Delicious food is certainly something people can feel poetic about. Poets have written many poems about eating, dining, collecting berries and favorite meals. Here are some food poems from famous poets.
- "Blueberries" by Robert Frost
Frost's ode to blueberries contains the lines:"Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green"
- "The Pumpkin" by John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier's 19th century poem about pumpkins discusses both eating and carving pumpkins. It contains the lines:"Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better
E’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!
Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,
Brighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!"
- "Figs" by David H. Lawrence
Lawrence's fig poem begins:"The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower."
- "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens
Stevens' ice cream poem begins:"Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress"
- "Ode To The Onion" by Pablo Neruda
Neruda's onion poem begins:"Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
- "The Salad" by Virgil
Virgil's salad poem contains the lines:"Rinsed and disposed within the hollow stone;
Salt added, and a lump of salted cheese,
With his injected herbs he covered these,"
- "Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath
Plath's blackberries poem contains the lines:"Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
- "Fame is a Fickle Food" by Emily Dickinson
Dickinson's poem begins:"Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set."
- "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams
Williams' funny poem begins:"I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
- "The Walrus and the Baker's Man" by Lewis Carroll
Carroll's poem begins:"A loaf of bread, the Walrus said,
Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed-
