Famous Nailed Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Nailed poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous nailed poems. These examples illustrate what a famous nailed poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...lutions.
In your midst, his precursor,
I am where pain is ¨C everywhere;
on each drop of the tear-flow
I have nailed myself on the cross.
Nothing is left to forgive.
I¡¯ve cauterised the souls where tenderness was bred.
It was harder than taking
a thousand thousand Bastilles!
And when,
the rebellion
his advent announcing,
you step to meet the saviour ¨C
then I
shall root up my soul;
I¡¯ll trample it hard
till it spread
in blood; and I off...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
She was more beautiful than thy first love,
But now lies under boards....Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...ch I know.
I was forced backward.
I was forced forward.
I was passed hand to hand
like a bowl of fruit.
Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help --
this life after death?...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...heard, and, suddenly lifted,
Sounded the wooden latch, and the door swung back on its hinges.
Benedict knew by the hob-nailed shoes it was Basil the blacksmith,
And by her beating heart Evangeline knew who was with him.
"Welcome!" the farmer exclaimed, as their footsteps paused of the threshold.
"Welcome, Basil, my friend! Come, take thy place on the settle
Close by the chimney-side, which is always empty without thee;
Take from the shelf overhead thy pipe and the box of tob...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...matins,
Or, mind you fast next Friday!" Why, for this
What need of art at all? A skull and bones,
Two bits of stick nailed crosswise, or, what's best,
A bell to chime the hour with, does as well.
I painted a Saint Laurence six months since
At Prato, splashed the fresco in fine style:
"How looks my painting, now the scaffold's down?"
I ask a brother: "Hugely," he returns--
"Already not one phiz of your three slaves
Who turn the Deacon off his toasted side,
But's sc...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ocketa.
Once upon a time Ms. Dog was sixty-six.
She had white hair and wrinkles deep as splinters.
her portrait was nailed up like Christ
and she said of it:
That's when I was forty-two,
down in Rockport with a hat on for the sun,
and Barbara drew a line drawing.
We were, at that moment, drinking vodka
and ginger beer and there was a chill in the air,
although it was July, and she gave me her sweater
to bundle up in. The next summer Skeezix tied
strings in that h...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...hen stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis
back on the trellis
for no one's sake except its own.
I know the chart nailed to the wallboards
the icy kettle squatting on the burner.
The hands that hammered in those nails
emptied that kettle one last time
are these two hands
and they have caught the baby leaping
from between trembling legs
and they have worked the vacuum aspirator
and stroked the sweated temples
and steered the boat there through this hot
misblotted sunligh...Read more of this...
by
Rich, Adrienne
...g the ghost of what was gone,
Put out his hand: “Rather, I say, why ask?
If I be not the friend of Lancelot,
May I be nailed alive along the ground
And emmets eat me dead. If I be not
The friend of Lancelot, may I be fried
With other liars in the pans of hell.
What item otherwise of immolation
Your Darkness may invent, be it mine to endure
And yours to gloat on. For the time between,
Consider this thing you see that is my hand.
If once, it has been yours a thousand ti...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...t night,
whom is it searching for
when the mortal heart
looks for me in the chest?
Look at the black rock
where it is nailed down.
A crow digs endlessly
but no longer bleeds....Read more of this...
by
Storni, Alfonsina
...and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would ne...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Ted
...uated zones
of decline:
dead rowhouses,
charred windows'
wet frames
around empty space,
a few chipboard polemics
nailed over the gaps,
speeches too long
and obsessive for anyone
on this train to read,
sealing the hollowed interiors
--some of them grand once,
you can tell by
the fillips of decoration,
stone leaves, the frieze
of sunflowers.
Desolate fields--open spaces,
in a city where you
can hardly turn around!--
seem to center
on little flames,
somethi...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...this he shall live hated, be blasphemed,
Seised on by force, judged, and to death condemned
A shameful and accursed, nailed to the cross
By his own nation; slain for bringing life:
But to the cross he nails thy enemies,
The law that is against thee, and the sins
Of all mankind, with him there crucified,
Never to hurt them more who rightly trust
In this his satisfaction; so he dies,
But soon revives; Death over him no power
Shall long usurp; ere the third dawning li...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...lkshake
and then drove back into the mountains along Clear Creek and
over the summit to Bear Creek
There were signs nailed to the trees all along Bear
Creek, the signs said, "IF YOU FISH IN THIS CREEK,
WE'LL HIT YOU IN THE HEAD." I didn't want to be hit in
the head, so I kept my fishing tackle right there in the car.
We saw a flock of sheep. There's a sound that the baby
makes when she sees furry animals. She also makes that
sound when she sees her mother and me na...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ls about?
Were any branches broken? Had the
weeds Been duly taken out
Under the 'spaliered pears, and were these lying
Nailed snug against the sunny bricks and drying
Their leaves and satisfying all their needs?
VI
She picked a stone up with a little pout, Stones
looked so ill in well-kept flower-borders.
Where should she put it? All the paths about Were
strewn with fair, red gravel by her orders.
No stone could mar their sifted smoothness. So She
hurried to the river. A...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...howers
They plunged to earth, and died transformed to sugared food.
29
Against the high, encircling walls were grapes,
Nailed close to feel the baking of the sun
From glowing bricks. Their microscopic shapes
Half hidden by serrated leaves. And one
Old cherry tossed its branches near the door.
Bordered along the wall, in beds between,
Flickering, streaming, nodding in the air,
The pride of all the garden, there were more
Tulips than Max had ever dreamed or seen.
They jostled,...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...
Flutings, and twinings, and long slow swirls,
Bits of deal shaved away to thin spiral curls.
Tap! Tap! A cornucopia is nailed into place.
Rap-a-tap! They are putting up a railing filigreed like
Irish lace.
The Three Town's people never saw such grace.
And the paint on it! The richest gold leaf!
Why, the glitter when the sun is shining passes belief.
And that row of glass windows tipped toward the sky
Are rubies and carbuncles when the day is dry.
Oh, my! Oh, my!
They have c...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...r sand or cloud.
It chose that way to grow and not to move.
The monument's an object, yet those decorations,
carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all,
give it away as having life, and wishing;
wanting to be a monument, to cherish something.
The crudest scroll-work says "commemorate,"
while once each day the light goes around it
like a prowling animal,
or the rain falls on it, or the wind blows into it.
It may be solid, may be hollow.
The bones of the artist-prince may b...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,
And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;
I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,
I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;
I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,
And lashed him fast...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...er of the people.
You in you have everything and you owe it to everyone,
while me, my nothing I owe to nobody.
You nailed to the static ancestral dividend,
and me, a one in the numerical social divider,
we are the duel to death who fatally approaches.
When the multitudes run rioting
leaving behind ashes of burned injustices,
and with the torch of the seven virtues,
the multitudes run after the seven sins,
against you and against everything unjust and inhuman,
...Read more of this...
by
Burgos, Julia de
...teen years later I sat down on a rock. It was under a
tree next to an old abandoned shack that had a sheriff's
notice nailed like a funeral wreath to the front door.
NO TRESPASSING
4/17 OF A HAIKU
Many rivers had flowed past those seventeen years, and
thousands of trout, and now beside the highway and the sheriff's
notice flowed yet another river, the Klamath, and I was
trying to get thirty-five miles downstream to Steelhead,
the place where I was staying....Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
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