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Famous Stride Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...
salesmen. 

Gentlemen! 
Stop! 
You are no beggars; 
how dare you beg for alms! 

We in our vigour, 
whose stride measures yards, 
must not listen, but tear them apart ¨C 
them, 
glued like a special supplement 
to each double bed! 

Are we to ask them humbly: 
¡°Assist me!¡± 
Implore for a hymn 
or an oratorio! 
We ourselves are creators within a burning hymn ¨C 
the hum of mills and laboratories. 

What is Faust to me, 
in a fairy splash of ro...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir



...fect rhythm

A man cycles on the towpath

His dog on a lead

Running beside,

They do not notice me

Or falter in their stride.





6



At dawn in Leeds

I was lost

Once I had left

The lock

Car park, office block,

Grand hotel looming

And no path

But then I found

Back Lane, every

Window blocked,

Every inch cobbled,

A road to nowhere

Built a hundred

Years ago.



I found a gas lamp

Anchored to a corner

Rusty and forgotten

In the glare

Of the million wa...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out....Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...--
For rest divine upon exalted couch,
And slumber in the arms of melody,
He pac'd away the pleasant hours of ease
With stride colossal, on from hall to hall;
While far within each aisle and deep recess,
His winged minions in close clusters stood,
Amaz'd and full offear; like anxious men
Who on wide plains gather in panting troops,
When earthquakes jar their battlements and towers.
Even now, while Saturn, rous'd from icy trance,
Went step for step with Thea through the wo...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She ...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan



..., marching hand in hand. 
Last then but one, Powell that could not ride, 
Led the French standard, weltering in his stride. 
He, to excuse his slowness, truth confessed 
That 'twas so long before he could be dressed. 
The Lord's sons, last, all these did reinforce: 
Cornb'ry before them managed hobby-horse. 

Never before nor since, an host so steeled 
Trooped on to muster in the Tothill Field: 
Not the first cock-horse that with cork were shod 
To rescue Albe...Read more of this...
by Marvell, Andrew
...rising tide, like a bridge of boats. 

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, 
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride, 
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. 
Now he patted his horse's side, 
Now gazed on the landscape far and near, 
Then impetuous stamped the earth, 
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth; 
But mostly he watched with eager search 
The belfry-tower of the old North Church, 
As it rose above the graves on the hill, 
Lonely and spec...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...en I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It's the fire in my eyes,
And the flash of my teeth,
The swing in my waist,
And th...Read more of this...
by Angelou, Maya
...ok now for no inchanting voice, nor fear
The bait of honied words; a rougher tongue
Draws hitherward, I know him by his stride,
The Giant Harapha of Gath, his look
Haughty as is his pile high-built and proud.
Comes he in peace? what wind hath blown him hither 
I less conjecture then when first I saw
The sumptuous Dalila floating this way:
His habit carries peace, his brow defiance.

Sam: Or peace or not, alike to me he comes.

Chor: His fraught we soon shall know,...Read more of this...
by Milton, John
...For Man's grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!

We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst.

We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like thi...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...r he went on. 

104 How greatly had he grown in his demesne, 
105 This auditor of insects! He that saw 
106 The stride of vanishing autumn in a park 
107 By way of decorous melancholy; he 
108 That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, 
109 As dissertation of profound delight, 
110 Stopping, on voyage, in a land of snakes, 
111 Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged 
112 His apprehension, made him intricate 
113 In moody rucks, and difficult and strange 
1...Read more of this...
by Stevens, Wallace
...'re counted with the Great;
You strain and strive with mighty men;
Your hand is on the helm of State;
Colossus-like you stride . . . and then
There comes a pause, a shining hour,
A dog that leaps, a hand that clings:
O Titan, turn from pomp and power;
Give all your heart to Little Things.

Go couch you childwise in the grass,
Believing it's some jungle strange,
Where mighty monsters peer and pass,
Where beetles roam and spiders range.
'Mid gloom and gleam ...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...ed?
     In Holy-Rood a knight he slew;
     I saw, when back the dirk he drew,
     Courtiers give place before the stride
     Of the undaunted homicide;
     And since, though outlawed, hath his hand
     Full sternly kept his mountain land.

     Who else dared give—ah! woe the day,
     That I such hated truth should say!—
     The Douglas, like a stricken deer,
     Disowned by every noble peer,
     Even the rude refuge we have here?
     Alas, this wild m...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter
...bassoon, my throat; 
Abase those eyes that ever loved to meet 
Star-sisters answering under crescent brows; 
Abate the stride, which speaks of man, and loose 
A flying charm of blushes o'er this cheek, 
Where they like swallows coming out of time 
Will wonder why they came: but hark the bell 
For dinner, let us go!' 
And in we streamed 
Among the columns, pacing staid and still 
By twos and threes, till all from end to end 
With beauties every shade of brown and fair 
In col...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...re inured to sights of woe,
But so it was; - my broken chain
With links unfasten'd did remain,
And it was to liberty to stride
Along my cell from side to side,
And up and down, and then athwart,
And tread it over every part;
And round the pillars one by one,
Returning where my walk begun,
Avoiding only, as I trod,
My brothers' graves without a sod;
For if I thought with heedless tread
My step profaned their lowly bed,
My breath came gaspingly and thick,
And my crush'd heart f...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...e is done! I've won! I've won!'
Quoth she, and whistles thrice.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.

We listened and looked sideways up!
Fear at my heart, as at a cup,
My life-blood seemed to sip!
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman's face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip--
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The ...Read more of this...
by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...sness
Stifled him and his great distress.

One morning he threw the street door wide
On coming in, and his vigorous stride
Made the tools on his table rattle and jump.
In his hands he carried a new-burst clump
Of laurel blossoms, whose smooth-barked stalks
Were pliant with sap. As a husband talks
To the wife he left an hour ago,
Paul spoke to the Shadow. "Dear, you know
To-day the calendar calls it Spring,
And I woke this morning gathering
Asphodels, in my dre...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...are clouds and storms that they ride.
And there with the huntsmen of mound-builder days
Through jungle and meadow I stride.
And the Tiger Tree leaf is falling around
As it fell when the world began:
Like a monstrous tiger-skin, stretched on the ground,
Or the cloak of a medicine man.
A deep-crumpled gossamer web,
Fringed with the fangs of a snake.
The wind swirls it down from the leperous boughs.
It shimmers on clay-hill and lake,
With the gleam of great b...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel
...ell, and wondered, as she died, 
How, when her canvas had been sheeted home, 
Her quivering length would sweep into her stride, 
Making the greenness milky with her foam. 

But when we rose next morning, we discerned 
Her beauty once again a shattered thing; 
Towing to dock the Wanderer returned, 
A wounded sea-bird with a broken wing. 

A spar was gone, her rigging's disarray 
Told of a worse disaster than the last; 
Like draggled hair dishevelled hung the stay, 
Dro...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John
...ad in its warm bloom;
always the enemy is the foe at home.
And I wondered what surgery could recover
our lost, long stride of indolence and leisure
which is labor in reverse; what physic recall the smile
not of lips, but of eyes as of the sea bemused.
We, when we disperse from common sleep to several
tasks, we gather to despair; we, who assembled
once for hopes from common toil to dreams
or sickish and hurting or triumphal rapture;
always our enemy is our foe at home....Read more of this...
by García Lorca, Federico

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