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Famous Hooked Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
....


RecitativoThen niest outspak a raucle carlin,
Wha kent fu’ weel to cleek the sterlin;
For mony a pursie she had hooked,
An’ had in mony a well been douked;
Her love had been a Highland laddie,
But weary fa’ the waefu’ woodie!
Wi’ sighs an’ sobs she thus began
To wail her braw John Highlandman.


AirTune—“O, an ye were dead, Guidman.”A Highland lad my love was born,
The Lalland laws he held in scorn;
But he still was faithfu’ to his clan,
My gallant, braw John ...Read more of this...



by Lehman, David
...always two or three, hated by 
 the others, who give life to one ugly stereotype or another:
The grasping Jew with the hooked nose or the Ivy League Bolshevik
 who thinks he is the agent of world history.
But most of them are neither ostentatiously pious nor
 excessively avaricious.
How I envy them! They believe.
How I envy them their annual family reunion on Passover,
 anniversary of the Exodus, when all the uncles and aunts and
 cousins get together.
They w...Read more of this...

by Clampitt, Amy
...changed)

a silence opens

 *

the larval feeder
naked hairy ravenous
inventing from within
itself its own
raw stuffs'
hooked silk-hung
relinquishment

behind the mask
the milkfat shivering
sinew isinglass
uncrumpling transient
greed to reinvest

 *

names have been
given (revelation
kif nirvana
syncope) for
whatever gift
unasked
gives birth to

torrents
fixities
reincarnations of
the angels
Joseph Smith
enduring
martyrdom

a cavernous
compunction driving
founder-charlatans
...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...first friend was the sea.Now,is my last. 
I stop talking now.I work,then I read, 
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. 
I try to forget what happiness was, 
and when that don't work,I study the stars. 
Sometimes is just me,and the soft-scissored foam 
as the deck turn white and the moon open 
a cloud like a door,and the light over me 
is a road in white moonlight taking me home. 
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...is broken-face gargoyles.
All I can give you now is a double gorilla head with two fish mouths and four eagle eyes hooked on a street wall, spouting water and looking two ways to the ends of the street for the new people, the young strangers, coming, coming, always coming.

It is early.
I shall yet be footloose....Read more of this...



by Jeffers, Robinson
...The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion—
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...There was an unwanted child.
Aborted by three modern methods
she hung on to the womb,
hooked onto I
building her house into it
and it was to no avail,
to black her out.

At her birth
she did not cry,
spanked indeed,
but did not yell--
instead snow fell out of her mouth.

As she grew, year by year,
her hair turned like a rose in a vase,
and bled down her face.
Rocks were placed on her to keep
the growing silent,
and though they bru...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
....

 I've gone fishing now for seven years

 and I haven't caught a single trout.

 I've lost every trout I ever hooked.

 They either jump off

 or twist off.

 or squirm off

 or break my leader

 or flop off

 or **** off.

 I have never even gotten my hands on a trout.

 For all its frustration,

 I believe it was an interesting experiment

 in total loss

 but next year somebody else

 will have to go trout fishing.

 Somebody else will have to...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...th in leather breeches and a shirt Of finest broidered 
lawn lay out upon
An overhanging bole and deftly swayed A 
well-hooked fish which shone
In the pale lemon sunshine like a spurt
Of silver, bowed and damascened, and girt
With crimson spots and moons which waned and 
played.

VIII
The fish hung circled for a moment, ringed And 
bright; then flung itself out, a thin blade
Of spotted lightning, and its tail was winged With chipped 
and sparkled sunshine. And the sha...Read more of this...

by Emanuel, James A
....
A nice mess, we called them,
and ate with our fingers, laughing.

Once, dreaming of fish in far-off waters,
I hooked a two-foot carp in Michigan,
on nylon line so fine
a fellow-fisher shook his head:
"He'll break it, sure; he'll roll on it and get away."
A quarter-hour it took to bring him in;
back-and-forth toward my net,
syllable by syllable I let him have his way
till he lay flopping on the grass—
beside no other, himself enough in size:
he fed the three of u...Read more of this...

by Olds, Sharon
...e ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...nyway? I'd answer that
with speculations based on newspaper accounts if I were
Donald E. Westlake, whose novels I'm hooked on, but
this first cigarette after twenty-four hours
of abstinence tastes so good it makes me want
to include it in my catalogue of pleasures
designed to hide the ugliness or sweep it away
the way the violent overflow of rain over cliffs
cleans the sewers and drains of Ithaca
whose waterfalls head my list, followed by
crudites of carrots and beets, ro...Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...er gazed about; 
The cock his lusty greeting said, 
And forth his speckled harem led; 
The oxen lashed their tails, and hooked, 
And mild reproach of hunger looked; 
The hornëd patriarch of the sheep, 
Like Egypt's Amun roused from sleep, 
Shook his sage head with gesture mute, 
And emphasized with stamp of foot. 

All day the gusty north-wind bore 
The loosening drift its breath before; 
Low circling round its southern zone, 
The sun through dazzling snow-mist shone....Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...me leper in his lair.

And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman's snare
Strangled into a scream.

And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.


IV


There is no chapel on the day
On which they han...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...ers in his heart and wings.
Then, while the mistress gazed above for game,
Sudden he flew into her painted face
And hooked his horn-claws in her lily throat
And drove his beak into her lips and eyes
In fierce and hawkish kissing that did scar
And mar the lady's beauty evermore.
-- And once while Chivalry stood tall and lithe
And flashed his sword above the stricken eyes
Of all the simple peasant-folk of France:
While Thought was keen and hot and quick,
And did not pla...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...pursuer; at mine ear 
Bubbled the nightingale and heeded not, 
And secret laughter tickled all my soul. 
At last I hooked my ankle in a vine, 
That claspt the feet of a Mnemosyne, 
And falling on my face was caught and known. 

They haled us to the Princess where she sat 
High in the hall: above her drooped a lamp, 
And made the single jewel on her brow 
Burn like the mystic fire on a mast-head, 
Prophet of storm: a handmaid on each side 
Bowed toward her, combing ou...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...irst friend was the sea. Now, is my last.
I stop talking now. I work, then I read,
cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam
as the deck turn white and the moon open
a cloud like a door, and the light over me
is a road in white moonlight taking me home.
Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea....Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...discover,  And then the wind! in faith, it was  A wind full ten times over.  Hooked around, I thought I saw  A jutting crag, and off I ran,  Head-foremost, through the driving rain,  The shelter of the crag to gain,  And, as I am a man,  Instead of jutting crag, I found  A woman seated on the ground. XIX.   I did not ...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...andered ever hand in hand;
Or sat in dreams on the pale strand,
Each forehead like an obscure star
Bent down above each hooked knee,
And sang, and with a dreamy gaze
Watched where the sun in a saffron blaze
Was slumbering half in the sea-ways;
And, as they sang, the painted birds
Kept time with their bright wings and feet;
Like drops of honey came their words,
But fainter than a young lamb's bleat.

'An old man stirs the fire to a blaze,
In the house of a child, of a frie...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ans.
He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.
I saw the world in it--small, mean and black,
Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.
A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn't ready. The white clouds rearing
Aside were dragging me in four directions.
I wasn't ready.
I had no reverence.
I thought I could deny the consequence--
But it was too late for that. It was too late, and the face
Went on shaping itself ...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs