Famous Grappling Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Terre

by Wilfred Owen
 (Being the philosophy of many Soldiers.)


Sit on the bed; I'm blind, and three parts shell,
Be careful; can't shake hands now; never shall.
Both arms have mutinied against me -- brutes.
My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.

I tried to peg out soldierly -- no use!
One dies of war like any old disease.
This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.
I have my...Read more of this...

Le Manteau De Pascal

by Jorie Graham
 I have put on my great coat it is cold.

It is an outer garment.

Coarse, woolen.

Of unknown origin.

 *

It has a fine inner lining but it is 
as an exterior that you see it — a grace.

 *

I have a coat I am wearing. It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions
has made, skillfully,...Read more of this...

The Dragon and The Undying

by Siegfried Sassoon
 All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings 
And beats upon the dark with furious wings; 
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires, 
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town; 
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires, 
And hurls their martyred music toppling down. 
Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze, 

Vocal...Read more of this...

Attack

by Siegfried Sassoon
 AT dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun 
In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, 
Smouldering through spouts of drifting smoke that shroud 
The menacing scarred slope; and, one by one, 
Tanks creep and topple forward to the wire. 
The barrage roars and lifts. Then, clumsily bowed 
With bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear, 
Men jostle and...Read more of this...

Dalliance of the Eagles The

by Walt Whitman
 SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) 
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles, 
The rushing amorous contact high in space together, 
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel, 
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling, 
Till o’er the river...Read more of this...

Long too Long O Land!

by Walt Whitman
 LONG, too long, O land, 
Traveling roads all even and peaceful, you learn’d from joys and prosperity only; 
But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish—advancing, grappling with direst
 fate,
 and
 recoiling not; 
And now to conceive, and show to the world, what your children en-masse really are; 
(For who except myself has yet conceiv’d what your...Read more of this...

Discipline

by D. H. Lawrence
 It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane, 
The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves; 
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains 
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves. 

It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too...Read more of this...

Skyscraper

by Carl Sandburg
 BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul...Read more of this...

Facility

by Robert William Service
 So easy 'tis to make a rhyme,
That did the world but know it,
Your coachman might Parnassus climb,
Your butler be a poet.

Then, oh, how charming it would be
If, when in haste hysteric
You called the page, you learned that he
Was grappling with a lyric.

Or else what rapture it would yield,
When cook sent up the salad,
To find within its depths concealed
A touching...Read more of this...

Banishment

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I am banished from the patient men who fight 
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride. 
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side, 
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light. 
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,— 
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried 
To...Read more of this...

Singing Nigger

by Carl Sandburg
 YOUR bony head, Jazbo, O dock walloper,
Those grappling hooks, those wheelbarrow handlers,
The dome and the wings of you, ******,
The red roof and the door of you,
I know where your songs came from.
I know why God listens to your, “Walk All Over God’s Heaven.”
I heard you shooting craps, “My baby’s going to have a new dress.”
I heard you in the...Read more of this...

Transformations

by D. H. Lawrence
I

=The Town=

Oh you stiff shapes, swift transformation seethes
About you: only last night you were
A Sodom smouldering in the dense, soiled air;
To-day a thicket of sunshine with blue smoke-wreaths.

To-morrow swimming in evening's vague, dim vapour
Like a weeded city in shadow under the sea,
Beneath an ocean of shimmering light you will be:
Then a group of toadstools waiting the moon's white taper.

And when...Read more of this...

The Aisne

by Alan Seeger
 We first saw fire on the tragic slopes 
Where the flood-tide of France's early gain, 
Big with wrecked promise and abandoned hopes, 
Broke in a surf of blood along the Aisne. 


The charge her heroes left us, we assumed, 
What, dying, they reconquered, we preserved, 
In the chill trenches, harried, shelled, entombed, 
Winter came down on us, but no...Read more of this...

Hits and Runs

by Carl Sandburg
 I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness.
And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown.
And the umpire’s voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and...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...

Resurrection

by Sidney Lanier
 Sometimes in morning sunlights by the river
Where in the early fall long grasses wave,
Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver
And sigh as if just blown across a grave.

And then I pause and listen to this sighing.
I look with strange eyes on the well-known stream.
I hear wild birth-cries uttered by the dying.
I know men waking who appear to...Read more of this...

The Red Son

by Carl Sandburg
 I LOVE your faces I saw the many years
I drank your milk and filled my mouth
With your home talk, slept in your house
And was one of you.
But a fire burns in my heart.
Under the ribs where pulses thud
And flitting between bones of skull
Is the push, the endless mysterious command,
Saying:
"I leave you behind--
You for the little hills and the years...Read more of this...

Tis so appalling -- it exhilarates

by Emily Dickinson
 'Tis so appalling -- it exhilarates --
So over Horror, it half Captivates --
The Soul stares after it, secure --
A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more --

To scan a Ghost, is faint --
But grappling, conquers it --
How easy, Torment, now --
Suspense kept sawing so --

The Truth, is Bald, and Cold --
But that will hold --
If any are not sure --
We show...Read more of this...

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