Famous Hitting Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Roxbury Garden

...shine,
Leaving the half-formed grape clusters
A-tremble under their big leaves.
"I will beat you, Minna," cries Stella,
Hitting her hoop smartly with her stick.
"Stella, Stella, we are winning," calls Minna,
As her hoop curves round a bed of clove-pinks.
A humming-bird whizzes past Stella's ear,
And two or three yellow-and-black butterflies
Flutter, startled, out of a pillar rose.
Round and round race the little girls
After their great white hoops.
Suddenly Minna stops.
Her h...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy


A Terre

...d,
And patriotic. Buffers catch from boys
At least the jokes hurled at them. I suppose
Little I'd ever teach a son, but hitting,
Shooting, war, hunting, all the arts of hurting.
Well, that's what I learnt, -- that, and making money.
Your fifty years ahead seem none too many?
Tell me how long I've got? God! For one year
To help myself to nothing more than air!
One Spring! Is one too good to spare, too long?
Spring wind would work its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs as qui...Read more of this...
by Owen, Wilfred

Any Man Speaks

...I, after difficult entry through my mother's blood
And stumbling childhood (hitting my head against the world);
I, intricate, easily unshipped, untracked, unaligned;
Cut off in my communications; stammering; speaking
A dialect shared by you, but not you and you;
I, strangely undeft, bereft; I searching always
For my lost rib (clothed in laughter yet understanding)
To come round the corner of Wardour Street into the Square
Or to sign...Read more of this...
by Tessimond, A S J

Astrophel and Stella

...some thrise-sad tragedie.
I am not I: pitie the tale of me. 
XLVI 

I curst thee oft, I pitie now thy case,
Blind-hitting Boy, since she that thee and me
Rules with a becke, so tyranniseth thee,
That thou must want or food or dwelling-place,
For she protests to banish thee her face.
Her face! O Loue, a roge thou then shouldst be,
If Loue learne not alone to loue and see,
Without desire to feed of further grace.
Alas, poor wag, that now a scholler art
To such a s...Read more of this...
by Sidney, Sir Philip

Carry On

..., little soldier, and chortle:

Carry on! Carry on!
There isn't much punch in your blow.
You're glaring and staring and hitting out blind;
You're muddy and bloody, but never you mind.
Carry on! Carry on!
You haven't the ghost of a show.
It's looking like death, but while you've a breath,
Carry on, my son! Carry on!

And so in the strife of the battle of life
 It's easy to fight when you're winning;
It's easy to slave, and starve and be brave,
 When the dawn of success is begi...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William


Edward Hirsch

...lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the gam...Read more of this...
by Hirsch, Edward

Fast Break

...lanes in tandem, moving
together as brothers passing the ball

between them without a dribble, without
a single bounce hitting the hardwood

until the guard finally lunges out
and commits to the wrong man

while the power-forward explodes past them
in a fury, taking the ball into the air

by himself now and laying it gently
against the glass for a lay-up,

but losing his balance in the process,
inexplicably falling, hitting the floor

with a wild, headlong motion
for the gam...Read more of this...
by Hirsch, Edward

Letter Home

...I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the wash pots
and irons of the laundresses call to me.

I thought not to do the work I once did, back bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift--even those half days
at picking time, listening t...Read more of this...
by Trethewey, Natasha

Little Sleeps-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight

...of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-g?t, ci-g?t, ci-g?t,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a caf¨¦ at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will...Read more of this...
by Kinnell, Galway

The Channel Swimmer

...
On and on through the darkness he paddled
Till he knew he were very near in 
By the way he kept bumping the bottom
And hitting the stones with his chin.

Was it Grisniz he'd reached?... No, it wasn't, 
The treacherous tide in its track 
Had carried him half-way to Blackpool 
And he had to walk all the way back....Read more of this...
by Edgar, Marriott

The Daughter Goes To Camp

...in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to rea...Read more of this...
by Olds, Sharon

The Princess (part 2)

...y; they could rule a house; 
Men hated learned women: but we three 
Sat muffled like the Fates; and often came 
Melissa hitting all we saw with shafts 
Of gentle satire, kin to charity, 
That harmed not: then day droopt; the chapel bells 
Called us: we left the walks; we mixt with those 
Six hundred maidens clad in purest white, 
Before two streams of light from wall to wall, 
While the great organ almost burst his pipes, 
Groaning for power, and rolling through the court 
A ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Quality Of Sprawl

...our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would thatit were more so. 

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It m...Read more of this...
by Murray, Les

The Shooting Of Dan McGrew

...A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grav...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Wanderlust

...the Wanderlust again.

Soldier, sailor, in what a plight I've been!
Tinker, tailor, oh what a sight I've seen!
And I'm hitting the trail in the morning, boys,
And you won't see my heels for dust;
For it's "all day" with you
When you answer the cue
 Of the Wan-der-lust.

The Wanderlust has got me . . . by the belly-aching fire,
By the fever and the freezing and the pain;
By the darkness that just drowns you, by the wail of home desire,
I've tried to break the spell of it -- i...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

Thinking Ahead To Possible Options And A Worst-Case Scenario

...I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel
in the center of the road and that's when
the deer came charging out of the forest
and forced me to hit the brakes for all I
was worth and I careened back to the other
side of the road just as a skunk came toddling
out of Mrs. Bancroft's front yard and I swung
back perhaps just grazing it a bit. I glanced
quickly in the rearview mirror and...Read more of this...
by Taylor, Edward

Thinking Ahead To Possible Options And A Worst-Case Scenario

...I swerved to avoid hitting a squirrel
in the center of the road and that's when
the deer came charging out of the forest
and forced me to hit the brakes for all I
was worth and I careened back to the other
side of the road just as a skunk came toddling
out of Mrs. Bancroft's front yard and I swung
back perhaps just grazing it a bit. I glanced
quickly in the rearview mirror and...Read more of this...
by Tate, James

Wild With All Regrets

...d we'd hate to grow dead old. But now,
Not to live old seems awful: not to renew
My boyhood with my boys, and teach 'em hitting,
Shooting and hunting, -- all the arts of hurting!
-- Well, that's what I learnt. That, and making money.
Your fifty years in store seem none too many;
But I've five minutes. God! For just two years
To help myself to this good air of yours!
One Spring! Is one too hard to spare? Too long?
Spring air would find its own way to my lung,
And grow me legs ...Read more of this...
by Owen, Wilfred

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