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Famous Hulls Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Masefield, John
...ide. 

And first I'll hear the sea-wind, the mewing of the gulls, 
The clucking, sucking of the sea about the rusty hulls, 
The songs at the capstan at the hooker warping out, 
And then the heart of me'll know I'm there or thereabout. 

Oh I am sick of brick and stone, the heart of me is sick, 
For windy green, unquiet sea, the realm of Moby Dick; 
And I'll be going, going, from the roaring of the wheels, 
For a wind's in the heart of me, a fire's in my heels....Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...s at anchor, 
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars,
The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants, 
The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilot-houses, 
The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels, 
The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sun-set, 
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolicsome crests and
 glistening,
The stretc...Read more of this...

by Berryman, John
...Sixteen below. Our care like stranded hulls
litter all day our little Avenues.
It was 28 below.
No one goes anywhere. Fabulous calls
to duty clank. Icy dungeons, though, 
have much to mention to you.

At Harvard & Yale must Pussy-cat be heard
in the dead of winter when we must be sad
and feel by the weather had.
Chrysanthemums crest, far way, in the Emperor's garden
and, ...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...barrels,
And the black sticks that fence the weirs,

If I could see the weedy mussels
Crusting the wrecked and rotting hulls,
Hear once again the hungry crying
Overhead, of the wheeling gulls,

Feel once again the shanty straining
Under the turning of the tide,
Fear once again the rising freshet,
Dread the bell in the fog outside,—

I should be happy,—that was happy
All day long on the coast of Maine!
I have a need to hold and handle
Shells and anchors and ships again!

I sh...Read more of this...

by Hughes, Langston
...ax into many hands
That hewed and shaped the rooftops of America.
Splash into the rivers and the seas went the boat-hulls
That moved and transported America.
Crack went the whips that drove the horses
Across the plains of America.
Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus tog...Read more of this...



by Hecht, Anthony
...For William and Emily Maxwell

At this time of day
One could hear the caulking irons sound
Against the hulls in the dockyard.
Tar smoke rose between trees
And large oily patches floated on the water,
Undulating unevenly
In the purple sunlight
Like the surfaces of Florentine bronze.

At this time of day
Sounds carried clearly
Through hot silences of fading daylight.
The weedy fields lay drowned
In odors of creosote and salt.
Richer than double-...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...eek of Knox County
I know how the fingers of late October
Loosen the hazel nuts.
I know the brown eyes of half-open hulls.
I know boys named Lindquist, Swanson, Hildebrand.
I remember their cries when the nuts were ripe.
And some are in machine shops; some are in the navy;
And some are not on payrolls anywhere.
Their mothers are through waiting for them to come home....Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...henna-color
Bat's wing of sail.

   Now, returned home
After so many thousands of miles of road and ocean, all the hulls sailed in,
 the houses visited,
I remember that slender skiff with dark henna sail
Bearing off across the stormy sunset to the distant island
Most clearly; and have rather forgotten the dragging whirlpools of London,
 The screaming haste of New York....Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...e, 
they probably will be. 
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, 
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, 
slime-hung and barnacled. 

Think of the long trip home. 
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? 
Where should we be today? 
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play 
in this strangest of theatres? 
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life 
in our bodies, we are determined to rush 
to see...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...t, there in the beams of the moon, they surrender to us. 

36
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight; 
Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness; 
Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking—preparations to pass to the one we
 have conquer’d;
The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance
 white as a sheet; 
Near by, the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin; 
The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and ca...Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...se. 
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise. 
She cannot recall how long ago she chose 
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes, 

Love, which still pours into its ancient mould 
The lashing seed that grows to a man again, 
From whom by the same processes unfold 
Unending generations of living men. 

She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains. 
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in 
His dreams: his science is tethered to their br...Read more of this...

by Aeschylus,
...s
Were struck, they shattered all our naval host.
The Grecian vessels not unskillfully
Were smiting round about; the hulls of ships
Were overset; the sea was hid from sight,
Covered with wreckage and the death of men;
The reefs and headlands were with corpses filled,
And in disordered flight each ship was rowed,
As many as were of the Persian host.
But they, like tunnies or some shoal of fish,
With broken oars and fragments of the wrecks
Struck us and clove us; and...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...orse
 That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
 The hate that swings the whole;
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
 At gaze and gone again --
The Brides of Death that wait the groom --
 The Choosers of the Slain!

Offshore where sea and skyline blend
 In rain, the daylight dies;
The sullen, shouldering sweels attend
 Night and our sacrifice.
Adown the stricken capes no flare --
 No mark on spit or bar, --
Birdled and desperate we da...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...treasure as yet unfound;
So the fearless ships fared forth to the search,
in joy that the globe was round. 

Their hulls were heightened, their sails spread out,
they grew with the growth of their quest; 
They opened the secret doors of the East,
and the golden gates of the West; 
And many a city of high renown
was proud of a ship on its crest. 

The fleets of England and Holland and France
were at strife with each other and Spain; 
And battle and storm sent a myriad...Read more of this...

by Carman, Bliss
...chain runs out,--
I often hear them still.

I can see them still, the sun on their gear,
The shining streak as the hulls careen,
And the flag at the peak unfurling,--clear
As a picture on a screen.

The fog still hangs on the long tide-rips,
The gulls go wavering to and fro,
But where are all the beautiful ships
I knew so long ago?...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and hi...Read more of this...

by MacLeish, Archibald
...nd over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on......Read more of this...

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