Famous Dragged Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Turtle Swan

by Mark Doty
 Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool

and Die Company, a swan;
the word doesn't convey the shock
of the thing, white architecture
rippling like a pond's rain-pocked skin,
beak lifting to hiss at my approach.
Magisterial, set down in elegant...Read more of this...

The Miraculous Escape of Robert Allan the Fireman

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the year of 1858, and on October the fourteenth day,
That a fire broke out in a warehouse, and for hours blazed away;
And the warehouse, now destroyed, was occupied by the Messrs R. Wylie, Hill & Co.,
Situated in Buchanan Street, in the City of Glasgow. 

The flames burst forth about three o'clock in the afternoon,
And intimation of the...Read more of this...

Number 3 on the Docket

by Amy Lowell
 The lawyer, are you?
Well! I ain't got nothin' to say.
Nothin'!
I told the perlice I hadn't nothin'.
They know'd real well 'twas me.
Ther warn't no supposin',
Ketchin' me in the woods as they did,
An' me in my house dress.
Folks don't walk miles an' miles
In the drifted snow,
With no hat nor wrap on 'em
Ef everythin's all right, I guess.
All right? Ha! Ha! Ha!
Nothin'...Read more of this...

The Death of the Hired Man

by Robert Frost
 Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. 'Silas is back.'
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. "Be kind,' she said.
She took the market things...Read more of this...

Birthday (Autobiography)

by Robinson Jeffers
 Seventy years ago my mother labored to bear me,
A twelve-pound baby with a big head,
Her first, it was plain torture. Finally they used the forceps
And dragged me out, with one prong
In my right eye, and slapped and banged me until I breathed.
I am not particularly grateful for it.

As to the eye: it remained invalid and now has a cataract.
It...Read more of this...

chickens claw

by Rg Gregory
 by a dank and ancient coffin
in the gaunt and gloomy hall
alone and sighing deeply
crouched the sorriest crone of all
her worn hands clutched a feather
her eyes were sore with tears
her lips were mumbling slowly
through the burdens of her fears
her clothes were drab and tattered
her body drooped and old
she waited waited waited
her blood let in the cold
she waited waited waited
a chill...Read more of this...

am was. are leaves few this. is these a or

by Edward Estlin (E E) Cummings
am was. are leaves few this. is these a or

scratchily over which of earth dragged once
-ful leaf. ; were who skies clutch an of poor
how colding hereless. air theres what immense
live without every dancing. singless on-
ly a child's eyes float silently down
more than two those that and that noing our
gone snow gone
yours mine
. We're
alive and shall be:cities may overflow(am
was)assassinating whole...Read more of this...

While The Bannock Bakes

by Robert William Service
 Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight...Read more of this...

Birches

by Robert Frost
 When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks...Read more of this...

The Return

by Philip Levine
 All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
and follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn
in August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.
Often he'd leave the Terraplane beside the highway
to enter the...Read more of this...

Aix In Provence

by Robert Browning
 Christ God who savest man, save most
Of men Count Gismond who saved me!
Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,
Chose time and place and company
To suit it; when he struck at length
My honour, 'twas with all his strength.

II.

And doubtlessly ere he could draw
All points to one, he must have schemed!
That miserable morning saw
Few half so happy as I seemed,
While being...Read more of this...

Last Words

by Philip Levine
 If the shoe fell from the other foot 
who would hear? If the door 
opened onto a pure darkness 
and it was no dream? If your life 
ended the way a book ends 
with half a blank page and the survivors 
gone off to Africa or madness? 
If my life ended in late spring 
of 1964 while I walked...Read more of this...

The Watchman

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 My Claudia, it is long since we have met, 
So kissed, so held each other heart to heart! 
I thought to greet thee as a conqueror comes, 
Bearing the trophies of his prowess home, 
But Jove hath willed it should be otherwise­
Jove, say I? Nay, some mightier stranger-god 
Who thus hath laid his heavy hand on me, 
No victor,...Read more of this...

Borderland

by Henry Lawson
 I am back from up the country -- very sorry that I went -- 
Seeking for the Southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent; 
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track -- 
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I'm glad that I am back. 
Further out may be the pleasant scenes...Read more of this...

The Whole Soul

by Philip Levine
 Is it long as a noodle 
or fat as an egg? Is it 
lumpy like a potato or 
ringed like an oak or an 
onion and like the onion 
the same as you go toward 
the core? That would be 
suitable, for is it not 
the human core and the rest 
meant either to keep it 
warm or cold...Read more of this...

The Hemp

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 (A Virginia Legend.) 

The Planting of the Hemp.

Captain Hawk scourged clean the seas 
(Black is the gap below the plank) 
From the Great North Bank to the Caribbees 
(Down by the marsh the hemp grows rank). 

His fear was on the seaport towns, 
The weight of his hand held hard the downs. 
And the merchants cursed him, bitter and...Read more of this...

Orion

by Adrienne Rich
 Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are...Read more of this...

Dragged through the rapid course of time, which accords

by Omar Khayyam
Dragged through the rapid course of time, which accords
its favors only to the least worthy, my life is passed
in a gulf of grief and sorrow. In this garden of being,
my heart is hard as is the green bud of a rose; and like
a tulip, it is dipped in blood....Read more of this...

The Legend of Evil

by Rudyard Kipling
 I
This is the sorrowful story
 Told when the twilight fails
And the monkeys walk together
 Holding their neighbours' tails: --

"Our fathers lived in the forest,
 Foolish people were they,
They went down to the cornland
 To teach the farmers to play.

"Our fathers frisked in the millet,
 Our fathers skipped in the wheat,
Our fathers hung from the branches,
 Our fathers danced in...Read more of this...

Man and Wife

by Robert Lowell
Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad--
its hackneyed...Read more of this...

Name of Horses

by Donald Hall
 All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding 
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul 
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer, 
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields, 
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with...Read more of this...

The River-Merchants Wife: A Letter

by Ezra Pound
 After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight 
 across my forehead
I played at the front gate, pulling
 flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing
 horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with
 blue plums. 
And we went on living in the village of 
 Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or 
 suspicion. 

At fourteen I married My Lord...Read more of this...

The Lovers of the Poor

by Gwendolyn Brooks
 arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. 
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their...Read more of this...

The Paroo

by Henry Lawson
 It was a week from Christmas-time, 
As near as I remember, 
And half a year since, in the rear, 
We'd left the Darling timber. 
The track was hot and more than drear; 
The day dragged out for ever; 
But now we knew that we were near 
Our camp - the Paroo River. 
With blighted eyes and blistered feet, 
With...Read more of this...

The Conquerors Grave

by William Cullen Bryant
WITHIN this lowly grave a Conqueror lies  
And yet the monument proclaims it not  
Nor round the sleeper's name hath chisel wrought 
The emblems of a fame that never dies ¡ª 
Ivy and amaranth in a graceful sheaf 5 
Twined with the laurel's fair imperial leaf. 
A simple name alone  
To the great world unknown  
Is...Read more of this...

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