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Famous Tracking Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...her; two planes cracking 
in mid-air over Washington, like blind birds. 
And the picking up afterwards, the morticians tracking 
bodies in the Potomac and piecing them like boards 
to make a leg or a face. There is only her miniature 
photograph left, too long now for fear to remember. 
Special tonight because I made her into a story 
that I grew to know and savor. 
A reason to worry, 
Rose, when you fix an old death like that, 
and outliving the impact, to find you've prete...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne



...re rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew
...to-eye,
as stiff as my brother & me when we attempt

to hug. Soon, the gun fires and the music
quiets, the camera stops tracking and they

relax, shoulders drop, their jaws go slack
& we are all suspended in that perfect moment

when no one knows who took the bullet--
the earth spins below our feet, a blanket of swallows

changes direction suddenly above us, folding
into the rafters of a barn, and the two men

no longer struggle, they simply stand in their wreckage
propped in...Read more of this...
by Flynn, Nick
...ning grasses
 And night lit with dreamlight enfolds the sleepy town.


Then she will wander, her heart all a laughter,
 Tracking the dream star that lights the purple gloom.
She follows the proud and golden races after,
 As high as theirs her spirit, as high will be her doom....Read more of this...
by Russell, George William
...thimble.
The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.


II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummer
Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
Incising summer.
My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
I scrape through resin to a starry bone
And a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.
I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
Red in an Austrian volley.
I hear, through dead men's...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan



...eeting in this fair solitude;
For beneath yon very sky,
Had they resigned to one another 
Body and soul. The multitude,
Tracking them to the secret wood,
Tore limb from limb their innocent child,
And stabbed and trampled on its mother;
But the youth, for God's most holy grace,
A priest saved to burn in the market-place.

Duly at evening Helen came
To this lone silent spot,
From the wrecks of a tale of wilder sorrow
So much of sympathy to borrow 
As soothed her own dark lot.
D...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...re rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew
...to enter the stunned silence of mid-September,
his eyes cast down for a sign, the only music
his own breath or the wind tracking slowly through
the stalks or riding above the barren ground. Later
he'd come home, his dress shoes coated with dust or mud,
his long black overcoat stained or tattered
at the hem, sit wordless in his favorite chair,
his necktie loosened, and stare at nothing. At first
my brothers and I tried conversation, questions
only he could answer: Why had he g...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...s raising nicely, pal; just jab it with your knife.)
Fine specimens of manhood they would reckon us out there.
It's the tracking and the packing and the poling in the sun;
It's the sleeping in the open, it's the rugged, unfaked food;
It's the snow-shoe and the paddle, and the campfire and the gun,
And when I think of what I was, I know that it is good.

Just think of how we've poled all day up this strange little stream;
Since life began no eye of man has seen this place befo...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things