Famous Staggering Poems by Famous Poets

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

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80. The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata

...held up her greedy gab,
 Just like an aumous dish;
 Ilk smack still, did crack still,
 Just like a cadger’s whip;
 Then staggering an’ swaggering
 He roar’d this ditty up—


AirTune—“Soldier’s Joy.”I am a son of Mars who have been in many wars,
 And show my cuts and scars wherever I come;
This here was for a wench, and that other in a trench,
 When welcoming the French at the sound of the drum.
 Lal de daudle, &c.


My ’prenticeship I past where my leader breath’d his last,
 ...Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert


A doubt if it be Us

...A doubt if it be Us
Assists the staggering Mind
In an extremer Anguish
Until it footing find.

An Unreality is lent,
A merciful Mirage
That makes the living possible
While it suspends the lives....Read more of this...
by Dickinson, Emily

Absalom And Achitophel

...isclaims the kindred of her earth:
And made for empire, whispers me within;
Desire of greatness is a god-like sin.

Him staggering so when Hell's dire agent found,
While fainting virtue scarce maintain'd her ground,
He pours fresh forces in, and thus replies:

Th'eternal God, supremely good and wise,
Imparts not these prodigious gifts in vain;
What wonders are reserv'd to bless your reign?
Against your will your arguments have shown,
Such virtue's only giv'n to guide a throne...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John

Bridge Over The Aire Book 5

...e what V.D. was but I was too embarrassed,

The harder I tried to explain, the more she laughed.



When we saw a drunk staggering Chaplinesque from

Lamp-post to lamp-post I started to laugh but

simply she said, “Poor man!“ shaming me to silence.

Perhaps her pity was for her absent drunken father,

Every year serving six weeks in Armley for maintenance.

Once, on a hot summer afternoon, Margaret and I were

Sitting in the binyard telling stories when he came

Unexpected an...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Clancy Of The Mounted Police

...seething snows; 
 Day after day of blindness, the swoop of the stinging blast; 
On through a blur of fury the swing of staggering blows;
 On through a world of turmoil, empty, inane and vast. 
Night with its writhing storm-whirl, night despairingly black;
 Night with its hours of terror, numb and endlessly long;
Night with its weary waiting, fighting the shadows back,
 And ever the crouching madman singing his crazy song.

Cold with its creeping terror, cold with its sudden ...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William


Democracy

...emocracy is coming to the U.S.A. 
 It's coming through a crack in the wall,
 on a visionary flood of alcohol;
 from the staggering account
 of the Sermon on the Mount
 which I don't pretend to understand at all.
 It's coming from the silence
 on the dock of the bay,
 from the brave, the bold, the battered
 heart of Chevrolet:
 Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 
 It's coming from the sorrow on the street
 the holy places where the races meet;
 from the homicidal bitchin'
 that...Read more of this...
by Cohen, Leonard

Elegy On The Death Of A Young Man

...the judgment day!

O'er thee fortune still may juggle on,
For her minions blindly look around,--
Man now totter on his staggering throne,
And in dreary puddles now be found!
Blest art thou, within thy narrow cell!
To this stir of tragi-comedy,
To these fortune-waves that madly swell,
To this vain and childish lottery,
To this busy crowd effecting naught,
To this rest with labor teeming o'er,
Brother!--to this heaven with devils--fraught,
Now thine eyes have closed forevermor...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

Equinox

...from breaking into the story by force
for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand
and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,
your nation dead beside you.

I keep walking away though it has been an eternity
and from each drop of blood
springs up sons and daughters, trees,
a mountain of sorrows, of songs. 

I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north
not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.
Geese are returning to mate and crocuses h...Read more of this...
by Harjo, Joy

First Child ... Second Child

...ce of lungs can be deduced.
Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder,
This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder.
A staggering child, a child astounding,
Dazzling, diaperless, dumbfounding,
Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed,
A child to stagger and flabbergast,
Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn,
And the only perfect one ever born.


SECOND

Arrived this evening at half-past nine.
Everybody is doing fine.
Is it a boy, or quite the reverse?
You can call in the morning a...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

Howl

...across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and ...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Mazeppa

...the sea,
Came thickly thundering on,
As if our faint approach to meet;
The sight re-nerved my courser's feet,
A moment staggering, feebly fleet,
A moment, with a faint low neigh,
He answered, and then fell!
With gasps and glazing eyes he lay,
And reeking limbs immoveable,
His first and last career is done!
On came the troop - they saw him stoop,
They saw me strangely bound along
His back with many a bloody thong.
They stop - they start - they snuff the air,
Gallop a moment h...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

Part 5 of Trout Fishing in America

...N AMERICA SHORTY

 TO NELSON ALGREN



Trout Fishing in America Shorty appeared suddenly last

autumn in San Francisco, staggering around in a magnificent

chrome-plated steel wheelchair.

 He was a legless, screaming middle-aged wine.

 He descended upon North Beach like a chapter from the

Old Testament. He was the reason birds migrate in the

autumn. They have to. He was the cold turning of the earth;

the bad wind that blows off sugar.

 He would stop children on the stre...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard

Sohrab and Rustum

...form,
And then he stood bewilder'd; and he dropp'd
His covering shield, and the spear pierced his side.
He reel'd, and staggering back, sank to the ground;
And then the gloom dispersed, and the wind fell,
And the bright sun broke forth, and melted all
The cloud; and the two armies saw the pair--
Saw Rustum standing, safe upon his feet,
And Sohrab, wounded, on the bloody sand. 

Then, with a bitter smile, Rustum began:--
"Sohrab, thou thoughtest in thy mind to kill
A Persian ...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew

The Battle-Field

...n on the hill, 
And bell of wandering kine, are heard. 

No solemn host goes trailing by 
The black-mouthed gun and staggering wain; 
Men start not at the battle-cry,¡ª 15 
O, be it never heard again! 

Soon rested those who fought; but thou 
Who minglest in the harder strife 
For truths which men receive not now, 
Thy warfare only ends with life. 20 

A friendless warfare! lingering long 
Through weary day and weary year; 
A wild and many-weaponed throng 
Han...Read more of this...
by Bryant, William Cullen

The Emigrants: Book II

..., while each hideous image to his mind
Rises terrific, o'er a bleeding corse
Stumbling he falls; another interrupts
His staggering feet--all, all who us'd to rush
With joy to meet him--all his family
Lie murder'd in his way!--And the day dawns
On a wild raving Maniac, whom a fate
So sudden and calamitous has robb'd
Of reason; and who round his vacant walls
Screams unregarded, and reproaches Heaven!--
Such are thy dreadful trophies, savage War!
And evils such as these, or yet ...Read more of this...
by Turner Smith, Charlotte

The Horsemen

...ed by sound 
or flames of the amethyst, 

spoke to me; 
spoke to me like the preacher from…

I recall this moment staggering through the wind, 
when its breath hissed at the earth; 
as we leaned out of the window 
in that moment when the first light
streaked, joyous, out of the unalterable street... 

Then, tuned to the immanent choir of the grassland, 
untangling from the sea -

Then, stripped to the last detail, from her sinewed skin, 
disheveled in the ligh...Read more of this...
by Nwakanma, Obi

The Princess (part 5)

...
All that I would. But that large-moulded man, 
His visage all agrin as at a wake, 
Made at me through the press, and, staggering back 
With stroke on stroke the horse and horseman, came 
As comes a pillar of electric cloud, 
Flaying the roofs and sucking up the drains, 
And shadowing down the champaign till it strikes 
On a wood, and takes, and breaks, and cracks, and splits, 
And twists the grain with such a roar that Earth 
Reels, and the herdsmen cry; for everything 
Gam...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Secret People

...d; we never heard guns again.
But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain,
He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
Come back in shining shapes at last to spoil his last carouse:
We only know the last sad squires rode slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land: and still it is ...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Siege of Corinth

...; 
From whence thy traitor soul is driven — 
Far from thee, and undefiled." 
Grimly then Minotti smiled, 
As he saw Alp staggering bow 
Before his words, as with a blow. 

"O God! when died she?" — "Yesternight — 
Nor weep I for her spirit's flight: 
None of my pure race shall be 
Slaves to Mohammed and thee — 
Come on!" That challenge is in vain — 
Alp's already with the slain! 

While Minotti's words were wreaking 
More revenge in bitter speaking 
Than his falchion's point ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

There was a Child went Forth

...with blossoms, and the fruit afterward, and wood-berries,
 and
 the
 commonest weeds by the road; 
And the old drunkard staggering home from the out-house of the tavern, whence he had
 lately
 risen, 
And the school-mistress that pass’d on her way to the school, 
And the friendly boys that pass’d—and the quarrelsome boys,
And the tidy and fresh-cheek’d girls—and the barefoot ***** boy and girl, 
And all the changes of city and country, wherever he went. 

His own parents, 
He...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

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