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Famous Clanging Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...he silver beam,
Crept, gently-crusting, o’er the glittering stream—


 When, lo! on either hand the list’ning Bard,
The clanging sugh of whistling wings is heard;
Two dusky forms dart through the midnight air;
Swift as the gos 4 drives on the wheeling hare;
Ane on th’ Auld Brig his airy shape uprears,
The other flutters o’er the rising piers:
Our warlock Rhymer instantly dexcried
The Sprites that owre the Brigs of Ayr preside.
(That Bards are second-sighted is nae joke,
A...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...the steep road of wide empire.

O lonely Himalayan height,
Grey pillar of the Indian sky,
Where saw'st thou last in clanging flight
Our winged dogs of Victory?

The almond-groves of Samarcand,
Bokhara, where red lilies blow,
And Oxus, by whose yellow sand
The grave white-turbaned merchants go:

And on from thence to Ispahan,
The gilded garden of the sun,
Whence the long dusty caravan
Brings cedar wood and vermilion;

And that dread city of Cabool
Set at the mountain's sca...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...stagger and demand
More blood-gangs for your ******-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions

End in the mud-flat detritus of death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Hungarian workmen give their blood
For the martyrs Stephen who was stoned to death.

Black Myd, a name to conjure with: O mud
For watermelons gutted to the crust,
Mu...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.

As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desol...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...their nightly food.

Down Bleron's hills they dreadful rush,
Their cry ascends the clouds;
The trampling horse and clanging arms
Like rushing mighty floods!

Their wives and children, weeping loud,
Follow in wild array,
Howling like ghosts, furious as wolves
In the bleak wintry day.

`Pull down the tyrant to the dust,
Let Gwin be humbl?d,'
They cry, `and let ten thousand lives
Pay for the tyrant's head.'

From tow'r to tow'r the watchmen cry,
`O Gwin, the son of ...Read more of this...



by Morris, William
...should call my name.

"The thrushes sang in the lone garden there:
But where you were the birds were scared I trow:
Clanging of arms about pavilions fair,
Mixed with the knights' laughs; there, as I well know,

"Rode Launcelot, the king of all the band,
And scowling Gauwaine, like the night in day,
And handsome Gareth, with his great white hand
Curl'd round the helm-crest, ere he join'd the fray;

"And merry Dinadan with sharp dark face,
All true knights loved to see; and...Read more of this...

by Riley, James Whitcomb
...as the face
Of some sweet infant in its angel grace,--
There came a sound of music, thrown afloat
Upon the balmy air--a clanging note
Reiterated from the brazen throat
Of Independence Bell: A sound so sweet,
The clamoring throngs of people in the streets
Were stilled as at the solemn voice of prayer,
And heads were bowed, and lips were moving there
That made no sound--until the spell had passed,
And then, as when all sudden comes the blast
Of some tornado, came the cheer on c...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...root. 

Never, tho' my mortal summers to such length of years should come
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home. 

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind? 

I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love. 

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?
No--she never loved ...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The ha...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...in secret, looking over wasted lands, 
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands, 115 
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands. 
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song 
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, 
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong; 
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil, 120 
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest ...Read more of this...

by Poe, Edgar Allan
...r!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows:
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-
Of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV

Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
W...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...sun hung,
A navel for the curving sky.
The air was a blue clarity.
Swallows flew,
And a cock crew.
The iron clanging sank through the light air,
Rustled over with blowing branches. A flare
Of spotted green, and a snake had gone
Into the bed where the snowdrops shone
In green new-started,
Their white bells parted.
Two by two, in a long brown line,
The nuns were walking to breathe the fine
Bright April air. They must go in soon
And work at their tasks al...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...peals on Boxing Day, 
And then surge up and gather shape, 
And spread great pinions and escape; 
And each great bird of clanging shrieks 
O Fire! Fire, from iron beaks. 
My shoulders cracked to send around 
Those shrieking birds made out of sound 
With news of fire in their bills. 
(They heard 'em plain beyond Wall Hills.). 

Up go the winders, out come heads, 
I heard the springs go creak in beds; 
But still I heave and sweat and tire, 
And still the clang go...Read more of this...

by Bradstreet, Anne
...d, and my cheeks are pale.
5.71 No more rejoice, at music's pleasant noise,
5.72 But do awake at the cock's clanging voice.
5.73 I cannot scent savours of pleasant meat,
5.74 Nor sapors find in what I drink or eat.
5.75 My hands and arms, once strong, have lost their might.
5.76 I cannot labour, nor I cannot fight:
5.77 My comely legs, as nimble as the Roe,
5.78 Now stiff and numb, can hardly creep or go.
5.79 My heart s...Read more of this...

by Teasdale, Sara
...I went back to the clanging city,
 I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love's glory,
 My eyes were laughing and unafraid.

I met one who had loved me madly
 And told his love for all to hear --
But we talked of a thousand things together,
 The past was buried too deep to fear.

I met the other, whose love was given
 With never a kiss ...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...ed away,
And up again, feeling his blood go wild.

He gave the signal; the long girder swung
Closer to him, dropped clanging into place,
Almost pushing him off. Pneumatic hammers
Began their madhouse clatter, the white-hot rivets
Were tossed from below and deftly caught in pails;
He signalled again, and wiped his mouth, and thought
A place so high in the air should be more quiet.
The tree, far down below, teased at his eyes,
Teased at the corners of them, until he...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...dhound's heavy bay
     Resounded up the rocky way,
     And faint, from farther distance borne,
     Were heard the clanging hoof and horn.
     II.

     As Chief, who hears his warder call,
     'To arms! the foemen storm the wall,'
     The antlered monarch of the waste
     Sprung from his heathery couch in haste.
     But ere his fleet career he took,
     The dew-drops from his flanks he shook;
     Like crested leader proud and high
     Tossed his beamed...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ey smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring ...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...the mellay, lord of the ringing lists, 
And all the plain,--brand, mace, and shaft, and shield-- 
Shocked, like an iron-clanging anvil banged 
With hammers; till I thought, can this be he 
From Gama's dwarfish loins? if this be so, 
The mother makes us most--and in my dream 
I glanced aside, and saw the palace-front 
Alive with fluttering scarfs and ladies' eyes, 
And highest, among the statues, statuelike, 
Between a cymballed Miriam and a Jael, 
With Psyche's babe, was Ida ...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...N>And all on fire with glory's opening charms,Plunged to the Shades below with clanging arms,Lævinus, Mummius, with Flaminius show'd,Like meaner lights along the heavenly road;And he who conquer'd Greece from sea to sea,Then mildly bade th' afflicted race be free.Next came the dauntless envoy, with his wand,...Read more of this...

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