Famous Grinned Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Behind the Arras

...happy Ariel masking so 
In mocking woe? 


Then with a little broken laugh I say, 
Snatching away 
The curtain where he grinned 
(My feverish sight thought) like a sin unsinned, 
"Only the wind!" 


Yet often too he steals so softly by. 
With half a sigh, 
I deem he must be mild, 
Fair as a woman, gentle as a child, 
And forest wild. 


Passing the door where an old wind-harp swings, 
With its five strings, 
Contrived long years ago 
By my first predecessor bent to show 
His ...Read more of this...
by Carman, Bliss


Captain Craig

...hings that I wished he wouldn’t. Killigrew, 
Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass, 
Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made 
Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.

It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats 
That night, but I have rather to believe 
As I lay turning, twisting, listening, 
And wondering, between great sleepless yawns, 
What possible satisfaction those dead leaves
Could find in sending shadows to my room 
And swinging them like black rags o...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Clancy Of The Mounted Police

...d with its creeping terror, cold with its sudden clinch;
 Cold so utter you wonder if 'twill ever again be warm;
Clancy grinned as he shuddered, "Surely it isn't a cinch
 Being wet-nurse to a looney in the teeth of an arctic storm.

"The blizzard passed and the dawn broke, knife-edged and crystal clear;
 The sky was a blue-domed iceberg, sunshine outlawed away;
Ever by snowslide and ice-rip haunted and hovered the Fear;
 Ever the Wild malignant poised and panted to slay.

The...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

Contentment

...d years or two,
And for a dozen more he hankered;
So o'er a pint I asked how he
Had kept his timbers tight together;
He grinned and answered: "It maun be
Because I likes all kinds o' weather.

"Fore every morn when I get up
I lights my clay pipe wi' a cinder,
And as me mug o' tea I sup
I looks from out the cottage winder;
And if it's shade or if it's shine
Or wind or snow befit to freeze me,
I always say: 'Well, now that's fine . . .
It's just the sorto' day to please me.'

"...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

Corporal Stare

...y at Festubert. 
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire, 
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire! 
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind, 
Leaving us blank astonishment. 
The song broke, up we started, leant 
Out of the window—nothing there, 
Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare,
Only a quiver of smoke that showed 
A ***-end dropped on the silent road....Read more of this...
by Graves, Robert


Crow Blacker than ever

...redemption. 

The agony did not diminish. 

Man could not be man nor God God. 

The agony 

Grew. 

Crow 

Grinned 

Crying: 'This is my Creation,' 

Flying the black flag of himself. ...Read more of this...
by Hughes, Ted

Hard Rock Returns To Prison From The Hospital For The Criminal Insane

...is teeth, a screw who knew Hard Rock
>From before shook him down and barked in his face
And Hard Rock did nothing. Just grinned and look silly. 
His empty eyes like knot holes in a fence. 

And even after we discovered that it took Hard Rock
Exactly 3 minutes to tell you his name,
we told ourselves that he had just wised up,
Was being cool; but we could not fool ourselves for long. 
And we turned away, our eyes on the ground. Crushed. 
He had been our Destroyer, the doer of t...Read more of this...
by Knight, Etheridge

Paradise Lost: Book 02

...e fed and filled 
Immeasurably; all things shall be your prey." 
 He ceased; for both seemed highly pleased, and Death 
Grinned horrible a ghastly smile, to hear 
His famine should be filled, and blessed his maw 
Destined to that good hour. No less rejoiced 
His mother bad, and thus bespake her sire:-- 
 "The key of this infernal Pit, by due 
And by command of Heaven's all-powerful King, 
I keep, by him forbidden to unlock 
These adamantine gates; against all force 
Death rea...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Peter Anderson And Co

...ely -- he would say his partner slept; 
That he had a `sleeping partner' -- jesting while his spirit broke -- 
And they grinned above their glasses, for they took it as a joke. 
He would shout while he had money, he would joke while he had breath -- 
No one seemed to care or notice how he drank himself to death; 
Till at last there came a morning when his smile was seen no more -- 
He was gone from out the office, and his shingle from the door, 
And a boundary-rider jogging o...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

Suicide In The Trenches

...I knew a simple soldier boy 
Who grinned at life in empty joy, 
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark, 
And whistled early with the lark. 

In winter trenches, cowed and glum, 
With crumps and lice and lack of rum, 
He put a bullet through his brain. 
No one spoke of him again. 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye 
Who cheer when soldier lads march by, 
Sneak home and pray you'll nev...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried

The Ballad Of How Macpherson Held The Floor

...his mighty lungs and empty was his flask.
And when a fallen foe wailed out: "Say! when will you have done?"
MacPherson grinned and answered: "Hoots! She's only ha'f begun."
Aye, though his hands were bloody, and his knees were gay with gore,
A Grampian of Highland pride - MacPherson held the floor.

And still in Yukon valleys where the silent peaks look down,
They tell of how the Piper was invited up to town,
And he went in kilted glory, and he piped before them all,
But wou...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

...teep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful...Read more of this...
by Brooks, Gwendolyn

The Breaking Point

..., 
And yawn, and stretch, and pat myself, 
-- The grass began to whisper things -- 
And every tree became an elf, 
That grinned and chuckled counsellings: 
Birds, beasts, one thing alone they said, 
Beating and dinning at my head. 
I could not fly. I could not shun it. 
Slimily twisting, slow and blind, 
It crept and crept into my mind. 
Whispered and shouted, sneered and laughed, 
Screamed out until my brain was daft. . . . 
One snaky word, "What if you'd done it?" 

And I b...Read more of this...
by Benet, Stephen Vincent

The Driver

...the thorny back,
And the hammer-fish's misshapen kind,
And the shark, the hyena dread of the sea,
With his angry teeth, grinned fiercely on me."

"There hung I, by fulness of terror possessed,
Where all human aid was unknown,
Amongst phantoms, the only sensitive breast,
In that fearful solitude all alone,
Where the voice of mankind could not reach to mine ear,
'Mid the monsters foul of that wilderness drear."

"Thus shuddering methought--when a something crawled near,
And a h...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

The Everlasting Mercy

...ve, not light, but talk about it.

But parson'd proved to people's eyes 
That I was drunk, and he was wise; 
And people grinned and women tittered, 
And little children mocked and twittered. 
So, blazing mad, I stalked to bar 
To show how noble drunkards are, 
And guzzled spirits like a beast, 
To show contempt for Church and priest, 
Until, by six, my wits went round 
Like hungry pigs in parish pound. 
At half past six, rememb'ring Jane, 
I staggered into street again 
With ...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John

The Famous Tay Whale

...after him did go,
Armed well with harpoons for the fray,
Which they fired at him without dismay. 

And they laughed and grinned just like wild baboons,
While they fired at him their sharp harpoons:
But when struck with,the harpoons he dived below,
Which filled his pursuers' hearts with woe. 

Because they guessed they had lost a prize,
Which caused the tears to well up in their eyes;
And in that their anticipations were only right,
Because he sped on to Stonehaven with all hi...Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz

The Present

...ssed, 
Teddy the Polack told us a fat tit 
would stop a toothache, two a headache. 
He told it to anyone who asked, and grinned -- 
the small eyes watering at the corners -- 
as Alcibiades might have grinned 
when at last he learned that love leads 
even the body beloved to a moment 
in the present when desire calms, the skin 
glows, the soul takes the light of day, 
even a working day in 1944. 
For Baharozian at seventeen the present 
was a gift. Seeing my ashen face, 
the c...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

Travels With John Hunter

...lly. Seaweed gel 
plugged views of my pluck and offal. 
The only poet whose liver 

damage hadn't been self-inflicted, 
grinned my agent. A momentarily 
holed bowel had released flora 
who live in us and will eat us 

when we stop feeding them the earth. 
I had, it did seem, rehearsed 
the private office of the grave, 
ceased excreting, made corpse gases 

all while liana'd in tubes 
and overseen by cockpit instruments 
that beeped or struck up Beethoven's 
Fifth at behests o...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

What Happened

...Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail;
Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail;
Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee
As he ground the butcher-knife of the Khyberee.

Jowar Singh the Sikh procured sabre, quoit, and mace,
Abdul Huq, Wahabi, jerked his dagger from its place,
While amid the jungle-grass danced and grinned and jabbered
Little Boh Hla-oo and cleared his dah-blade from the scabbard.


What became of Mookerjee? Smoothly, who can say?
Yar Mahommed...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Who In The Hell Is Tom Jones?

...ut into the street.
squadcars full of cops
arrived. a police heli-
coptor circled overhead.
I stood in the bathroom
and grinned in the mirror.
it's not often at the age
of 55 that such splendid
things occur.
better than the Watts
riots.
the 34 year old
came back in. she had
pissed all over her-
self and her clothing
was torn and she was
followed by 2 cops who
wanted to know why.
pulling up my shorts
I tried to explain....Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

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