Famous Stirrings Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Thrushes

by Ted Hughes
 Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living - a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense - with a start, a bounce, 
a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. 
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab 
And a ravening...Read more of this...

the buddha's tooth

by Rg Gregory
 (for matt – 15)

in the first seven years you choose your howdah
having by then bare inklings of a journey
but where or why - confusion there to cloud a
judgement no more ready than a sore knee
to enter the lists of a whole life’s tourney -
but after this howdah-do (this introduction)
what’s to carry you where - from muddy fluxion

and glimpsing that...Read more of this...

Hospital For Defectives

by Thomas Blackburn
 By your unnumbered charities
A miracle disclose,
Lord of the Images, whose love
The eyelids and the rose 
Takes for a language, and today
Tell to me what is said
By these men in a turnip field 
And their unleavened bread.

For all things seem to figure out
The stirrings of your heart,
And two men pick the turnips up
And two men pull the cart;
And yet between...Read more of this...

Wednesday

by Marvin Bell
 Gray rainwater lay on the grass in the late afternoon.
The carp lay on the bottom, resting, while dusk took shape
in the form of the first stirrings of his hunger,
and the trees, shorter and heavier, breathed heavily upward.
Into this sodden, nourishing afternoon I emerged,
partway toward a paycheck, halfway toward the weekend,
carrying the last mail and holding above still puddles
the books...Read more of this...

The Sun kept stooping -- stooping -- low!

by Emily Dickinson
 The Sun kept stooping -- stooping -- low!
The Hills to meet him rose!
On his side, what Transaction!
On their side, what Repose!

Deeper and deeper grew the stain
Upon the window pane --
Thicker and thicker stood the feet
Until the Tyrian

Was crowded dense with Armies --
So gay, so Brigadier --
That I felt martial stirrings
Who once the Cockade wore --

Charged from my chimney corner...Read more of this...

Martha Washington

by Sidney Lanier
 Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal".



Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time,
When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet
Of Trade have cased us in such icy rime
That hearts are scarcely hot enough to beat,
Thy fame, O Lady of the lofty eyes,
Doth fall along the age, like as a lane
Of Spring, in whose most generous boundaries
Full many a frozen virtue...Read more of this...

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