Famous Driver Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Song Of Despair

...happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I lo...Read more of this...
by Neruda, Pablo


Account Of A Visit From St. Nicholas

...w;

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,

With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and call'd them by name:

"Now! Dasher, now! Dancer, now! Prancer, and Vixen,
"On! Comet, on! Cupid, on! Dunder and Blixem1;

"To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
"Now dash away! dash away! dash away ...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Application For A Driving License

...Two birds loved
in a flurry of red feathers
like a burst cottonball,
continuing while I drove over them.
I am a good driver, nothing shocks me....Read more of this...
by Ondaatje, Michael

Call It Music

...glad," though that day
I would have said silent, "the silent music
of Charlie Parker." Howard said nothing.
He paid the driver and helped Bird up two flights
to their room, got his boots off, and went out
to let him sleep as the afternoon entered
the history of darkness. I'm not judging
Howard, he did better than I could have
now or then. Then I was 19, working
on the loading docks at Railway Express
coming day by day into the damaged body
of a man while I sang into the filth...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

Carol of Occupations

...e-dressing,
Ship-joining, dock-building, fish-curing, ferrying, flagging of side-walks by flaggers, 
The pump, the pile-driver, the great derrick, the coal-kiln and brick-kiln, 
Coal-mines, and all that is down there,—the lamps in the darkness, echoes, songs,
 what
 meditations, what vast native thoughts looking through smutch’d faces, 
Iron-works, forge-fires in the mountains, or by the river-banks—men around feeling
 the
 melt
 with huge crowbars—lumps of ore, the due combi...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt


Days of Pie and Coffee

...to automobiles, 
and this particular motorist 
sent a little spasm of fright up our spines, 
which in turn panicked the driver a bit 
and it seemed as if we were off to a bad start, 
and that's when Sithney began to bark 
and the man could not be heard, that is, 
if he was speaking or trying to speak 
because I was commanding Sithnewy to be silent, 
though, indeed I was sympathetic 
to his emotional excitement.
It was, as I recall, a day of prodigious beauty. 
April 21, 1932-...Read more of this...
by Tate, James

Gertrude of Wyoming

...ge glories he would spea,--
The loneliness of earth at overawes,--
Where, resting by some tomb of old Cacique,
The lama-driver on Peruvia's peak
Nor living voice nor motion marks around;
But storks that to the boundless forest shriek,
Or wild-cane arch high flung o'er gulf profound,
That fluctuates when the storms of El Dorado sound.

Pleased with his guest, the good man still would ply
Each earnest question, and his converse court;
But Gertrude, as she eyed him, knew not why...Read more of this...
by Campbell, Thomas

Her Kind

...ing, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Hymn to Demeter by Homer

...was laden with leaves and flowers. Then she went, and to the kings who deal justice, Triptolemus and Diocles, the horse-driver, and to doughty Eumolpus and Celeus, leader of the people, she showed the conduct of her rites and taught them all her mysteries, to Triptolemus and Polyxeinus and Diocles also, -- awful mysteries which no one may in any way transgress or pry into or utter, for deep awe of the gods checks the voice. Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these ...Read more of this...
by Homer,

I Sing the Body Electric

...
The female soothing a child—the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, 
The young fellow hoeing corn—the sleigh-driver guiding his six horses through the crowd,

The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured,
 native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, 
The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; 
The march of fireme...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Saving a Train

...ting, 'The bridge is down! The bridge is down!'
He cried with a pitiful wail and sound. 

But, thank heaven, the engine-driver sees the red light
That Carl keeps swinging round his head with all his might;
But bang! bang! goes the engine with a terrible crash,
And the car is dashed all to smash. 

But the breaking of the car stops the train,
And poor Carl's struggle is not in vain;
But, poor soul, he was found stark dead,
Crushed and mangled from foot to head! 

And the passe...Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz

Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat

...Northern Hemisphere!

You may say that by and large it is Skimble who's in charge
Of the Sleeping Car Express.
From the driver and the guards to the bagmen playing cards
He will supervise them all, more or less.
Down the corridor he paces and examines all the faces
Of the travellers in the First and the Third;
He establishes control by a regular patrol
And he'd know at once if anything occurred.
He will watch you without winking and he sees what you are thinking
And it's cert...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Song of Myself

....

The blab of the pave, the tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the
 promenaders; 
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the
 shod horses on the granite floor; 
The snow-sleighs, the clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs; 
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs; 
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital;
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall;...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Song of the Open Road

...n those trees, and always drop fruit as I
 pass;) 
What is it I interchange so suddenly with strangers? 
What with some driver, as I ride on the seat by his side? 
What with some fisherman, drawing his seine by the shore, as I walk by, and pause? 
What gives me to be free to a woman’s or man’s good-will? What gives them to be free to
 mine?

8
The efflux of the Soul is happiness—here is happiness; 
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times; 
Now it flows unto us—...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Growth of Love

...ss. 

50
The world comes not to an end: her city-hives
Swarm with the tokens of a changeless trade,
With rolling wheel, driver and flagging jade,
Rich men and beggars, children, priests and wives.
New homes on old are set, as lives on lives;
Invention with invention overlaid:
But still or tool or toy or book or blade
Shaped for the hand, that holds and toils and strives. 
The men to-day toil as their fathers taught,
With little better'd means; for works depend
On works and ov...Read more of this...
by Bridges, Robert Seymour

The Jacquerie A Fragment

...Tall Grief shall stand, the helmsman of the ship.
By every wain that jolts along the roads,
Stout Grief shall walk, the driver of the team.
Midst every herd of cattle on the hills,
Dull Grief shall lie, the herdsman of the drove.
Oh Grief shall grind your bread and play your lutes
And marry you and bury you.
-- How else?
Who's here in France, can win her people's faith
And stand in front and lead the people on?
Where is the Church?
The Church is far too fat.
Not, mark, by rob...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

The Man of Laws Tale

...ven, with his woundes new,
The white Lamb, that hurt was with a spear;
Flemer* of fiendes out of him and her *banisher, driver out
On which thy limbes faithfully extend,
Me keep, and give me might my life to mend."

Yeares and days floated this creature
Throughout the sea of Greece, unto the strait
Of Maroc*, as it was her a venture: *Morocco; Gibraltar
On many a sorry meal now may she bait,
After her death full often may she wait*, *expect
Ere that the wilde waves will h...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Moose

...e dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of 
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passenger...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The Schooner Flight

...e she don't sleep hard,"
but the ***** look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
"This time, Shabine, like you really gone!"
I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the street, that whole fucking...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

To Think of Time

...t, last daylight of Twelfth-month, 
A hearse and stages—other vehicles give place—the funeral of an old Broadway
 stage-driver, the cortege mostly drivers. 

Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell, the gate is pass’d, the
 new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight, the hearse uncloses, 
The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on the coffin,
 the
 earth is swiftly shovel’d in,
The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence,...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

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