And tulips, children love to stretch
Their fingers down, to feel in each
Its beauty’s sweet nearer.
— from “A Flower in a Letter”
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

You believe
In God, for your part? — that He who makes
Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,
As men plant tulips upon dunghills when
They wish them finest.
— “Aurora Leigh”
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Bring the tulip and the rose,
While their brilliant beauty glows.
— from “Tulips”
by Eliza Cook (1818-1889, English poetess)

The tulip is a courtly quean,
Whom, therefore, I will shun.
— from “Flowers”
by Thomas Hood (1799–1845, British humorist and poet)

The tulip’s petals shine in dew,
All beautiful, but none alike.
— from “On Planting a Tulip-Root”
by James Montgomery (1771-1854, Scottish poet)

Like tulip-beds of different shape and dyes,
Bending beneath the invisible west-wind’s sighs.
— from “Lalla Rookh, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan”
by Thomas Moore (1779-1852, Irish poet)

Dutch tulips from their beds
Flaunted their stately heads.
— from “The Adventure of a Star”
by James Montgomery (1771-1854, Scottish poet)

Mid the sharp, short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well,
The wild tulip at the end of its tube, blows out its great red bell,
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.
— from “Up at a Villa, Down in the City”
by Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Guarded within the old red wall’s embrace,
Marshaled like soldiers in gay company,
The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry
Wheels out into the sunlight. What bold grace
Sets off their tunics, white with crimson lace!
Here are platoons of gold-frocked cavalry,
With scarlet sabres tossing in the eye
Of purple batteries, every gun in place.
Forward they come, with flaunting colors spread,
With torches burning, stepping out in time
To some quick, unheard march. Our ears are dead,
We cannot catch the tune. In pantomime
Parades that army. With our utmost powers
We hear the wind stream through a bed of flowers.
— from “A Tulip Garden”
by Amy Lowell (1874-1925, American poetess)

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
—from “Tulips” 1961
by Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)

The tulips make me want to paint,
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint
—from “Tulips”
by A. E. Stallings (1968–)

The Tulips strength is in it’s stem
It holds it’s head so strong and straight
Into the soil it sinks so deep
There it stays til it’s time to reap
—from “The Tulip”
by Thomas B. Davies (South Wales, UK)