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Famous Crawled Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...s extinction of the rest, 
Had overlooked him and forgotten him. 
Yet I was not alone. Interminably
The minutes crawled along and over me, 
Slow, cold, intangible, and invisible, 
As if they had come up out of that water. 
How long I sat there I shall never know, 
For time was hidden out there in the black lake,
Which now I could see only as a glimpse 
Of black light by the shore. There were no stars 
To mention, and the moon was hours away 
Behind me. The...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...r foreheads felt the cooling air, 
Balin first woke, and seeing that true face, 
Familiar up from cradle-time, so wan, 
Crawled slowly with low moans to where he lay, 
And on his dying brother cast himself 
Dying; and HE lifted faint eyes; he felt 
One near him; all at once they found the world, 
Staring wild-wide; then with a childlike wail 
And drawing down the dim disastrous brow 
That o'er him hung, he kissed it, moaned and spake; 

'O Balin, Balin, I that fain had died 
...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...spoken when the shuddering trees
Shook, and the leaves divided, and the air
Grew conscious of a god, and the grey seas
Crawled backward, and a long and dismal blare
Blew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed,
And like a flame a barbed reed flew whizzing down the glade.

And where the little flowers of her breast
Just brake into their milky blossoming,
This murderous paramour, this unbidden guest,
Pierced and struck deep in horrid chambering,
And ploughed a blood...Read more of this...

by Hughes, Ted
...e future and the universe 

Opening and opening 
And kept on and slept and at last 

Crashed on the moon awoke and crawled out 

Under his mother's buttocks. ...Read more of this...

by Rossetti, Christina
...o linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat's face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat's pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
Lizzie heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.

Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like ...Read more of this...



by Hughes, Ted
...writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway 
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews 
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two hal...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...espy, 
By what means it could thither come, and whence; 
So that it seems a thing endued with sense: 
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf 
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself; 

X 

Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead, 
Nor all asleep--in his extreme old age: 
His body was bent double, feet and head 
Coming together in life's pilgrimage; 
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage 
Of sickness felt by him in times long past, 
A more than human...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...espy, 
By what means it could thither come, and whence; 
So that it seems a thing endued with sense: 
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf 
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself; 

X 

Such seemed this Man, not all alive nor dead, 
Nor all asleep--in his extreme old age: 
His body was bent double, feet and head 
Coming together in life's pilgrimage; 
As if some dire constraint of pain, or rage 
Of sickness felt by him in times long past, 
A more than human...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...mns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.

So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.

With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.

...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...wide
The old horse graven, God knows when,
By gods or beasts or what things then
Walked a new world instead of men
And scrawled on the hill-side.

And when he came to White Horse Down
The great White Horse was grey,
For it was ill scoured of the weed,
And lichen and thorn could crawl and feed,
Since the foes of settled house and creed
Had swept old works away.

King Alfred gazed all sorrowful
At thistle and mosses grey,
Then laughed; and watched the finches flash,
Til...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
.... .

Hunting his food a rival caveman crept
Through those dark woods, and marked him where he lay;
Cowered and crawled upon him as he slept,
Poising a mighty stone aloft to slay --
(A gaunt and hairy man with wolfish eyes.) . . .

* * * * * *

The great stone crashed. The Dreamer shrieked and woke,
And saw, fear-blinded, in his dripping cell,
A gaunt and hairy man, who with one stroke
Swung a great ax of steel that flashed and fell . . .Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...mself away beside
A ladle and a tub of beer,
And snored, no phantom by his look.
So with a laugh at his own fear
He crawled into that pleasant nook.

'Night grows uneasy near the dawn
Till even I sleep light; but who
Has tired of his own company?
What one of Maeve's nine brawling sons
Sick of his grave has wakened me?
But let him keep his grave for once
That I may find the sleep I have lost.'

What care I if you sleep or wake?
But I'Il have no man call me ghost.Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...nd waited for you;
There was a woman who smiled at you and lied.
There was a golden girl who loved you, begged you,
Crawled after you, and died.

'There is a ghost of murder in your blood—
Coming or past, I know not which.
And here is danger—a woman with sea-green eyes,
And white-skinned as a witch . . .'

The words hiss into me, like raindrops falling
On sleepy fire . . . She smiles a meaning smile.
Suspicion eats my brain; I ask a que...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...my dreams.
I have walked through a door in my dreams
and she was standing there in my mother's apron.
Once she crawled through a window that was shaped
like a keyhole and she was wearing my daughter's
pink corduroys and each time I tied these women
in a knot. Once a queen came. I tied her too.
But this is something I have actually tied
and now I have made her fast.
I sang her out. I caught her down.
I stamped her out with a song.
There was...Read more of this...

by Benet, Stephen Vincent
.... 
And reach that light upon the snow . . . 
And touch her dress at last . . . 
So, so, 
I crawled. I could not speak or see 
Save dimly. The ice glared like fire, 
A long bright Hell of choking cold, 
And each vein was a tautened wire, 
Throbbing with torture -- and I crawled. 
My hands were wounds. 
So I attained 
The second Hell. The snow was stained 
I thought, and shook my head at it 
How red it was! Black tree-roots clutc...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...t I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow
Of tardy kindness can avail thee now
With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;
Lonely I came, and I depart alone,
And know not where nor unto whom I go;
But that thou canst not follow me I know."

Thus I to Life, and ceased; but through my brain
My thought ...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...& some
Seeking the object of another's fear,
And others as with steps towards the tomb
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death ...
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.
But more with motions which each other crost
Pursued or shunned the shadows the clouds threw
Or birds within the noonday ether lost,
Upon that pat...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light 
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
 In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the win...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...like throne
Would place a gaudy mock-bird to repeat
The chatterings of the monkey. Every one
Of the prone courtiers crawled to kiss the feet
Of their great emperor when the morning came;
And kissed--alas, how many kiss the same!

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, and
Walked out of quarters in somnambulism;
Round the red anvils you might see them stand
Like Cyclopses in Vulcan's sooty abysm,
Beating their swords to ploughshares:--in a band
The jailors sent t...Read more of this...

by Silverstein, Shel
...Last night, while I lay thinking here,
some Whatifs crawled inside my ear
and pranced and partied all night long
and sang their same old Whatif song:
Whatif I'm dumb in school?
Whatif they've closed the swimming pool?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there's poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Wh...Read more of this...

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