Famous Cling To Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Last Confession

by William Butler Yeats
 What lively lad most pleasured me
Of all that with me lay?
I answer that I gave my soul
And loved in misery,
But had great pleasure with a lad
That I loved bodily.

Flinging from his arms I laughed
To think his passion such
He fancied that I gave a soul
Did but our bodies touch,
And laughed upon his breast to think
Beast gave beast as much.

I gave...Read more of this...

The Sudden Light And The Trees

by Stephen Dunn
 My neighbor was a biker, a pusher, a dog
and wife beater.
In bad dreams I killed him

and once, in the consequential light of day,
I called the Humane Society
about Blue, his dog. They took her away

and I readied myself, a baseball bat
inside my door.
That night I hear his wife scream

and I couldn't help it, that pathetic
relief; her again, not me.
It would...Read more of this...

Sing To Me

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Sing to me! Something of sunlight and bloom, 
I am so compassed with sorrow and gloom, 
I am so sick with the world’s noisse and strife, -
Sing of the beauty and brightness of life –
Sing to me, sing to me! 

Sing to me! Something that’s jubilant, glad! 
I am so weary, my soul so sad.
All my earth riches are...Read more of this...

Song of the Soldiers Wifes

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

At last! In sight of home again, 
Of home again; 
No more to range and roam again 
As at that bygone time? 
No more to go away from us 
And stay from us? - 
Dawn, hold not long the day from us, 
But quicken it to prime! 

II 

Now all the town shall ring to them, 
Shall ring...Read more of this...

74. Fragment—Her Flwoing Locks

by Robert Burns
 HER flowing locks, the raven’s wing,
Adown her neck and bosom hing;
How sweet unto that breast to cling,
 And round that neck entwine her!


Her lips are roses wat wi’ dew,
O’ what a feast her bonie mou’!
Her cheeks a mair celestial hue,
 A crimson still diviner!...Read more of this...

Reconciliation

by William Butler Yeats
 Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you - but now
We'll out, for the...Read more of this...

If it should ever happen that

by Emile Verhaeren
If it should ever happen that, without our knowledge, we became a pain or torment or despair one to the other;
If it should come about that weariness or hackneyed pleasure unbent in us the golden bow of lofty desire;
If the crystal of pure thought must fall in our hearts and break;
If, in spite of all, I should feel myself vanquished...Read more of this...

Yet Yet Ye Downcast Hours

by Walt Whitman
 1
YET, yet, ye downcast hours, I know ye also; 
Weights of lead, how ye clog and cling at my ankles! 
Earth to a chamber of mourning turns—I hear the o’erweening, mocking voice, 
Matter is conqueror—matter, triumphant only, continues onward. 

2
Despairing cries float ceaselessly toward me,
The call of my nearest lover, putting forth, alarm’d, uncertain, 
The Sea I am quickly...Read more of this...

Tar

by C K Williams
 The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, 
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to 
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble 
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening...Read more of this...

The Land of the Exile

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Mother, the light has grown grey in the sky; I do not know what
the time is.
There is no fun in my play, so I have come to you. It is
Saturday, our holiday.
Leave off your work, mother; sit here by the window and tell
me where the desert of Tepantar in the fairy tale is.
The shadow of the rains has covered...Read more of this...

Fallen Leaves

by Robert William Service
 Why should I be the first to fall
Of all the leaves on this old tree?
Though sadly soon I know that all
Will lose their hold and follow me.
While my birth-brothers bravely blow,
Why should I be first to go?

Why should I be the last to cling
Of all the leaves on this bleak bough?
I've fluttered since the fire of Spring
And I am...Read more of this...

Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage...Read more of this...

Chorus

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 from Atalanta in Calydon

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nigthingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and emptying of...Read more of this...

The Gardener XVI: Hands Cling to Eyes

by Rabindranath Tagore
 Hands cling to hands and eyes linger
on eyes: thus begins the record of our
hearts.
It is the moonlit night of March;
the sweet smell of henna is in the air;
my flute lies on the earth neglected 
and your garland of flowers is
unfinished.
This love between you and me is
simple as a song.
Your veil of the saffron colour
makes my eyes drunk.
The jasmine wreath...Read more of this...

The Schoolmaster

by D. H. Lawrence
I

=A Snowy Day in School=

All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class,
Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence
Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass
Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly--

But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light
Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars,
Like full-blown...Read more of this...

Sleep

by John Gould Fletcher
 Do you give yourself to me utterly,

Body and no-body, flesh and no-flesh

Not as a fugitive, blindly or bitterly, 

But as a child might, with no other wish?

Yes, utterly.



Then I shall bear you down my estuary,

Carry you and ferry you to burial mysteriously,

Take you and receive you,

Consume you, engulf you,

In the huge cave, my belly, lave you

With huger waves continually.

And...Read more of this...

The Winners

by Rudyard Kipling
 What the moral? Who rides may read.
When the night is thick and the tracks are blind
A friend at a pinch is a friend, indeed,
But a fool to wait for the laggard behind.
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

White hands cling to the tightened rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel,
Tenderest voices cry...Read more of this...

Mother and Poet

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I.

Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead ! both my boys ! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me !

II.
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a...Read more of this...

Come

by Sara Teasdale
 Come, when the pale moon like a petal
 Floats in the pearly dusk of spring,
Come with arms outstretched to take me,
 Come with lips pursed up to cling.

Come, for life is a frail moth flying,
 Caught in the web of the years that pass,
And soon we two, so warm and eager,
 Will be as the gray stones in the...Read more of this...

If you know to what to cling upon this walk around

by Omar Khayyam
If you know to what to cling upon this walk around
a circle without end, you must recognize two classes
of men: those who understand perfectly its good and its
bad side, and those who have no notion either of themselves
or of things here below.
359...Read more of this...

Bein' Back Home

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Home agin, an' home to stay—
Yes, it's nice to be away.
Plenty things to do an' see,
But the old place seems to me
Jest about the proper thing.
Mebbe 'ts 'cause the mem'ries cling
Closer 'round yore place o' birth
'N ary other spot on earth.
W'y it's nice jest settin' here,
Lookin' out an' seein' clear,
'Thout no smoke, ner dust, ner haze
In these sweet October days.
What's...Read more of this...

Beachcomber

by Robert William Service
 When I have come with happy heart to sixty years and ten,
I'll buy a boat and sail away upon a summer sea;
And in a little lonely isle that's far and far from men,
In peace and praise I'll spend the days the Gods allow to me.
For I am weary of a strife so pitiless and vain;
And in a far and...Read more of this...

The Mother

by Robert William Service
 Your children grow from you apart,
 Afar and still afar;
And yet it should rejoice your heart
 To see how glad they are;
In school and sport, in work and play,
 And last, in wedded bliss
How others claim with joy to-day
 The lips you used to kiss.

Your children distant will become,
 And wide the gulf will grow;
The lips of loving will...Read more of this...

O Glorious France

by Edgar Lee Masters
 You have become a forge of snow-white fire,
A crucible of molten steel, O France!
Your sons are stars who cluster to a dawn
And fade in light for you, O glorious France!
They pass through meteor changes with a song
Which to all islands and all continents
Says life is neither comfort, wealth, nor fame,
Nor quiet hearthstones, friendship, wife nor child,
Nor love, nor youth's...Read more of this...

From 'LES VILLAGES ILLUSOIRES' RAIN

by Emile Verhaeren
Long as unending threads, the long-drawn rain
Interminably, with its nails of grey,
Athwart the dull grey day,
Rakes the green window-pane—
So infinitely, endlessly, the rain,
The long, long rain.
The rain.

Since yesternight it keeps unravelling
Down from the frayed and flaccid rags that cling
About the sullen sky.
The low black sky;
Since yesternight, so slowly, patiently.
Unravelling its threads upon the roads.
Upon the roads and lanes, with even...Read more of this...

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