

Within his arms I feared to sink 
Where lions shook their manes, 
And dragons drawn in azure ink 
Lept quickened by his veins.

Dreadful his strength and length of limb 
As the sea to foundering ships; 
I dipped my hands in love for him 
No deeper than the tips....Read more of this...
by Wylie, Elinor

The Rhyme of the Three Captains

...hen gods -- and what should he want o' these?
My foremast would not mend his boom, my deckhouse patch his boats;
He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle for shoe-peg oats.
I could not fight for the failing light and a rough beam-sea beside,
But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice because he lied.
Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
I had nailed his ears to my c...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

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