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Famous Blocked Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Browning, Robert
...ll;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well.

III.

Dearest, three months ago!
When we lived blocked-up with snow,---
When the wind would edge
In and in his wedge,
In, as far as the point could go---
Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!

IV.

Laughs with so little cause!
We devised games out of straws.
We would try and trace
One another's face
In the ash, as an artist draws;
Free on each other's flaws,
How we chattered...Read More



by Moure, Erin
...emis in a stone hat
from Anatolia

A little pedal steel guitar

A photograph of her at a table by the sea,
her shoulder blocked by the red geranium.
The sea tho invisible can be smelled by the casual watcher
Incredible salt air
in my throat when I see her.

"Suddenly you discover that you'll spend your entire life
in disorder; it's all that you have; you must learn to live
with it."

2

Four tanks, & the human white-shirted body
stopped on June 5 in Place Tian an ...Read More

by Kipling, Rudyard
...-
 No; you'll put the 'tween-decks stove out, bein' sick!

'Alt! The married kit 'as all to go before us!
 'Course it's blocked the bloomin' gangway up again!
Cheer, O cheer the 'Orse Guards watchin' tender o'er us,
 Keepin' us since eight this mornin' in the rain!

Stuck in 'eavy marchin'-order, sopped and wringin' --
 Sick, before our time to watch 'er 'eave an' fall,
'Ere's your 'appy 'ome at last, an' stop your singin'.
 'Alt! Fall in along the troop-deck! Silence all...Read More

by Tebb, Barry
...d left

The lock

Car park, office block,

Grand hotel looming

And no path

But then I found

Back Lane, every

Window blocked,

Every inch cobbled,

A road to nowhere

Built a hundred

Years ago.



I found a gas lamp

Anchored to a corner

Rusty and forgotten

In the glare

Of the million watt

Yorkshire Electricity

Tower of Steel for

The new museum

‘Guns before butter’

And I wonder,

Christian Visionary Poet

Or Regional Romantic

Is there any longer

A place in t...Read More

by Tebb, Barry
...e

Folded house walls, relievo

Running and touching and

Scattering fast round

The binyards.





25



A gateway blocked for fifty years

By a standing elm opened a way

For the dead to come through:

See how they stretch and set forth

In cloth caps and Sunday suits

Fresh from their graves amidst

A grove of trees in Chapeltown

Where the downwind strokes the

Backs of leaves.

 Margaret, I have

Carved your image in mother-of-pearl

Beauty like no other born.Read More



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...as dragged full many a nation down to shame.
A word unspoken by the rightful lips
Has dyed the land with blood, and blocked the sea with ships.



XXII.
The word withheld, when Indians asked for aid, 
Came when the red man started on his raid.
What Justice with a gesture might have done
Was left for noisy war with bellowing gun.
And who save Custer and his gallant men
Could calm the tempest into peace again? 
What other hero in the land could hope
With Sit...Read More

by Brontë, Emily
...this tranquillity
Brings bitter, restless thoughts to me;
And, in the red fire's cheerful glow,
I think of deep glens, blocked with snow;
I dream of moor, and misty hill,
Where evening closes dark and chill;
For, lone, among the mountains cold,
Lie those that I have loved of old.
And my heart aches, in hopeless pain
Exhausted with repinings vain,
That I shall greet them ne'er again!' 

'Father, in early infancy,
When you were far beyond the sea,
Such thoughts were tyrant...Read More

by Gregory, Rg
...s serious concern and banter
there's opacity there's chit-chat
diversions and derailings from
a line some avalanche has blocked
(what a fine pass through the mountains)
poetry and fidgets are blood-brothers

it's within all these the cosmos calls
that makes these afternoons a rich
adventure through a common field
when three men moving towards death
(without alacrity but conscious of it)
find youth again and bubble with
its springs - opening worn valves
to give such flow their...Read More

by Belloc, Hilaire
...ires?
In what close prison's horror were their wiles
Watched by what tyrant power with evil smiles;
Or in what caverns, blocked from grace and air
Received they, then, the mandates of despair?
What! Must our race, our tragic race, that roam
All exiled from our first, and final, home:
That in one moment of temptation lost
Our heritage, and now wander, hunger-tost
Beyond the Gates (still speaking with our eyes
For ever of remembered Paradise),
Must we with every gift accepted, ...Read More

by Roethke, Theodore
...d the stream with its sharp stones,
The upland of alder and birchtrees,
Through the swamp alive with quicksand,
The way blocked at last by a fallen fir-tree,
The thickets darkening,
The ravines ugly....Read More

by Bronk, William
...make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in 
from say, the sea, a purity of space....Read More

by Lorde, Audre
...ween the lips of strangers
my days collapse into a hollow tube 
soon implodes against now
like an iron wall
my eyes are blocked with rubble 
a smear of perspectives
blurring each horizon 
in the breathless precision of silence
One word is made.

Once the renegade flesh was gone
fall air lay against my face 
sharp and blue as a needle
but the rain fell through October
and death lay a condemnation
within my blood.

The smell of your neck in August
a fine gold wire bejew...Read More

by Browning, Robert
...l grievance---heigh ho!

XXIV.

Their ghosts still stand, as I said before,
Watching each fresco flaked and rasped,
Blocked up, knocked out, or whitewashed o'er:
---No getting again what the church has grasped!
The works on the wall must take their chance;
``Works never conceded to England's thick clime!''
(I hope they prefer their inheritance
Of a bucketful of Italian quick-lime.)

XXV.

When they go at length, with such a shaking
Of heads o'er the old delusion, ...Read More

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ne.
 O the oont, O the oont, O the Gawd-forsaken oont!
 The lumpy-'umpy 'ummin'-bird a-singin' where 'e lies,
 'E's blocked the whole division from the rear-guard to the front,
 An' when we get him up again -- the beggar goes an' dies!

'E'll gall an' chafe an' lame an' fight -- 'e smells most awful vile;
'E'll lose 'isself for ever if you let 'im stray a mile;
'E's game to graze the 'ole day long an' 'owl the 'ole night through,
An' when 'e comes to greasy ground 'e spli...Read More

by Collins, Billy
...ngs smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.

In a while I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch,
sending a cold shower down on us both.

But for now I am a willing prisoner in this house,
a sympathizer with the anarchic cause of snow.
I wi...Read More

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...g you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star....Read More

by Murray, Les
...er belts
but paddlewheels sailed the silvery vats where muscles
of the one deep cream were exercised to a bullion
to be blocked in paper. And between waves of delivery
the men trod on water, hosing the rainbows of a shift.

It was damp April even at Christmas round every
margin of the factory. Also it opened the mouth
to see tackles on glibbed gravel, and the mossed char louvres
of the ice-plant's timber tower streaming with
heavy rain all day, above the droughty ...Read More

by Brooks, Gwendolyn
...t are bringings
Of loathe-love largesse? What shall peril hungers
So old old, what shall flatter the desolate?
Tin can, blocked fire escape and chitterling
And swaggering seeking youth and the puzzled wreckage
Of the middle passage, and urine and stale shames
And, again, the porridges of the underslung
And children children children. Heavens! That
Was a rat, surely, off there, in the shadows? Long
And long-tailed? Gray? The Ladies from the Ladies'
Betterment League agree ...Read More

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ghness breaks with ease 
The law your Highness did not make: 'twas I. 
I had been wedded wife, I knew mankind, 
And blocked them out; but these men came to woo 
Your Highness--verily I think to win.' 

So she, and turned askance a wintry eye: 
But Ida with a voice, that like a bell 
Tolled by an earthquake in a trembling tower, 
Rang ruin, answered full of grief and scorn. 

'Fling our doors wide! all, all, not one, but all, 
Not only he, but by my mother's soul, ...Read More

by Lowell, Robert
...ave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish barks it nose
On Ahab's void and forehead; and the name
Is blocked in yellow chalk.
Sailors, who pitch this portent at the sea
Where dreadnaughts shall confess
Its heel-bent deity,
When you are powerless
To sand-bag this Atlantic bulwark, faced
By the earth-shaker, green, unwearied, chaste
In his steel scales: ask for no Orphean lute
To pluck life back. The guns of the steeled fleet
Recoil and then repeat
Th...Read More

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