Famous Fastened Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Beowulf (Modern English)

...wine-hall resisted
the battle-brave, that it did not just fall to the earth,
that house lovely yet mortal, but it was fastened within
and without with iron bands, smithed with crafty thoughts.
There from the floor was buckled many a mead-bench,
as I have heard, made beautiful with gold,
where the combatants struggled. (ll. 767-77)

Until this moment, Scylding wisemen never believed
that any man could ever have the means, excellent
though bound in bone, to break it a...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,


Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)

...ted and exorcised.
Briar Rose grew to be a goddess
and each night the king
bit the hem of her gown
to keep her safe.
He fastened the moon up
with a safety pin
to give her perpetual light
He forced every male in the court
to scour his tongue with Bab-o
lest they poison the air she dwelt in.
Thus she dwelt in his odor.
Rank as honeysuckle.

On her fifteenth birthday
she pricked her finger
on a charred spinning wheel
and the clocks stopped.
Yes indeed. She went to sleep.
The kin...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Christabel

...nge and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain,
For a lady's chamber meet:
The lamp with twofold silver chain
Is fastened to an angel's feet.
The silver lamp burns dead and dim;
But Christabel the lamp will trim.
She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright,
And left it swinging to and fro,
While Geraldine, in wretched plight,
Sank down upon the floor below.
'O weary lady, Geraldine,
I pray you, drink this cordial wine!
It is a wine of virtuous powers;
My mother ...Read more of this...
by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Consorting With Angels

...,
a people apart.

"You are the answer,"
I said, and entered,
lying down on the gates of the city.
Then the chains were fastened around me
and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.
Adam was on the left of me
and Eve was on the right of me,
both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.
We wove our arms together
and rode under the sun.
I was not a woman anymore,
not one thing or the other.

O daughters of Jerusalem,
the king has brought me into his chamber.
I am...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...he poor, or the blessed image of Mary.
Farther down, on the slope of the hill, was the well with its moss-grown
Bucket, fastened with iron, and near it a trough for the horses.
Shielding the house from storms, on the north, were the barns and the farm-yard,
There stood the broad-wheeled wains and the antique ploughs and the harrows;
There were the folds for the sheep; and there, in his feathered seraglio,
Strutted the lordly turkey, and crowed the cock, with the selfsame
Voic...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Flee On Your Donkey

...ovepipe hat
with his fiery joke, his manic smile—
even he seems blurred, small and pale.
I have come back,
recommitted,
fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,
held like a prisoner
who was so poor
he fell in love with jail.

I stand at this old window
complaining of the soup,
examining the grounds,
allowing myself the wasted life.
Soon I will raise my face for a white flag,
and when God enters the fort,
I won't spit or gag on his finger.
I will eat it like a white flowe...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Hiawathas Childhood

...Hiawatha!"
But he heeded not, nor heard them, 
For his thoughts were with the red deer; 
On their tracks his eyes were fastened, 
Leading downward to the river, 
To the ford across the river,
And as one in slumber walked he. 
Hidden in the alder-bushes,
There he waited till the deer came, 
Till he saw two antlers lifted, 
Saw two eyes look from the thicket, 
Saw two nostrils point to windward, 
And a deer came down the pathway, 
Flecked with leafy light and shadow. 
And his ...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

His Wife The Painter

...rite Kaiser, though I think he's a homosexual."
"Are you still reading Freud?"
"Page 299."
She made a little hat and he fastened two snaps under one
arm, reaching up from the bed like a long feeler from the
snail, and she went to church, and he thought now I h've
time and the dog.
About church: the trouble with a mask is it 
never changes.
So rude the flowers that grow and do not grow beautiful.
So magic the chair on the patio that does not hold legs
and belly and arm and nec...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

Paradise Lost: Book 10

...rigour not to move; 
And with Asphaltick slime, broad as the gate, 
Deep to the roots of Hell the gathered beach 
They fastened, and the mole immense wrought on 
Over the foaming deep high-arched, a bridge 
Of length prodigious, joining to the wall 
Immoveable of this now fenceless world, 
Forfeit to Death; from hence a passage broad, 
Smooth, easy, inoffensive, down to Hell. 
So, if great things to small may be compared, 
Xerxes, the liberty of Greece to yoke, 
From Susa, h...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Paris

...and strain to see 
The tango in its ecstasy of glowing lives that clasp and cling. 


Lithe limbs relaxed, exalted eyes fastened on vacancy, they seem 
To float upon the perfumed stream of some voluptuous Paradise, 


Or, rapt in some Arabian Night, to rock there, cradled and subdued, 
In a luxurious lassitude of rhythm and sensual delight. 


And only when the measures cease and terminate the flowing dance 
They waken from their magic trance and join the cries that clamor "B...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

Part 3 of Trout Fishing in America

...contained a couch, a glass cabinet

with Chinese things in it and a table and three chairs. There

was a tiny bathroom fastened like a watch fob to the room.

 I was sitting on a stool in the bookstore one afternoon

reading a book that was in the shape of a chalice. The book

had clear pages like gin, and the first page in the book read:



 Billy

 the Kid

 born

 November 23,

 1859

 in

 New York

 City



 The owner of the bookstore came up to me, and put his

arm on ...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Smoke and Steel

..., flying feet upside down;
Buckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;
Sparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;
Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermillion balloons;
I saw the...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl

The Division Of Parts

...der, a dove's
cheek among the stones,
my Lady of first words,
this is the division of ways.
And now, while Christ stays
fastened to his Crucifix
so that love may praise
his sacrifice
and not the grotesque metaphor,
you come, a brave ghost, to fix
in my mind without praise
or paradise
to make me your inheritor....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Dream

...had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man,
Glad in a flowing garb, did watch the while,
While many of his tribe slumbered around:
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.

V

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The Lady of his love was wed with One
Who did not love her better...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Hammers

...eases."
Tap! Squeak! Tap!
The man on the ladder hammers steadily for a minute or two,
Then stops.
"He! Patron!
They are fastened well, Nom d'un Chien!
What if I break them?"
"Break away,
You and Paul must have them down to-day."
"Bien."
And the hammers start again,
Drum-beating at the something of gilded wood.
Sunshine in a golden flood
Lighting up the yellow fronts of houses,
Glittering each window to a flash.
Squeak! Squeak! Tap!
The hammers beat and rap.
A Prussian hussar ...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Hunting Of The Snark

...ic tones Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand--so it generally ended in its being fastened on, anyhow, across the rudder. The helmsman* used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong, but alas! Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm," had been completed by the Bellman himself with the words "and the Man at the Helm shall speak to no one." So remon{-} strance was impossible, and no steering could...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

The Jumblies

...The water it soon came in;
So to keep them dry, they wrapped their feet
In a pinky paper all folded neat,
  And they fastened it down with a pin.
And they passed the night in a crockery-jar,
And each of them said, `How wise we are!
Though the sky be dark, and the voyage be long,
Yet we never can think we were rash or wrong,
  While round in our Sieve we spin!'
    Far and few, far and few,
      Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
    Their heads are green, and ...Read more of this...
by Lear, Edward

The Medal

...npalatable law. 
The witnesses that, leech-like lived on blood, 
Sucking for them were med'cinally good; 
But when they fastened on their festered sore, 
Then justice and religion they forswore, 
Thus men are raised by factions and decried, 
And rogue and saint distinguished by their side; 
They rack even Scripture to confess their cause 
And plead a call to preach in spite of laws. 
But that's no news to the poor injured page, 
It has been used as ill in every age, 
And is c...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John

The Science Of The Night

...hooded powers and from abstract flight
I summon you, your person and your pride.
Fall to me now from outer space,
Still fastened desperately to my side;
Through gulfs of streaming air
Bring me the mornings of the milky ways
Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;
And by the virtue of your honeyed word
Restore the liquid language of the moon,
That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.
Awake!
 My whirling hands stay at the noon,
Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my...Read more of this...
by Kunitz, Stanley

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

...invisible when the right time came.
And thus he sat outside the dorm.
The oldest princess brought him some wine
but he fastened a sponge beneath his chin,
looking the opposite of Andy Gump.

The sponge soaked up the wine,
and thus he stayed awake.
He feigned sleep however
and the princesses sprang out of their beds
and fussed around like a Miss America Contest.
Then the eldest went to her bed
and knocked upon it and it sank into the earth.
They descended down the opening
one...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

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