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Famous Hunched Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...s farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing --
That just now dangled still --

An awe came on the Trinket!
The Figures hunched, with pain --
Then quivered out of Decimals --
Into Degreeless Noon --

It will not stir for Doctors --
This Pendulum of snow --
This Shopman importunes it --
While cool -- concernless No --

Nods from the Gilded pointers --
Nods from the Seconds slim --
Decades of Arrogance between
The Dial life --
And Him --...Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily



.... 
At night the self only desires 
to steep its clangour in softness, 
in woman. 

And thus, 
enormous, 
I stood hunched by the window, 
and my brow melted the glass. 
What will it be: love or no-love? 
And what kind of love: 
big or minute? 
How could a body like this have a big love? 
It should be teeny-weeny, 
humble, little love; 
a love that shies at the hooting of cars, 
that adores the bells of horse-trams. 

Again and again 
nuzzling against the rai...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet,
A standing mercy.
The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, d...Read more of this...
by Jarrell, Randall
...Desks are straining on all fours, flanks

Heaving to hurl the hunched riders

Down crack and cranny, buck

Finger-snapping lids, consume

Scrap and scribble between tongue and teeth.



The blackboard is cleaning itself behind me,

Making my neck prick as it scatters dust

Like seed, empties its clogged pores of clich?,

Anoints its carved channels and cavities

With infinite black ooze and sap.



And I don’t trust th...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...the puppet queen,
held at a ravishing angle
over her puppet lover slain,

for her lush vowels
mouthed by the plain man
hunched behind the stage....Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark



...ed outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier 
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, be...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen
...Blue, where he hauls his kind. I would have it all

My way: at the top of that tree I place

The New World's last eagle
Hunched in mangy feathers giving

Up on the theory of flight.
Dear God of the wildness of poetry, let them mate
To the death in the rotten branches,
Let the tree sway and burst into flame

And mingle them, crackling with feathers,

In crownfire. Let something come
Of it something gigantic legendary

Rise beyond reason over hills
Of ice SCREAMING that it cann...Read more of this...
by Dickey, James
...ll knightly without scorn; for in those days 
No knight of Arthur's noblest dealt in scorn; 
But, if a man were halt or hunched, in him 
By those whom God had made full-limbed and tall, 
Scorn was allowed as part of his defect, 
And he was answered softly by the King 
And all his Table. So Sir Lancelot holp 
To raise the Prince, who rising twice or thrice 
Full sharply smote his knees, and smiled, and went: 
But, ever after, the small violence done 
Rankled in him and ruffled...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...retched across the black mantle.

So Lawrence-like and yet not, grandad

A strict Methodist who read only a vast Bible

Hunched in his fireside chair insisting

On chapel three times on Sundays.

Only in retirement did joy and wisdom

Enter him, abandoning chapel he took

To the Friends or Quakers as they called them then

And somehow at seventy the inner light

Consumed him.

Gruff but kind was my impression:

He would take me for walks

Along abandoned railways to the shutd...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...n do the clouds like silver flags
Stream out above the tattered crags,
And black and silver all the coast
Marshalls its hunched and rocky host,
And headlands striding sombrely
Buttress the land against the sea,
-- The darkened land, the brightening wave --
And moonlight slants through Merlin's cave....Read more of this...
by Sackville-West, Vita
...I sit here on the 2nd floor
hunched over in yellow
pajamas
still pretending to be
a writer.
some damned gall,
at 71,
my brain cells eaten
away by
life.
rows of books
behind me,
I scratch my thinning
hair
and search for the
word. 
for decades now
I have infuriated the
ladies,
the critics,
the university
suck-toads. 
they all will soon have
their time to
celebrate. 
"terribly overrated.....Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan
...small pity upon his horse had he, 
Or on himself, or any, and when he met 
A cripple, one that held a hand for alms-- 
Hunched as he was, and like an old dwarf-elm 
That turns its back upon the salt blast, the boy 
Paused not, but overrode him, shouting, `False, 
And false with Gawain!' and so left him bruised 
And battered, and fled on, and hill and wood 
Went ever streaming by him till the gloom, 
That follows on the turning of the world, 
Darkened the common path: he twit...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...h.' 

'Sunlight's a thing that needs a window 
Before it enter a dark room. 
Windows don't happen.' 
So two old poets, 
Hunched at their beer in the low haze 
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran 
Noisily by them, glib with prose....Read more of this...
by Thomas, R S
...apers against a smoke moon?
These chimneys shaking on the lumber shanties
When the coal boats plow by on the river—
The hunched shoulders of the grain elevators—
The flame sprockets of the sheet steel mills
And the men in the rolling mills with their shirts off
Playing their flesh arms against the twisting wrists of steel:
 what brothers these
 in the dark
 of a thousand years?. . .
A headlight searches a snowstorm.
A funnel of white light shoots from over the pilot of the Pi...Read more of this...
by Sandburg, Carl
...From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose....Read more of this...
by Jarrell, Randall
...es; higher than that heaped brick 
Man piled to smite the sun. And all around 
Are devils. One can laugh . . . but that hunched shape 
The face one stone, like those Assyrian kings! 
One sees in carvings, watching men flayed red 
Horribly laughable in leaps and writhes; 
That face -- utterly evil, clouded round 
With evil like a smoke -- it turns smiles sour! 
. . . And Nero there, the flabby cheeks astrain 
And sweating agony . . . long agony . . . 
Imperishable, unappeasabl...Read more of this...
by Benet, Stephen Vincent
...a door.
All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor
And tortured thereover, potato peelings, soft-
Eyed kitten, hunched-up, haggard, to-be-hurt.
Their League is allotting largesse to the Lost.
But to put their clean, their pretty money, to put
Their money collected from delicate rose-fingers
Tipped with their hundred flawless rose-nails seems . . . 
They own Spode, Lowestoft, candelabra,
Mantels, and hostess gowns, and sunburst clocks,
Turtle soup, Chippendale, red sa...Read more of this...
by Brooks, Gwendolyn
...s shook me.
So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me 
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed . . ."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day....Read more of this...
by Kunitz, Stanley
...the verandah
when dark cattle rubbed at the corner 
and sometimes dim towering rain stood
for forest, and the dry cave hunched woollen.

Inside the forest was lamplit
along tracks to a starry creek bed
and beyond lay the never-fenced country,
its full billabongs all surrounded

by animals and birds, in loud crustings,
and sometimes kept leaping up amongst them.
And out there, to kindle whenever
dark found it, hung the daylight moon....Read more of this...
by Murray, Les
...couch. Cars slowly fill the windows, and I aim,
making the noise with my mouth, in case it's them,
and when his back is hunched over her I aim
between his shoulder blades, silently,
in case it's him....Read more of this...
by Flynn, Nick

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things