Famous Zero Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Zero poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous zero poems. These examples illustrate what a famous zero poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...re to hinder your picking out phrases
For an epic as clever as "Paradise Lost"?
Don't mind if the index of sense is at zero,
Use words that run smoothly, whatever they mean;
Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero
Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine.
There are words so delicious their sweetness will smother
That boarding-school flavor of which we're afraid,
There is "lush"is a good one, and "swirl" is another,--
Put both in one stanza, its fortune is made.
W...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...t's the COLD,
COLD,
COLD.
Oh, the rain, the mud, and the cold,
The cold, the mud, and the rain;
With weather at zero it's hard for a hero
From language that's rude to refrain.
With porridgy muck to the knees,
With sky that's a-pouring a flood,
Sure the worst of our foes
Are the pains and the woes
Of the RAIN,
THE COLD,
AND THE MUD....Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...for them a transport
Of cordiality—
But never met this Fellow
Attended, or alone
Without a tighter breathing
And Zero at the Bone—
1027
My Heart upon a little Plate
Her Palate to delight
A Berry or a Bun, would be,
Might it an Apricot!
1129
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradua...Read more of this...
by
Brodsky, Joseph
...
Morning enters the premises with a coroner's
punctuality, puts its ear
to the ribs of a cold radiator, detects sub-zero:
the afterlife has to start somewhere.
Correspondingly, the angelic curls
grow more blond, the skin gains its distant, lordly
white, while the bedding already coils
desperately in the basement laundry.
...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...ranches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—paper to snow—
but, at zero of suffering, one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.
As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.
He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowi...Read more of this...
by
Lux, Thomas
...ng, slow
motion, over and over for one day, six days, fourteen
decades, eleven centuries (a long time
falling to fill a zero) and in that time
not a leaf, no rain,
not a single duck, nor hearts, not one human, nor sleep,
nor grace, nor graves--falling
to where the bottom, finally, is again the surface,
which is gorgeous, of course,
which is glue, saw- and stone-dust,
which is blue-gray
ice, which is
the barely glinting grit
of abyss....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...br>
The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.
Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in school.
Joe takes a piece of carpenter’s chalk, draws lines on the floo...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...y finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.
I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb's weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...
With double spreads
And a glossy colour photo
Instead I’m stuck in a bus queue at Morden
London’s meridian point of zero imagination
Actually it’s a bit like ACUMEN with the Oxleys
Boasting about their 150,000 annual submissions-
If what they print’s the best God help the rest...)
At least my Christmas post had - instead of a card
From Jeremy Reed - his ELEGY FOR DAVID GASCOYNE -
The best poem I’ve had by post in forty years
And Jeremy’s best to date in...Read more of this...
by
Pinsky, Robert
...ry Mind,
Naked omphalos pierced
By quills of rhyme or sense, torah-like: unborn
Vein of will, xenophile
Yearning out of Zero.
Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.
Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...hall prologize, how we shall perorate,
Utter fit things upon art and history,
Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate,
Make of the want of the age no mystery;
Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras,
Show---monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks
Out of the bear's shape into Chimra's,
While Pure Art's birth is still the republic's.
XXXV.
Then one shall propose in a speech (curt Tuscan,
Expurgate and sober, with scarcely an ``_issimo,_'')
To end now our half-...Read more of this...
by
Nesbitt, Kenn
...chair.
She let out a sigh, with a lump in her throat,
then sniffled and picked up the TV remote.
She surfed channel zero to channel one-ten
then went back to zero and started again.
She watched music videos, sitcoms and sports,
commercials and talkshows and weather reports.
But no fairy godmother came to her side
to offer a dress or a carriage to ride.
So Poor Cinderella’s been sitting there since,
while one of her stepsisters married the Prince.
She sits there an...Read more of this...
by
Wilbur, Richard
...perhaps be rendered,
"I'm afraid you won't find much of interest here."
Census-reports which give the population
As zero are, of course, not to be trusted,
Save as reflecting the natives' flustered insistence
That they do not count, as well as their modest horror
Of letting one's sex be known in so many words.
The uniform grey of the nondescript buildings, the absence
Of churches or comfort-stations, have given observers
An odd impression of ostentatious meanness,
And...Read more of this...
by
Graham, Jorie
...e hurried mind hovering over its rankings,
the heart -- there at the core of the drafting leaves -- wet and warm at the
zero of
the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves -- the heart,
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
fussing about the integrity of the whole,
the heart trying to make time and place seem small,
sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event
on the list
then checking it off -- oh the satisfaction -- each check a small kiss,
an...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...is he
Whom Silliness' sweetheart drives so, by the ear!
Thou languid, lordly, most heart-breaking Nought!
Thou bastard zero, that hast come to power,
Nothing's right issue failing! Thou mere `pooh'
That Life hath uttered in some moment's pet,
And then forgot she uttered thee! Thou gap
In time, thou little notch in circumstance!"
Chapter IV.
Lord Raoul drew rein with all his company,
And urged his horse i' the crowd, to gain fair view
Of him that spoke, and stopped at ...Read more of this...
by
Olds, Sharon
...On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire's heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted the doctor to tu...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...s an' straight began to shake 'em.
Fur once within that lighted room, our feelin's took a canter,
An' scurried to the zero mark ez quick ez Tam O'Shanter.
'Cause there was crowds o' people there, both sexes an' all stations;
It looked like all the town had come an' brought all their relations.
The first I saw was Nettie Gray, I thought that girl was dearer
'N' gold; an' when I got a chance, you bet I aidged up near her.
An' Farmer Dobbs's girl was there, the one 'at Ji...Read more of this...
by
Butler, Ellis Parker
...>
The Sheepmen were as foul as pitch,
The Cowboy was a hero,
The gold mine made the hero rich,
The Villain’s score was zero.
The Sheepmen tried to steal the maid,
The Villain sought the attic,
The Hero fifteen bad men slayed
With his blue automatic.
The Hero kissed the willing lass,
The final scene was snappy;
The Villain went to Boston, Mass.,
And everyone was happy....Read more of this...
by
Simic, Charles
...
Gravedigger ants.
Village-idiot ants.
This is the last summoning.
Solitude--as in the beginning.
A zero burped by a bigger zero--
It's an awful licking I got.
And fear--that dead letter office.
And doubt--that Chinese shadow play.
Does anyone still say a prayer
Before going to bed?
White sleeplessness.
No one knows its weight.
What The White Had To Say
For how could anything white be distinct
from or divided from whiteness?
M...Read more of this...
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