Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Hinge Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Schiller, Friedrich von
...is youth
What harvests are destined for manhood and fame!

Not to be was that manhood!--The death-bell is knelling,
The hinge of the death-vault creaks harsh on the ears--
How dismal, O Death, is the place of thy dwelling!
Not to be was that manhood!--Flow on, bitter tears!
Go, beloved, thy path to the sun,
Rise, world upon world, with the perfect to rest;
Go--quaff the delight which thy spirit has won,
And escape from our grief in the Halls of the Blest.

Again (in that ...Read more of this...



by Brodsky, Joseph
...e propped behind this gauze
cloth with the print of lips under the print of fringe 
mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge....Read more of this...

by Brodsky, Joseph
...ve propped behind this gauze
cloth, with the print of lips under the print of fringe, mumbling "Good night" to a window hinge....Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...fe?

. . . They burn beautifully with a blue flame.

When they cry out it is like the screech of a tiny hinge; 
the cry of a bat. No one hears it . . ....Read more of this...

by Kenyon, Jane
...he patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . . 

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . . 

I am there in the basket of fruit 
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening 
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . 

I am the one whose love
overcomes you,...Read more of this...



by Plath, Sylvia
...for Susan O'Neill Roe

What a thrill ----
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they one?
O m...Read more of this...

by Kunitz, Stanley
...An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was forever over.

Already the iron door of the North
Clangs op...Read more of this...

by Lindley, John
...Wheeling them in,
the yard gate at half-mast 
with its ticking hinge,
the tin bucket with a hairnet of webs,
the privy door ajar,
the path gloved with moss
ploughed by metal 
through a scalped tyre -
in the shadows of the hood,
in the ripped silk
of the rocking, buckled pram,
none of the dead clocks moving.

And carrying them in
to a kitchen table,
a near-lifetime’s Woodies
coating each cough,
he will tickle them aw...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,

and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed....Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...estrain itself no longer;
Who tried before by many a freak, or
Insulting noise, to stop the speaker;
Swung th' un-oil'd hinge of each pew-door,
Their feet kept shuffling on the floor;
Made their disapprobation known
By many a murmur, hum and groan,
That to his speech supplied the place
Of counterpart in thorough bass.
Thus bagpipes, while the tune they breathe,
Still drone and grumble underneath;
And thus the famed Demosthenes
Harangued the rumbling of the seas,
Held fort...Read more of this...

by Trumbull, John
...ts and thieves and Tories,
Whom erst the mid-day sun had awed,
Crept from their lurking holes abroad.


On cautious hinges, slow and stiller,
Wide oped the great M'Fingal's cellar,
Where safe from prying eyes, in cluster,
The Tory Pandemonium muster.
Their chiefs all sitting round descried are,
On kegs of ale and seats of cider;
When first M'Fingal, dimly seen,
Rose solemn from the turnip-bin.
Nor yet his form had wholly lost
Th' original brightness it could boast...Read more of this...

by Riley, James Whitcomb
...t one said,
 "How on earth do you scratch your head ?"
Nine Little Gobblins

And he laughed like the screech of a rusty hinge---
 Laughed and laughed till his face grew black;
And when he clicked, with a final twinge
 Of his stifling laughter, he thumped his back
 With a fist that grew on the end of his tail
 Till the breath came back to his lips so pale.

And the third little Goblin leered round at me---
 And there were no lids on his eyes at all---
And he clucked one ey...Read more of this...

by Wright, James
...a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
 under wa...Read more of this...

by Burnside, John
...resurrection, 

and I'm amazed to see you shuffle off
the woman I've know for years,
tracing the lithe, hard body, the hinge of the jaw, 
the tension where sex might be, that I always assume 
is neuter, when I walk our muffled house
at nightfall, throwing switches, locking doors....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...is a chef-d’oeuvre for the highest, 
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, 
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels, 
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl
 boiling her iron tea-kettle and baking shortcake. 

I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-thread...Read more of this...

by Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...the hunt it is toward evening 
from the left 
sturdy hunters lead in 

their pack the inn-sign 
hanging from 
a broken hinge is a stag a crucifix 

between his antlers the cold 
inn yard 
is deserted but for a huge bonfire 

that flares wind-driven it is tended by 
women who cluster 
about it to the right beyond 

the hill is a pattern of skaters 
Brueghel the painter 
concerned with it all has chosen 

a winter-struck bush for his 
foreground to 
complete the picture....Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...The Missing All -- prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World's
Departure from a Hinge --
Or Sun's extinction, be observed --
'Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity....Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ell-made Lie--

 To a quite unwreckable Lie,
 To a most impeccable Lie!
 To a water-right, fire-proof, angle-iron, sunk-hinge, time-lock,
 steel-faced Lie!
 Not a private handsome Lie, 
 But a pair-and-brougham Lie,
 Not a little-place-at-Tooting, but a country-house-with-shooting
 And a ring-fence-deer-park Lie.

 When a lover hies abroad
 Looking for his love,
 Azrael smiling sheathes his sword,
 Heaven smiles above.
 Earth and sea
 His servants be,
 And to lesser c...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...nnous tyranny, tyrannous loyalty
Tyrannous liberty, all gone down.

(There is never a crack in the ivory tower
Or a hinge to groan in the house of gold
Or a leaf of the rose in the wind to wither
And she grows young as the world grows old.
A Woman clothed with the sun returning
to clothe the sun when the sun is cold.)

Ah, who had guessed that in a moment
Great Liberty that loosed the tribes,
the Republic of the young men's battles
Grew stale and stank of old men'...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...f my finger
Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
That globe itself of hair and bone
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses are timed to charge his heart,
He blew like powder to the light
An...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Hinge poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs