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Famous Gong Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Thomas, Dylan
...neighbor's polar
cat. But soon the voice grew louder.
"Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring
out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier
in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the
house, laden...Read more of this...



by Service, Robert William
...
I'll smoke a bit and joke a bit, and read the news, and then
I'll potter round my peach-trees till I hear the luncheon gong.
And after that I think I'll doze an hour, well, maybe two,
And then I'll show some kindred soul how well my roses thrive;
I'll do the things I never yet have found the time to do. . . .
Oh, won't I be the busy man when I am Sixty-five.

I'll revel in my library; I'll read De Morgan's books;
I'll grow so garrulous I fear you'll w...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail...Read more of this...

by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...ome inviolate abode.
Still, O beloved, let me hear
The great bell beating far and near-
The odd, unknown, enchanted gong
That on the road hales men along,
That from the mountain calls afar,
That lures a vessel from a star,
And with a still, aerial sound
Makes all the earth enchanted ground.
Love, and the love of life and act
Dance, live and sing through all our furrowed tract;
Till the great God enamoured gives
To him who reads, to him who lives,
That rare and fair ro...Read more of this...

by Raine, Craig
...odas with tiny triangular tiles,
each milky lid a steamed-up window.
Inside, the heart repeats itself like a sleepy gong,
summoning nothing to nothing.

In winter time, the zoo reverts to metaphor,
God's poetry of boredom:
the cobra knits her Fair-Isle skin,
rattlers titter over the same joke.
All of them endlessly finish spaghetti.
The python runs down like a spring,
and time stops on some ancient Sabbath.

Pythagorean bees are shut inside the hive,
which...Read more of this...



by García Lorca, Federico
...una espada caliente.

 Frunce su rumor el mar.
Los olivos palidecen.
Cantan las flautas de umbr?a
y el liso gong de la nieve.

 ?Preciosa, corre, Preciosa,
que te coge el viento verde!
Preciosa, corre, Preciosa!
?M?ralo por donde viene!
S?tiro de estrellas bajas
con sus lenguas relucientes.

 Preciosa, llena de miedo,
entra en la casa que tiene,
m?s arriba de los pinos,
el c?nsul de los ingleses.

 Asustados por los gritos
tres carabineros viene,
sus n...Read more of this...

by MacNeice, Louis
...returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...nd extrication, 
And make short account of neuters and geldings, and favor men and women fully
 equipt,
And beat the gong of revolt, and stop with fugitives, and them that plot and
 conspire. 

24
Walt Whitman am I, a Kosmos, of mighty Manhattan the son, 
Turbulent, fleshy and sensual, eating, drinking and breeding; 
No sentimentalist—no stander above men and women, or apart from them; 
No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors! 
Uns...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...tense, like tiger for a leap.
And then he swung around to me, his hand went to his hip,
My heart was beating like a gong -- my arm was in his grip;
His eyes were glaring into mine; aye, though I shrank with fear,
His fetid breath was on my face, his voice was in my ear:
"Excuse my brusquerie," he hissed; "but, sir, do you suppose --
That portly man who passed us had a wen upon his nose?"

And then at last it dawned on me, the fellow must be mad;
And when I soothingly repl...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...bric forest roars the Norseman's song  
And loud amid the universal clamor 15 
O'er distant deserts sounds the Tartar gong. 

I hear the Florentine who from his palace 
Wheels out his battle-bell with dreadful din  
And Aztec priests upon their teocallis 
Beat the wild war-drums made of serpent's skin; 20 

The tumult of each sacked and burning village; 
The shouts that every prayer for mercy drowns; 
The soldiers' revels in the midst of pillage; 
The wail of ...Read more of this...

by Creeley, Robert
...Whereas the man who hits
the gong dis-
proves it, in all its
simplicity --

Even so the attempt
makes for triumph, in
another man.

Likewise in love I
am not foolish or in-
competent. My method is not a

tenderness, but hope
defined....Read more of this...

by Lindsay, Vachel
...
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
A rapidly piling climax of speed & racket.
And "BLOOD" screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
"BLOOD" screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
"Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing.
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,"
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
W...Read more of this...

by Tagore, Rabindranath
...ere milking the cow.
I stood with my empty can.
I did not come near you.
The sky woke with the sound of
the gong at the temple.
The dust was raised in the road
from the hoofs of the driven cattle.
With the gurgling pitchers at their 
hips, women came from the river.
Your bracelets were jingling, and 
foam brimming over the jar.
The morning wore on and I did not
come near you....Read more of this...

by Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city....Read more of this...

by García Lorca, Federico
...g sword.

The sea darkens and roars,
while the olive trees turn pale.
The flutes of darkness sound,
and a muted gong of the snow.

Precosia, run, Precosia!
Or the green wind will catch you!
Precosia, run, Precosia!
And look how fast he comes!
A satyr of low-born stars
with their long and glistening tongues.

Precosia, filled with fear,
now makes her way to that house
beyond the tall green pines
where the English consul lives.

Alarmed by the anguished crie...Read more of this...

by Lear, Edward
...sailed away;
  And when the sun went down,
They whistled and warbled a moony song
To the echoing sound of a coppery gong,
  In the shade of the mountains brown.
`O Timballo!  How happy we are,
When we live in a Sieve and a crockery-jar,
And all night long in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail,
  In the shade of the mountains brown!'
    Far and few, far and few,
      Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
    Their heads are green, and th...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...g to offer
 Who ruled them so long--
In the fume of incense, the clash of the cymbals, the blare of 
 the conch and the gong?
Over the strife of the schools
 Low the day burns--
Back with the kine from the pools
 Each one returns
To the life that he knows where the altar-flame glows and the
 tulsi is trimmed in the urns....Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...When sunset, a brass gong,
vibrate through Couva,
is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,
like a white cattle bird growing more small
over the ocean of the evening canes,
and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return
like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,
because, for my spirit, India is too far.
And to that gong
sometimes bald clouds in saffron robes assemble
sacred to the ev...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...s. Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Cli...Read more of this...

by Tagore, Rabindranath
...When the gong sounds ten in the morning and I walk to school by our
lane.
Every day I meet the hawker crying, "Bangles, crystal
bangles!"
There is nothing to hurry him on, there is no road he must
take, no place he must go to, no time when he must come home.
I wish I were a hawker, spending my day in the road, crying,
"Bangles, crystal bangles!"
When at four ...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things