Famous Grip Poems by Famous Poets

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

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110. Epistle to a Young Friend

...f being independent.


The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whip,
 To haud the wretch in order;
But where ye feel your honour grip,
 Let that aye be your border;
Its slightest touches, instant pause—
 Debar a’ side-pretences;
And resolutely keep its laws,
 Uncaring consequences.


The great Creator to revere,
 Must sure become the creature;
But still the preaching cant forbear,
 And ev’n the rigid feature:
Yet ne’er with wits profane to range,
 Be complaisance extended;
An atheist-...Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert


A Lesson In Vengeance

...l, latter-day sages,
Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies
Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,
Never grip, as the grandsires did, that devil who chuckles
From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains....Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

An Elegy

...laughter
Oppress me like some hazy morning-after.
But sadness of days past, as alcohol -
The more it age, the stronger grip the soul.
My course is dull. The future's troubled ocean
Forebodes me toil, misfortune and commotion.

But no, my friends, I do not wish to leave;
I'd rather live, to ponder and to grieve -
And I shall have my share of delectation
Amid all care, distress and agitation:
Time and again I'll savor harmony,
Melt into tears about some fantasy,
And on my sad ...Read more of this...
by Pushkin, Alexander

Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait

...s in its virgin laps

And prophets loud on the burned dunes;
Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,
Times and places grip her breast bone,
She is breaking with seasons and clouds;

Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,
with moving fish and rounded stones
Up and down the greater waves
A separate river breathes and runs;

Strike and sing his catch of fields
For the surge is sown with barley,
The cattle graze on the covered foam,
The hills have footed the waves away,

W...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

Beowulf (Modern English)

...n,
those who carried coined gifts to the Geats
thither as thanks, that he had the strength
of thirty men in his hand-grip and fame in war as well.
Holy God has sent him to us as a support,
to the West-Danes, as I have hope,
against the terror of Grendel. I must offer treasures
to that good chieftain for his mindful courage.
Be of haste, bid their allied band to enter and be seen,
gathered together. Say to them wordfully as well
that they are welcome among the Danish...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,


Common Cold

...did not call you to be told 
My malady is a common cold. 

By pounding brow and swollen lip; 
By fever's hot and scaly grip; 
By those two red redundant eyes 
That weep like woeful April skies; 
By racking snuffle, snort, and sniff; 
By handkerchief after handkerchief; 
This cold you wave away as naught 
Is the damnedest cold man ever caught! 

Give ear, you scientific fossil! 
Here is the genuine Cold Colossal; 
The Cold of which researchers dream, 
The Perfect Cold, the Co...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

Like A Scarf

...flapping slightly in the wind.
Several members of our party were mingling with the nurses
down by the duck pond, and my grip on the situation
was loosening, the planks in my picnic platform were rotting.
I was thinking about the potato salad in an unstable environment.
A weeping spell was about to overtake me.
I was very close to howling and gnashing the gladiola.
I noticed the great calm of the clouds overhead.
And below, several nurses appeared to me in need of nursing.
The...Read more of this...
by Taylor, Edward

Meditations In Time Of Civil War

...e place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had bu...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler

Ruins of Rome by Bellay

...y fare on foot, or fly aloft, 
Or arméd be with claws, or scaly crests; 
What fell Erynnis with hot burning tongs, 
Did grip your hearts, with noisome rage imbew'd, 
That each to other working cruel wrongs, 
You blades in your own bowels you embrew'd? 
Was this (ye Romans) your hard destiny? 
Or some old sin, whose unappeased guilt 
Power'd vengeance forth on you eternally? 
Or brother's blood, the which at first was spilt 
Upon your walls, that God might not endure, 
Upon th...Read more of this...
by Spenser, Edmund

Sea Dreams

...! We live by faith," said he;
"And all things work together for the good
Of those"--it makes me sick to quote him--last
Gript my hand hard, and with God-bless-you went.
I stood like one that had received a blow:
I found a hard friend in his loose accounts,
A loose one in the hard grip of his hand,
A curse in his God-bless-you: then my eyes
Pursued him down the street, and far away,
Among the honest shoulders of the crowd,
Read rascal in the motions of his back,
And scoundrel ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Ballad Of Blasphemous Bill

...tter land;
Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heart-breaking woes,
And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!
North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.

River and plain and mighty peak--and who could stand unawed?
As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God.
North, aye, North, through a land accurst, s...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Ballad of Persse OReilly

...six years.

'Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children
But look out for his missus legitimate!
When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker
Won't there be earwigs on the green?
 (Chorus) Big earwigs on the green,
 The largest ever you seen.

 Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

Then we'll have a free trade Gael's band and mass meeting
For to sod him the brave son of Scandiknavery.
And we'll bury him down in Oxmanstown
Along with the devil and the Danes,
 (Chor...Read more of this...
by Joyce, James

The Ballad Of The Ice-Worm Cocktail

...st was Deacon White.
"We welcome you," he cried aloud, "to this the Great White Land.
The Artic Brotherhood is proud to grip you by the hand.
Yea, sportsman of the bull-dog breed, from trails of far away,
To Yukoners this is indeed a memorable day.
Our jubilation to express, vocabularies fail...
Boys, hail the Great Cheechako!" And the boys responded: "Hail!"

"And now," continued Deacon White to blushing Major Brown,
"Behold assembled the eelight and cream of Dawson Town,
An...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Ballad of the Red Earl

...th your tongue, Red Earl,
 That ye cannot loose with your hand.

Ye have travelled fast, ye have travelled far,
 In the grip of a tightening tether,
Till ye find at the end ye must take for friend
 The quick and their dead together.

Ye have played with the Law between your lips,
 And mouthed it daintilee;
But the gist o' the speech is ill to teach,
 For ye say: "Let wrong go free."

Red Earl, ye wear the Garter fair,
 And gat your place from a King:
Do ye make Rebellion of n...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Ballad of the White Horse

...ned his heart with hope.

A sea-folk blinder than the sea
Broke all about his land,
But Alfred up against them bare
And gripped the ground and grasped the air,
Staggered, and strove to stand.

He bent them back with spear and spade,
With desperate dyke and wall,
With foemen leaning on his shield
And roaring on him when he reeled;
And no help came at all.

He broke them with a broken sword
A little towards the sea,
And for one hour of panting peace,
Ringed with a roar that wou...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Lonely God

...stonied will 
Halted in circles, dizzied in the swing 
Of mazy nothingness. -- His mind could bring 
Not to subjection, grip or hold the theme 
Whose wide horizon melted like a dream 
To thinnest edges. Infinite behind 
The piling centuries were trodden blind 
In gulfs chaotic -- so He could not see 
When He was not who always had To Be. 

Not even godly fortitude can stare 
Into Eternity, nor easy bear 
The insolent vacuity of Time: 
It is too much, the mind can never climb ...Read more of this...
by Stephens, James

The Schooner Flight

...e:
where the horizon was one silver haze,
the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close
that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,
it was horrors, but it was beautiful.
We float through a rustling forest of ships
with sails dry like paper, behind the glass
I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,
and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,
right through their tissue, you traced their bones
like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,
the backward-mov...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

Variations on the Word Love

...t's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go....Read more of this...
by Atwood, Margaret

Virgin In A Tree

...and seraphic beauty
Of virgins for virginity's sake.'

Be certain some such pact's
Been struck to keep all glory in the grip
Of ugly spinsters and barren sirs
As you etch on the inner window of your eye
This virgin on her rack:

She, ripe and unplucked, 's
Lain splayed too long in the tortuous boughs: overripe
Now, dour-faced, her fingers
Stiff as twigs, her body woodenly
Askew, she'll ache and wake

Though doomsday bud. Neglect's
Given her lips that lemon-tasting droop:
Unto...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

Wild Grapes

...To loud cries from my brother of "Let go!
Don't you know anything, you girl? Let go!"
But I, with something of the baby grip
Acquired ancestrally in just such trees
When wilder mothers than our wildest now
Hung babies out on branches by the hands
To dry or wash or tan, I don't know which,
(You'll have to ask an evolutionist)-
I held on uncomplainingly for life.
My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.
"What are you doing up there in those grapes?
Don't be afraid. A few o...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert

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