1. Sea Shell - written by Amy Lowell
From A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass. Read 13427 times on American Poems.

Sea Shell, Sea Shell,
Sing me a song, O Please!
A song of ships, and sailor men,
And parrots, and tropical trees,
Of islands lost in the Spanish Main
Which no man ever may find again,
Of fishes and corals under the waves,
And seahorses... (Read full poem)

Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.

She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each... (Read full poem)

3. "What says the sea, little shell?" - written by Stephen Crane
From War is Kind & Other Lines. Published in 1899. Read 5094 times on American Poems.

"What says the sea, little shell?
What says the sea?
Long has our brother been silent to us,
Kept his message for the ships,
Awkward ships, stupid ships."

"The sea bids you mourn, O Pines,
Sing low in the moonlight.
He sends tale of the... (Read full poem)

Life is real, life is earnest, 
And the shell is not its pen –
“Egg thou art, and egg remainest”
Was not spoken of the hen.

Art is long and Time is fleeting, 
Be our bills then sharpened well, 
And not like muffled drums be beating
On the... (Read full poem)

5. Hamlet Off-Stage: Hambeau Heartbroke Horny - written by D.C. Berry
Read 623 times on American Poems.

Ophelia claims we're dead and gives me back
all my Frank Zappa and the Mothers albums.
I nearly claw out of my shell and say,
"You can't," but for a moment I've nothing
to quote. I'm rot, mortis of broken heart.
Hog wash! Lovers don't... (Read full poem)

Disengaged, bloody, Henry rose from the shell
where in theior racing start his seat got wedged
under his knifing knees,
he did it on the runners, feathering,
being bow, catching no crab. The ridges were sore
& tore chamois. It was not done with... (Read full poem)

7. Let Us play Yesterday -- - written by Emily Dickinson
From Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Published in 1955. Read 2975 times on American Poems.

Let Us play Yesterday --
I -- the Girl at school --
You -- and Eternity -- the
Untold Tale --

Easing my famine
At my Lexicon --
Logarithm -- had I -- for Drink --
'Twas a dry Wine --

Somewhat different -- must be --
Dreams tint the Sleep... (Read full poem)

Almost the shell of a woman after the surgeon's knife!
And almost a year to creep back into strength,
Till the dawn of our wedding decennial
Found me my seeming self again.
We walked the forest together,
By a path of soundless moss and... (Read full poem)

9. Dream Barker - written by Jean Valentine
From Home Deep Blue. Published in 1988. Read 626 times on American Poems.

We met for supper in your flat-bottomed boat. 
I got there first:   in a white dress:   I remember
Wondering if you'd come.   Then you shot over the bank, 
A Virgilian Nigger Jim, and poled us off
To a little sea-food barker's cave you... (Read full poem)

To you    whom I've hurt
not meaning to

I offer this plum    this drupe
no shell but a thin skin purpled

I tender to your mouth    the muscle
the sweet sympathetic scar-tissue

surrounding the stone    the seed
which wants to be buried(Read full poem)

11. On the Mystery of the Incarnation - written by Denise Levertov
Read 868 times on American Poems.

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature... (Read full poem)

I am a grave poetic hen
That lays poetic eggs
And to enhance my temperament
A little quiet begs.

We make the yolk philosophy,
True beauty the albumen.
And then gum on a shell of form
To make the screed sound human.(Read full poem)

13. Juan's Song - written by Louise Bogan
Read 3053 times on American Poems.

When beauty breaks and falls asunder
I feel no grief for it, but wonder.
When love, like a frail shell, lies broken,
I keep no chip of it for token.
I never had a man for friend
Who did not know that love must end.
I never had a girl for lover
Who... (Read full poem)

My hands have not touched pleasure since your hands, --
No, -- nor my lips freed laughter since 'farewell',
And with the day, distance again expands
Voiceless between us, as an uncoiled shell.

Yet, love endures, though starving and alone.
A dove's... (Read full poem)

15. Sand Dunes - written by Robert Frost
From West-Running Brook. Published in 1928. Read 8794 times on American Poems.

Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die,
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.

They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.

She may know cove and... (Read full poem)

There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love... (Read full poem)

17. Sway With Me - written by Charles Bukowski
From burning in water drowning in flame. Published in 1955. Read 1931 times on American Poems.

sway with me, everything sad --
madmen in stone houses
without doors,
lepers steaming love and song
frogs trying to figure
the sky;
sway with me, sad things --
fingers split on a forge
old age like breakfast shell
used books, used people
used... (Read full poem)

(What Grandpa told the Children)


The moon? It is a griffin's egg,
Hatching to-morrow night.
And how the little boys will watch
With shouting and delight
To see him break the shell and stretch
And creep across the sky.
The boys will... (Read full poem)

19. Crab - written by Sharon Olds
Read 1526 times on American Poems.

When I eat crab, slide the rosy
rubbery claw across my tongue
I think of my mother. She'd drive down
to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a
huge car, she'd ask the crab-man to
crack it for her. She'd stand and wait as the
pliers broke... (Read full poem)

Under a cherry tree
I found a robin's egg,
broken, but not shattered.

I had been thinking of you,
and was kneeling in the grass
among fallen blossoms

when I saw it: a blue scrap,
a delicate toy, as light
as confetti

It didn't seem real,
but... (Read full poem)

21. Fragments From The Beach - written by Bill Knott
From The Unsubscriber. Published in 2000. Read 835 times on American Poems.

(Nonasyllabics) 

In retrospect the tragic nature
of sea is a taste wept too daily,
too depleted by freedom's rupture;
the eyes have other secrets to see

and deeper use for the detritus
within us: the bright effluvium
of ego dries up, mired as it... (Read full poem)

THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,--
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids... (Read full poem)

23. Introductory Verses - written by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Read 333 times on American Poems.

Oh, you who read some song that I have sung –
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung? 

Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud
His secret thought unto the listening crowd? 

Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore-
You have its... (Read full poem)

10

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and... (Read full poem)

25. A Sleepless Night - written by Philip Levine
Read 1450 times on American Poems.

April, and the last of the plum blossoms 
scatters on the black grass 
before dawn. The sycamore, the lime, 
the struck pine inhale 
the first pale hints of sky. 
                                     An iron day, 
I think, yet it will come... (Read full poem)