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Famous Strapped Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Thomas, Dylan
...inion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift...Read more of this...



by Service, Robert William
...the banks of the Nordenscold."

Up sprang the red-haired Clancy, lean and eager of eye;
 Loaded the long toboggan, strapped each dog at its post;
Whirled his lash at the leader; then, with a whoop and a cry,
 Into the Great White Silence faded away like a ghost.

The clouds were a misty shadow, the hills were a shadowy mist;
 Sunless, voiceless and pulseless, the day was a dream of woe;
Through the ice-rifts the river smoked and bubbled and hissed;
 Behind was a trai...Read more of this...

by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...ever on the jar; 
Men, plugless word-spouts, whose deep fountains are 
Within their lungs. 

Children, with drums 
Strapped round them by the fond paternal ass; 
Peripatetics with a blade of grass 
Between their thumbs. 

Vagrants, whose arts 
Have caged some devil in their mad machine, 
Which grinding, squeaks, with husky groans between, 
Come out by starts. 

Cockneys that kill 
Thin horses of a Sunday, -- men, with clams, 
Hoarse as young bisons roaring for th...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...br>
When I am eighty old,
 Maybe I'll better them,
And you may yet behold
 A gem.

Old Renoir used to paint,
 Brush strapped to palsied hand;
His fervour of a saint
 How I can understand.
My joy is my reward,
 And though you gently smile,
Grant me to fumble, Lord,
 A little while!...Read more of this...

by Matthews, William
...
chemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up.
My wife's tumor has not come back.
I like to think of it in Tumor Hell
strapped to a dray, flat as a deflated
football, bleak and nubbled like a poorly
ironed truffle. There's one tense in Tumor Hell:
forever, or what we call the present.
For that long the flaccid tumor marinates
in lurid toxins. Tumor Hell Clinic
is, it turns out, a teaching hospital.
Every century or so, the way
we'd measure it, a chief doc br...Read more of this...



by Dickinson, Emily
...Sod Gown --
Bonnet of Everlasting Laces --
Brooch -- frozen on --

Horses of Blonde -- and Coach of Silver --
Baggage a strapped Pearl --
Journey of Down -- and Whip of Diamond --
Riding to meet the Earl --...Read more of this...

by Housman, A E
...le the quarters on the morning town. 
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people 
It tossed them down. 

Strapped, noosed, nighing his hour, 
He stood and counted them and cursed his luck; 
And then the clock collected in the tower 
Its strength, and struck....Read more of this...

by Noonuccal, Oodgeroo
...orest halls 
And wild bird calls 
Here you seems to me 
Like that poor cart-horse 
Castrated, broken, a thing wronged, 
Strapped and buckled, its hell prolonged, 
Whose hung head and listless mien express 
Its hopelessness. 
Municipal gum, it is dolorous 
To see you thus 
Set in your black grass of bitumen-- 
O fellow citizen, 
What have they done to us?...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ean it remembers better;
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November;
even the stars were strapped in the sky
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
and there are no signs to tell the way,
just the radio beating to itself
and the song that remembers
more than I. Oh, la la la,
this music swims back to me.<...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...were two port bottles,
And a curved table-knife hung at his belt for a scimitar,
While a fork and a keg of spirits were strapped to the saddle behind.
He dug his spurs into the pig,
Which trampled and snorted,
And stamped its cloven feet deeper into Mr. Spruggins.
Then the green light on the floor began to undulate.
It heaved and hollowed,
It rose like a tide,
Sea-green,
Full of claws and scales
And wriggles.
The air above his bed began to move;
It weighed...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...er, anticlimax after
Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower
Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods
In a land strapped by hunger
Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds
And bear those tendril hands I touch across
The agonized, two seas.
Behind my head a square of sky sags over
The circular smile tossed from lover to lover
And the golden ball spins out of the skies;
Not from this anger after
Refusal struck like a bell under water
Shall her smile breed that mouth, b...Read more of this...

by Wylie, Elinor
...ir 
It is a star where dragons breed: 
Devils have a footing there.

The sky has bent it out of shape; 
The sun has strapped it to his wheel; 
Its course is crooked to escape 
Traps and gins of stone and steel.

It balances on air, and spins 
Snared by strong transparent space; 
I forgive it all its sins; 
I kiss the scars upon its face....Read more of this...

by Webb, Charles
...hat didn't

win the raffle for a new Ford truck?
If, somewhere, I'm en route now, am I
praying the winged ballpoint I'm strapped into

will write on Denver's runway, "Safe and Sound"?
Was my pocket picked in Burbank,
and I've just noticed at thirty thousand feet?

Am I smiling, watching the clouds' icefields
melt to smoky wisps, revealing lakes
like Chinese dragons embroidered in blue below?

Lifting my ticket, do I hold a bon voyage,
or boiling jet streams, roaring thunderst...Read more of this...

by Edgar, Marriott
...swim in the shelter alee,
The Wireless folk lent him a wavelength, 
And the Water Board lent him the sea.

His wife strapped a mascot around him, 
The tears to his eyes gently stole;
'Twere some guiness corks she had collected 
And stitched to an old camisole.

He entered the water at daybreak, 
A man with a camera stood near,
He said "Hurry up and get in, lad, 
You're spoiling my view of the pier."

At last he were in, he were swimming 
With a beautiful overarm s...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...face!

XII.

That horrible black scaffold dressed,
That stapled block ... God sink the rest!
That head strapped back, that blinding vest,
Those knotted hands and naked breast,
Till near one busy hangman pressed,
And, on the neck these arms caressed ...

XIII.

No part in aught they hope or fear!
No heaven with them, no hell!---and here,
No earth, not so much space as pens
My body in their worst of dens
But shall bear God and man my cry,
Lies--...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...huts, their hale cries
shouting back to us and the hollow slam
of the dory against the float.
Black arms of thunder strapped
upon us, squalled out, we breathed in rain
and stroked past the boat.
We thrashed for shore as if we were trapped
in green and that suddenly inadequate stain

of lightning belling around
our skin. Bodies in air
we raced for the empty lobsterman-shack.
It was yellow inside, the sound
of the underwing of the sun. I swear,
I most solemn...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...For Marcia


Because you always have a clock
strapped to your body, it's natural 
that I should think of you as the 
correct time:
with your long blonde hair at 8:03,
and your pulse-lightning breasts at
11:17, and your rose-meow smile at 5:30,
I know I'm right....Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...-- but Mongrel Grey, 
He walked right into the homestead yard 
At dawn next morning, and grazed around, 
With the child strapped on to him safe and sound. 

We keep him now for the wife to ride, 
Nothing too good for him now, of course; 
Never a whip on his fat old hide, 
For she owes the child to that brave grey horse. 
And not Old Tyson himself could pay 
The purchase money of Mongrel Grey....Read more of this...

by Levis, Larry
...I didn't believe it.
Diseases were wise. Diseases, like the polio
My sister had endured, floating paralyzed
And strapped into her wheelchair all through
That war, seemed too precise. Like photographs . . .
Except disease left nothing. Disease was like
And equation that drank up light & never ended,
Not even in summer. Before my fever broke,
And the pains lessened, I could actually see
Myself, in the exact center of that square.
How still it...Read more of this...

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