Famous Tendril Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Nevertheless

by Marianne Moore
 you've seen a strawberry
that's had a struggle; yet
was, where the fragments met,

a hedgehog or a star-
fish for the multitude
of seeds. What better food

than apple seeds - the fruit
within the fruit - locked in
like counter-curved twin

hazelnuts? Frost that kills
the little rubber-plant -
leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't

harm the roots; they still grow 
in frozen ground. Once where
there was a prickley-pear - 

leaf...Read more of this...

Fist

by Philip Levine
 Iron growing in the dark, 
it dreams all night long 
and will not work. A flower 
that hates God, a child 
tearing at itself, this one 
closes on nothing. 

Friday, late, 
Detroit Transmission. If I live 
forever, the first clouded light 
of dawn will flood me 
in the cold streams 
north of Pontiac. 

It opens and is no longer....Read more of this...

Tis Sweet to Think

by Thomas Moore
 Tis sweet to think that, where'er we rove, 
We are sure to find something blissful and dear, 
And that, when we're far from the lips that we love, 
We've but to make love to the lips we are near.
The heart, like a tendril, accustom'd to cling, 
Let it grow where it will, cannot flourish alone, 
But will lean to...Read more of this...

Wildflowers And Hothouse-plants

by Henrik Ibsen
 "GOOD Heavens, man, what a freak of taste! 
What blindness to form and feature! 
The girl's no beauty, and might be placed 
As a hoydenish kind of creature." 

No doubt it were more in the current tone 
And the tide today we move in, 
If I could but choose me to make my own 
A type of our average...Read more of this...

On The Skeleton Of A Hound

by James Wright
 Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the...Read more of this...

Poem (Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box)

by Delmore Schwartz
 Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
 roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch 
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
-- Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
 just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is...Read more of this...

To John Keats

by Amy Lowell
 Great master! Boyish, sympathetic man!
Whose orbed and ripened genius lightly hung
From life's slim, twisted tendril and there swung
In crimson-sphered completeness; guardian
Of crystal portals through whose openings fan
The spiced winds which blew when earth was young,
Scattering wreaths of stars, as Jove once flung
A golden shower from heights cerulean.
Crumbled before thy majesty we bow.
Forget thy empurpled state, thy panoply
Of greatness, and...Read more of this...

Not From This Anger

by Dylan Thomas
 Not from this anger, 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...Read more of this...

Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage...Read more of this...

A Hermit Thrush

by Amy Clampitt
 Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day, 
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up 
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked 
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us 
back, year after year, lugging the 
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming 
seas, the gales...Read more of this...

Dedication

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 for Moremi, 1963

Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life

As this yam, wholly earthed, yet a living tuber
To the warmth of waters, earthed as springs
As roots of baobab, as the hearth.

The air will not deny you. Like a top
Spin you...Read more of this...

One Almost Might

by A S J Tessimond
 Wouldn't you say,
Wouldn't you say: one day,
With a little more time or a little more patience, one might
Disentangle for separate, deliberate, slow delight
One of the moment's hundred strands, unfray
Beginnings from endings, this from that, survey
Say a square inch of the ground one stands on, touch
Part of oneself or a leaf or a sound (not clutch
Or cuff or bruise but...Read more of this...

Dedication

by Wole Soyinka
Dedication

for Moremi, 1963

Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life

As this yam, wholly earthed, yet a living tuber
To the warmth of waters, earthed as springs
As roots of baobab, as the hearth.

The air will not deny you. Like a top
Spin you on...Read more of this...

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