Famous Linking Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Boy in Church

...morial brasses. 

It’s pleasant here for dreams and thinking,
Lolling and letting reason nod, 
With ugly serious people linking 
Sad prayers to a forgiving God…. 
But a dumb blast sets the trees swaying 
With furious zeal like madmen praying....Read more of this...
by Graves, Robert


Chattanooga

...ntense,
Alone such calmness wears.

The summit-cannon plunge their flame
Sheer down the primal wall,
But up and up each linking troop
In stretching festoons crawl - 
Nor fire a shot. Such men appal
The foe, though brave. He, from the brink,
Looks far along the breadth of slope,
And sees two miles of dark dots creep,
And knows they mean the cope.

He sees them creep. Yet here and there
Half hid 'mid leafless groves they go;
As men who ply through traceries high
Of turreted mar...Read more of this...
by Melville, Herman

Cruisers

...of the world.

The bitter salt spindrift, the sun-glare likewise,
The moon-track a-tremble, bewilders our eyes,
Where, linking and lifting, our sisters we hail
'Twixt wrench of cross-surges or plunge of head-gale.

As maidens awaiting the bride to come forth
Make play with light jestings and wit of no worth,
So, widdershins circling the bride-bed of death,
Each fleereth her neighbour and signeth and saith: --

"What see ye? Their signals, or levin afar?
"What hear ye? God's ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

Dram-Shop Ditty

...eeting shall affect in kind
Earth's Cosmic Story.

The fathomless, eternal Past,
The Future infinitely vast,
We two are linking;
So let us fitly celebrate
This moment of immortal Fate
In drinking, drinking.

But though I toss a hearty pot,
Kind stranger, do not think I'm not
For Truth a groper . . .
Another? Thanks, I won't refuse,
I am a tippler, if you choose,
But not a toper.

A nice distinction! . . . Well, life's good;
Just give me beer, rich greasy food,
And let me fidd...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

Impossible To Tell

...im,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher's heart: live, rigid, fluid

Like passages etched in a microscopic cicuit.
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture

Inside his brain, one so much making another
It was impossible to tell them all:
In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.

Imagine a court of one: the queen...Read more of this...
by Pinsky, Robert


Poem Reaching For Something

...g in the warehouse of language, after they have slipped
from our lips, like skiers on ice slopes, strung together words linking
themselves through smoke, where do the symbols they carry
stop everything, put down roots, cleanse themselves of everything
but clarity —— though here eye might be asking a little too much of any
poet's head, full as it were with double-entendres...Read more of this...
by Troupe, Quincy

Song of the Moon

...gubrious in unchanging monotone. 
Upon the clothes behind the tenement,
That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,
Linking each flat to each indifferent,
Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

There is no magic from your presence here,
Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing robe,
Whose silver seems antique and so severe
Against the glow of one electric globe.

Go spill your beauty on the laughing faces
Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues,
Waiting on ti...Read more of this...
by McKay, Claude

Stravinskys Three Pieces

...
And the nasal pipes squeal with their pigs' voices,
Little pigs' voices
Weaving among the dancers,
A fine white thread
Linking up the dancers.
Bang! Bump! Tong!
Petticoats,
Stockings,
Sabots,
Delirium flapping its thigh-bones;
Red, blue, yellow,
Drunkenness steaming in colours;
Red, yellow, blue,
Colours and flesh weaving together,
In and out, with the dance,
Coarse stuffs and hot flesh weaving together.
Pigs' cries white and tenuous,
White and painful,
White and --
Bump!
To...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Artists

...are yet behind--
He sees the Graces sporting there,
With feeling silent and refined.
Gentle as beauty's lines together linking,
As the appearances that round him play,
In tender outline in each other sinking,
The soft breath of his life thus fleets away.
His spirit melts in the harmonious sea,
That, rich in rapture, round his senses flows,
And the dissolving thought all silently
To omnipresent Cytherea grows.
Joining in lofty union with the Fates,
On Graces and on Muses calm...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

The Garden of Janus

...drawn
By singing winds
While we wove garlands of the flowers of our minds.

IV

All day my lover deigned to murder me,
Linking his kisses in a chain
About my neck; demon-embroidery!
Bruises like far-ff mountains stain
The valley of my body of ivory!
Then last came sleep.
I wake, and he is gone; what should I do but weep?

V

Nay, for I wept enough --- more sacred tears! ---
When first he pinned me, gripped
My flesh, and as a stallion that rears,
Sprang, hero-thewed and satyr...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

The Raven

...I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
    Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
    Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
            Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

    This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
    This and more I sat divining, with my head...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan

The Sycamores

...et his spirit walks 
Tis beneath the trees he planted 
And when Bob-o-Lincoln talks. 

Green memorials of the gleeman! 
Linking still the river-shores, 
With their shadows cast by sunset 
Stand Hugh Tallant's sycamores! 

When the Father of his Country 
Through the north-land riding came 
And the roofs were starred with banners, 
And the steeples rang acclaim,--- 

When each war-scarred Continental 
Leaving smithy, mill,.and farm, 
Waved his rusted sword in welcome, 
And shot...Read more of this...
by Whittier, John Greenleaf

Whales Weep Not!

...clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale's
 fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale's strong phallus, linking the
 wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
 forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
 sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

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