Famous Strung Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Strung poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous strung poems. These examples illustrate what a famous strung poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Kipling, Rudyard
...d to teach us common sense--
Truth and God's Own Common Sense,
Which is more than knowledge!
Each degree of Latitude
Strung about Creation
Seeth one or more of us
(Of one muster each of us),
Diligent in that he does,
Keen in his vocation.
This we learned from famous men,
Knowing not its uses,
When they showed, in daily work--
Man must finish off his work--
Right or wrong, his daily work--
And without excuses.
Servant of the Staff and chain,
Mine and fuse and...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
..., had the rankness of the soil been freed
From cockle, that opprest the noble seed:
David, for him his tuneful harp had strung,
And heav'n had wanted one immortal song.
But wild ambition loves to slide, not stand;
And fortune's ice prefers to virtue's land:
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful fame, and lazy happiness;
Disdain'd the golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the crowd his arm to shake the tree.
Now, manifest of crimes, contriv'd long since,
He stood...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ight has come to Leeds, the carnival is bright
With neon lights outlining every stall and carousel,
The Civic Hall is strung with a thousand bulbs,
On Beeston Hill I hold the city in my arms.
39
An iridescent car of fire
Is drawn across the winter sky
From the gates of heaven to Mount St. Mary’s;
On Beeston Hill a haptic wind raises
The ghosts of splayed dead leaves
And light through chandeliers glows
In a thousand shades, pale carousels
In mystic li...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...ns hang,
And bunting in the red Town Hall
Says 'Merry Christmas to you all'.
And London shops on Christmas Eve
Are strung with silver bells and flowers
As hurrying clerks the City leave
To pigeon-haunted classic towers,
And marbled clouds go scudding by
The many-steepled London sky.
And girls in slacks remember Dad,
And oafish louts remember Mum,
And sleepless children's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...mother felt who saw her sons
Rush from her loving arms, to face death-dealing guns.
VII.
But ere thy lyre is strung to martial strains
Of wars which sent our hero o'er the plains,
To add the cypress to his laureled brow,
Be brave, my Muse, and darker truths avow.
Let Justice ask a preface to thy songs,
Before the Indian's crimes declare his wrongs;
Before effects, wherein all horrors blend,
Declare the shameful cause, precursor of the end.
VIII.
...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...veined place,
my eyes shut on the confusing office,
eyes circling into my childhood,
eyes newly cut.
Years of hints
strung out—a serialized case history—
thirty-three years of the same dull incest
that sustained us both.
You, my bachelor analyst,
who sat on Marlborough Street,
sharing your office with your mother
and giving up cigarettes each New Year,
were the new God,
the manager of the Gideon Bible.
I was your third-grader
with a blue star on my forehead.
...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...er his voice, a fearless clarion, rung
That broke in warning on the ears of men;
For her the strong bow of his pow'r he strung
And sent his arrows to the very den
Where grim Oppression held his bloody place
And gloated o'er the mis'ries of a race.
And he was no soft-tongued apologist;
He spoke straight-forward, fearlessly uncowed;
The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist
And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;
To sin and crime he gave their proper hue,
And hurle...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...oks about this big!
The wind is roaring
blast
after blast,
blast
after blast...
The mast quivers like a strung bow.(*)
*[What business do you have being way up there?
Christ, man, what do you think you are-a stork?
N.H.]
Oops, now we're shooting sky-high --
my head splits the clouds.
Oops, now we're sinking to the bottom --
my fingers comb the ocean floor.
We're learning to the left, we're leaning to the right --
that is, we're leani...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...e diver's bell in the steeple of spindrift
Rings out the Dead Sea scale;
And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,
Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman's raft,
Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.
(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
Let the wax disk babble
Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
These are your y...Read more of this...
by
Ammons, A R
...rfectly adaptable,
if freedom and possibility were without limit,
the web would
lose its special identity:
the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (intersecting that the freest
"medium" should
accept the firmest order)
and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy....Read more of this...
by
St Vincent Millay, Edna
...
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...its red, his eye, though dim,
Rolls wide and wild, each slowly quivering limb
Recalls its function, but his words are strung
In terms that seem not of his native tongue;
Distinct but strange, enough they understand
To deem them accents of another land,
And such they were, and meant to meet an ear
That hears him not — alas! that cannot hear!
XIV.
His page approach'd, and he alone appear'd
To know the import of the words they heard;
And by the changes of his ch...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...coarsely clad in Norwich drugget came
To teach the nations in thy greater name.
My warbling lute, the lute I whilom strung
When to King John of Portugal I sung,
Was but the prelude to that glorious day,
When thou on silver Thames did'st cut thy way,
With well tim'd oars before the royal barge,
Swell'd with the pride of thy celestial charge;
And big with hymn, commander of an host,
The like was ne'er in Epsom blankets toss'd.
Methinks I see the new Arion sail,
The lute...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...pole, and what they say,
And that these gray crags
Not on crags are hung,
But beads are of a rosary
On prayer and music strung;
And, credulous, through the granite seeming
Seest the smile of Reason beaming;
Can thy style-discerning eye
The hidden-working Builder spy,
Who builds, yet makes no chips, no din,
With hammer soft as snow-flake's flight;
Knowest thou this?
O pilgrim, wandering not amiss!
Already my rocks lie light,
And soon my cone will spin.
For the world was bu...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ore there was even a road down at Big Sur. The mansion
had been brought over the mountains on the backs of mules,
strung out like ants, bringing visions of the good life to the
poison oak, the ticks, and the salmon.
The mansion was on a promontory, high over the Pacific.
Money could see farther in the 1920s and one could look out
and see whales and the Hawaiian Islands and the Kuomintang
in China.
The mansion burned down years ago.
The actor di...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...e country church, or mid the clustering trees, the open air camp-meeting,
The fiddler in the tavern—the glee, the long-strung sailor-song,
The lowing cattle, bleating sheep—the crowing cock at dawn.
8
All songs of current lands come sounding ’round me,
The German airs of friendship, wine and love,
Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances—English warbles,
Chansons of France, Scotch tunes—and o’er the rest,
Italia’s peerless compositions.
Across the stage, with pall...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...ioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
Have you wandered in the wilderness, the sagebrush desolation,
The bunch-grass levels where the cattle graze?
Have you whistled bits of rag-time at the end of all creation,
And learned to know the desert's little ways?
Have you camped up...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...m his sheep.
The notes are asleep,
Lying adrift on the air
In level lines
Like sunlight hanging in pines and pines,
Strung and threaded,
All imbedded
In the blue-green of the hazy pines.
Lines -- long, straight lines!
And stems,
Long, straight stems
Pushing up
To the cup of blue, blue sky.
Stems growing misty
With the many of them,
Red-green mist
Of the trees,
And these
Wood-flavoured notes.
The back is maple and the belly is pine.
The rich notes twine
As ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...arrangement:
For where its tatters hung loose like sedges,
Gold coins were glittering on the edges,
Like the band-roll strung with tomans
Which proves the veil a Persian woman's.
And under her brow, like a snail's horns newly
Come out as after the rain he paces,
Two unmistakeable eye-points duly
Live and aware looked out of their places.
So, we went and found Jacynth at the entry
Of the lady's chamber standing sentry;
I told the command and produced my companion,
And...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
..., and shut
The stern husk-leaves, and hid it many years.
-- Once Famine tricked himself with ears of corn,
And Hate strung flowers on his spiked belt,
And glum Revenge in silver lilies pranked him,
And Lust put violets on his shameless front,
And all minced forth o' the street like holiday folk
That sally off afield on Summer morns.
-- Once certain hounds that knew of many a chase,
And bare great wounds of antler and of tusk
That they had ta'en to give a lord some spo...Read more of this...
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