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Famous Plodding Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...on all the mazy plan,
She form’d of various parts the various Man.


 Then first she calls the useful many forth;
Plain plodding Industry, and sober Worth:
Thence peasants, farmers, native sons of earth,
And merchandise’ whole genus take their birth:
Each prudent cit a warm existence finds,
And all mechanics’ many-apron’d kinds.
Some other rarer sorts are wanted yet,
The lead and buoy are needful to the net:
The caput mortuum of gross desires
Makes a material for mere knights...Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert



...bear
Your colours everywhere,
All through each crowded street,
And meet
The wonder-light in every eye,
As I go by.
Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,
Blinded by rainbow haze,
The stuff of happiness,
No less,
Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds
Of peacock golds.
Before my feet the dusty, rough-paved way
Flushes beneath its gray.
My steps fall ringed with light,
So bright,
It seems a myriad suns are strown
About the town.
Around me is the sound of steepled bells,
And ri...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...es upon its face
And where enclosure has its birth
It spreads a mildew oer her mirth
The herd no longer one by one
Goes plodding on her morning way
And garlands lost and sports nigh gone
Leaves her like thee a common day
Yet summer smiles upon thee still
Wi natures sweet unalterd will
And at thy births unworshipd hours
Fills her green lap wi swarms of flowers
To crown thee still as thou hast been
Of spring and summer months the queen...Read more of this...
by Clare, John
...es 
High overhead in the 
Tops of the beeches. 

In spite of our wisdom 
And sensible talking, 
We on our feet must go 
Plodding and walking....Read more of this...
by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever
 renew’d; 
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined; 
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? 

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists, and identity; 
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse....Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt



...p, 
With the endless line of waggons stretching back, 
While the khaki soldiers travel like a mob of travelling sheep, 
Plodding silent on the never-ending track, 
While the constant snap and sniping of the foe you never see 
Makes you wonder will your turn come -- when and how? 
As the Mauser ball hums past you like a vicious kind of bee -- 
Oh! we're going on a long job now. 

When the dash and the excitement and the novelty are dead, 
And you've seen a load of wounded once...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...that won't happen,
it still has an okay five,
and quite a fine eight,
and all but final seven,
prodding and prodding a plodding eternity
to last....Read more of this...
by Szymborska, Wislawa
...share each other’s suits and blindly will
a raw transfiguration to assert
what wasn’t is - then this the only skill

as plodding snail and spiralling through space
unite in common pattern (daily blent) 
to tie truth down to gastropodic pace
and who goes faster loses what is meant...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg
...mountain cliffs; 
The fields of Nature long prepared and fallow—the silent, cyclic chemistry; 
The slow and steady ages plodding—the unoccupied surface ripening—the rich ores forming
 beneath; 
At last the New arriving, assuming, taking possession, 
A swarming and busy race settling and organizing every where;
Ships coming in from the whole round world, and going out to the whole world, 
To India and China and Australia, and the thousand island paradises of the Pacific; 
Popu...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...g with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement 
under me,
reeling with feet. Feet tripping, skipping, lagging, 
dragging,
plodding doggedly, or springing up and advancing on firm elastic 
insteps.
A boy is selling papers, I smell them clean and new from the press.
They are fresh like the air, and pungent as tulips and narcissus.
The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues 
of gold blind the shop-windows,
putting out their contents in a flood of flame.

Night and Sleep
The da...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...ve constraint her wing aspires, 
Nor rigid spells her flight can bind;
The narrow track of musty schools,
She leaves to plodding VAPID FOOLS. 

To scenes like THESE she bends her way,
HERE the best feelings of the soul
Nor interest taints, nor threats controul, 
Nor vice allures, nor snares betray; 
HERE from each trivial hope remov'd,
Our BARD first sought the MUSE he lov'd. 

Still shall thy pensive gloom diffuse,
The verse sublime, the dulcet song;
While round the POET'S s...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Mary Darby
...f the mule train toiling by. 
The rattle and clink of a leading-chain, the creak of the lurching load, 
As the patient, plodding creatures strain at their task in the shell-torn road, 
Through the dark and the dust you may watch them go till the dawn is grey in the sky, 
And only the watchful pickets know when the "All-night Corps" goes by. 
And far away as the silence falls when the last of the train has gone, 
A weary voice through the darkness: "Get on there, men, get on!"...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...d burst 
To sing aloft in golden light 
His song from blue air out of sight. 
The mist drove by, and now the cows 
Came plodding up to milking house. 
Followed by Frank, the Callow's cowman, 
Who whistled, "Adam was a ploughman." 
There came such cawing from the rooks, 
Such running chuck from little brooks, 
One thought it March, just budding green, 
With hedgerows full of celandine. 
An otter' out of stream and played, 
Two hares come loping up and stayed; 
Wide-eyed and te...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John
...er--by our bliss unblessed--
Dull to the art that colors or creates,
Like the dead timepiece, godless nature creeps
Her plodding round, and, by the leaden weights,
The slavish motion keeps.

To-morrow to receive
New life, she digs her proper grave to-day;
And icy moons with weary sameness weave
From their own light their fulness and decay.
Home to the poet's land the gods are flown,
Light use in them that later world discerns,
Which, the diviner leading-strings outgrown,
On i...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von
...en, bleak, and wide; 
Nothing look'd with love; 
All was dingy brown; 
The very skies above 
Seem'd to sulk and frown.

Plodding sick and sad, 
Weary day on day; 
Searching, never glad, 
Many a miry way; 
Poor existence lagg'd 
In this barren place; 
While the seasons dragg'd 
Slowly o'er its face. 

Spring, to sky and ground, 
Came before I guess'd; 
Then one day I found 
A valley, like a nest! 
Guarded with a spell 
Sure it must have been, 
This little fairy dell 
Which I h...Read more of this...
by Allingham, William
...only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
 With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
 Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
 Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
 In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
 He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
 And now is the time to la...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...y 
The beasts at market-booths and awnings gay 
Of shops, the city's comfortable trade, 
Lookt, and then into months of plodding lookt. 
And swiftly on my brain there came a wind 
Of vision; and I saw the road mapt out 
Along the desert with a chalk of bones; 
I saw a famine and the Afghan greed 
Waiting for us, spears at our throats, all we 
Made women by our hunger; and I saw 
Gigantic thirst grieving our mouths with dust, 
Scattering up against our breathing salt 
Of blown...Read more of this...
by Abercrombie, Lascelles
...you have told us.

"As we are, then, you behold us: 
Derelicts of all conditions, 
Poets, rogues, and sick physicians, 
Plodding forward from afar; 
Forward now into the darkness 
Where the men before us are; 
Forward, onward, out of grayness, 
To the light that shone so far."

IV

Said the Watcher by the Way 
To some aged ones who lingered, 
To the shrunken, the claw-fingered, 
"So you come for me to-day."-- 
"Yes, to give you warning; 
You are old," one said; 
"You have hai...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...long moss upon the apple-tree; 
Blue-lipt, an icedrop at thy sharp blue nose, 
Close muffled up, and on thy dreary way 
Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows. 
They should have drawn thee by the high-heapt hearth, 
Old Winter! seated in thy great armed chair, 
Watching the children at their Christmas mirth; 
Or circled by them as thy lips declare 
Some merry jest, or tale of murder dire, 
Or troubled spirit that disturbs the night, 
Pausing at times to rouse the mou...Read more of this...
by de la Mare, Walter
...Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring strews them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievances
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful ...Read more of this...
by Thoreau, Henry David

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry