Famous Groping Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Hyla Brook

by Robert Frost
 By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)--
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against...Read more of this...

To Certain Critics

by Countee Cullen
 Then call me traitor if you must, 
Shout reason and default! 
Say I betray a sacred trust 
Aching beyond this vault. 
I'll bear your censure as your praise, 
For never shall the clan 
Confine my singing to its ways 
Beyond the ways of man. 

No racial option narrows grief, 
Pain is not patriot, 
And sorrow plaits her dismal leaf...Read more of this...

By Rugged Ways

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
By rugged ways and thro' the night
We struggle blindly toward the light;
And groping, stumbling, ever pray
For sight of long delaying day.
The cruel thorns beside the road
Stretch eager points our steps to goad,
And from the thickets all about
Detaining hands reach threatening out.
"Deliver us, oh, Lord," we cry,
Our hands uplifted to the sky.
No answer save the thunder's peal,
And onward, onward, still we...Read more of this...

I

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Love is the light of the world, my dear,
Heigho, but the world is gloomy;
The light has failed and the lamp down hurled,
Leaves only darkness to me.
Love is the light of the world, my dear,
Ah me, but the world is dreary;
The night is down, and my curtain furled
But I cannot sleep, though weary.
Love is the light of the world, my dear,
Alas...Read more of this...

Dream Song 99: Temples

by John Berryman
 He does not live here but it is the god.
A priest tools in a top his motorbike.
You do not enter.
Us the landscape circles hard abroad,
sunned, stone. Like calls, too low, to like.

One submachine-gun cleared the Durga Temple.

It is very dark here in this groping forth

 Gulp rhubarb for a guilty heart,
rhubarb for a free, if the world's sway
waives customs...Read more of this...

Rupert Brooke - Sonnet (Suggested By Some Of The Proceedings Of The Society For Psychical Research )

by Rupert Brooke
 Not with vain tears, when we're beyond the sun,
We'll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread
Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead
Plaintive for Earth; but rather turn and run
Down some close-covered by-way of the air,
Some low sweet alley between wind and wind,
Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find
Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there

Spend in pure converse our eternal...Read more of this...

Sea Song

by Katherine Mansfield
 I will think no more of the sea! Of the big green waves And the hollowed
shore, Of the brown rock caves No more, no more Of the swell and the weed
And the bubbling foam. Memory dwells in my far away home, She has nothing
to do with me. She is old and bent With a pack On her back. Her...Read more of this...

The Death-Bed

by Siegfried Sassoon
 He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb...Read more of this...

J--K. Huysmans

by Amy Lowell
 A flickering glimmer through a window-pane,
A dim red glare through mud bespattered glass,
Cleaving a path between blown walls of sleet
Across uneven pavements sunk in slime
To scatter and then quench itself in mist.
And struggling, slipping, often rudely hurled
Against the jutting angle of a wall,
And cursed, and reeled against, and flung aside
By drunken brawlers as they shuffled past,
A man was groping...Read more of this...

To His Dead Body

by Siegfried Sassoon
 When roaring gloom surged inward and you cried, 
Groping for friendly hands, and clutched, and died, 
Like racing smoke, swift from your lolling head 
phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled. 

Yet, though my dreams that throng the darkened stair
Can bring me no report of how you fare, 
Safe quit of wars, I speed you on your way...Read more of this...

Sunshine

by Robert William Service
 I

Flat as a drum-head stretch the haggard snows;
The mighty skies are palisades of light;
The stars are blurred; the silence grows and grows;
Vaster and vaster vaults the icy night.
Here in my sleeping-bag I cower and pray:
"Silence and night, have pity! stoop and slay."

I have not slept for many, many days.
I close my eyes with weariness -- that's all.
I still have...Read more of this...

White Nassau

by Bliss Carman
 There is fog upon the river, there is mirk upon the town;
You can hear the groping ferries as they hoot each other down;
From the Battery to Harlem there's seven miles of slush,
Through looming granite canyons of glitter, noise, and rush.
Are you sick of phones and tickers and crazing cable gongs,
Of the theatres, the hansoms, and the breathless Broadway throngs,
Of...Read more of this...

Birth-Day Ode 03

by Robert Southey
 And wouldst thou seek the low abode
Where PEACE delights to dwell?
Pause Traveller on thy way of life!
With many a snare and peril rife
Is that long labyrinth of road:
Dark is the vale of years before
Pause Traveller on thy way!
Nor dare the dangerous path explore
Till old EXPERIENCE comes to lend his leading ray.

Not he who comes with lanthorn light
Shall guide thy...Read more of this...

Death

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Storm and strife and stress,
Lost in a wilderness,
Groping to find a way,
Forth to the haunts of day
Sudden a vista peeps,
Out of the tangled deeps,
Only a point—the ray
But at the end is day.
Dark is the dawn and chill,
Daylight is on the hill,
Night is the flitting breath,
Day rides the hills of death.
...Read more of this...

The Lacking Sense Scene.--A sad-coloured landscape Waddon Vale

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

"O Time, whence comes the Mother's moody look amid her labours, 
 As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves? 
 Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors, 
With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face, 
 As of angel fallen from grace?" 

II 

- "Her look is but her...Read more of this...

The End of the Day

by Katharine Tynan
 The night darkens fast & the shadows darken,
Clouds & the rain gather about mine house,
Only the wood-dove moans, hearken, O hearken!
The moan of the wood-dove in the rain-wet boughs. 

Loneliness & the night! The night is lonely
Star-covered the night takes to a tender breast
Wrapping them in her veil these dark hours only
The weary, the bereaved, the dispossessed. 

When will...Read more of this...

London Voluntaries IV: Out of the Poisonous East

by William Ernest Henley
 Out of the poisonous East,
Over a continent of blight,
Like a maleficent Influence released
From the most squalid cellerage of hell,
The Wind-Fiend, the abominable--
The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light--
Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,
Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;
And in a cloud unclean
Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate run...Read more of this...

Haunted

by Siegfried Sassoon
EVENING was in the wood, louring with storm. 
A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool 
And baked the channels; birds had done with song. 
Thirst was a dream of fountains in the moon, 
Or willow-music blown across the water 5 
Leisurely sliding on by weir and mill. 

Uneasy was the man who wandered, brooding, 
His face a little...Read more of this...

The Lamp of Life

by Amy Lowell
 Always we are following a light,
Always the light recedes; with groping hands
We stretch toward this glory, while the lands
We journey through are hidden from our sight
Dim and mysterious, folded deep in night,
We care not, all our utmost need demands
Is but the light, the light! So still it stands
Surely our own if we exert our might.
Fool! Never can'st thou grasp...Read more of this...

My Own Heart Let Me Have More Have Pity On; Let

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
 I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst 's all-in-all in all a world of...Read more of this...

The Lost Pyx: A Mediaeval Legend

by Thomas Hardy
 Some say the spot is banned; that the pillar Cross-and-Hand 
 Attests to a deed of hell; 
But of else than of bale is the mystic tale 
 That ancient Vale-folk tell. 

Ere Cernel's Abbey ceased hereabout there dwelt a priest, 
 (In later life sub-prior 
Of the brotherhood there, whose bones are now bare 
 In the field...Read more of this...

The Strayed Reveller

by Matthew Arnold
 1 Faster, faster, 
2 O Circe, Goddess,
3 Let the wild, thronging train 
4 The bright procession 
5 Of eddying forms, 
6 Sweep through my soul! 

7 Thou standest, smiling
8 Down on me! thy right arm,
9 Lean'd up against the column there,
10 Props thy soft cheek;
11 Thy left holds, hanging loosely,
12 The deep cup, ivy-cinctured,
13 I held but now. 

14...Read more of this...

Ash-Boughs

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 a.

Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world, 
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep 
Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky. 
Say it is ashboughs: whether on a December day and furled 
Fast ?r they in clammyish lashtender combs creep
Apart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high....Read more of this...

The Rear-Guard

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Groping along the tunnel, step by step, 
He winked his prying torch with patching glare 
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.

Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, 
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; 
And he, exploring fifty feet below 
The rosy gloom of battle overhead. 
Tripping, he grapped the wall; saw someone lie...Read more of this...

The Valley of the Shadow

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 There were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow, 
There were faces unregarded, there were faces to forget; 
There were fires of grief and fear that are a few forgotten ashes, 
There were sparks of recognition that are not forgotten yet. 
For at first, with an amazed and overwhelming indignation
At a measureless malfeasance that obscurely willed it...Read more of this...

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