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Famous Trip Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Tebb, Barry
...ormous red

Calves towered above me

Like a crane, his High

Anglican voice boomed,

“You are a ha’penny short

Of your trip money, what

Am I supposed to do?”



With Father Mulcock

Your alter ego you

Cost me half a lifetime’s faith,

“Not to know who accompanied Christ

Is ignorance worthy of chastisement.”





19



The dray wheels rolled

Over the ruts, the cobbles

Shone in the frost,

Standish’s woodyard

Burned in the Siege of Troy,

The ramparts of Eastend Park...Read more of this...



by Bidart, Frank
...tables, captain's chairs,
plastic doilies, papier-mâché bas-relief wall ballerinas,
German memorial plates "bought on a trip to Europe,"
Puritan crosshatch green-yellow wallpaper,
frilly shades, cowhide 
booths--

I thought of Cambridge:

 the lovely congruent elegance
 of Revolutionary architecture, even of

ersatz thirties Georgian

seemed alien, a threat, sign
of all I was not--

to bode order and lucidity

as an ideal, if not reality--

not this California plush, which

 ...Read more of this...

by Shakespeare, William
...O mistress mine, where are you roaming? 
O stay and hear! your true-love's coming 
That can sing both high and low; 
Trip no further, pretty sweeting, 
Journey's end in lovers' meeting-- 
Every wise man's son doth know. 

What is love? 'tis not hereafter; 
Present mirth hath present laughter; 
What's to come is still unsure: 
In delay there lies no plenty,-- 
Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty, 
Youth's a stuff will not endure....Read more of this...

by Carver, Raymond
...nd around, but always going back
where they'd started from.
That one inescapable fact: even while
we undertake this trip,
there's another, far more bizarre,
we still have to make....Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...an as I 
Who leave behind me living works indeed; 
For, such a poem, such a painting lives. 
What? dost thou verily trip upon a word, 
Confound the accurate view of what joy is 
(Caught somewhat clearer by my eyes than thine) 
With feeling joy? confound the knowing how 
And showing how to live (my faculty) 
With actually living?--Otherwise 
Where is the artist's vantage o'er the king? 
Because in my great epos I display 
How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act--...Read more of this...



by Milton, John
...unds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
And on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
The wood-nymphs, decked with daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?
Night hath better sweets to prove;
Venus now wakes, and wakens Love.
Come, let us our rights begin;
'T is only daylight that makes sin,
Which these dun shades...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...ace!
O my hunger! My hunger!
I could have gone around the world twice
or had new children - all boys.
It was a long trip with little days in it
and no new places.

In here,
it's the same old crowd,
the same ruined scene.
The alcoholic arrives with his gold culbs.
The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn
into the lining of her dress.
The permanent guests have done nothing new.
Their faces are still small
like babies with jaundice.

Meanwhile,
they ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...t lowers
Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless
Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;
Not as making a trip that will be unpayable
For a haul that will not bear examination.

There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of th...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
....

O happy field! and O thrice happy tree!
Soon will your queen in daisy-flowered smock
And crown of flower-de-luce trip down the lea,
Soon will the lazy shepherds drive their flock
Back to the pasture by the pool, and soon
Through the green leaves will float the hum of murmuring bees at
noon.

Soon will the glade be bright with bellamour,
The flower which wantons love, and those sweet nuns
Vale-lilies in their snowy vestiture
Will tell their beaded pearls, and carnat...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...ead with fright talking to a huge cop 
 by the Coke machine, 
nor this trembling old lady with a cane taking the last 
 trip of her life, 
nor the red-capped cynical porter collecting his quar- 
 ters and smiling over the smashed baggage, 
nor me looking around at the horrible dream, 
nor mustached ***** Operating Clerk named Spade, 
 dealing out with his marvelous long hand the 
 fate of thousands of express packages, 
nor fairy Sam in the basement limping from leaden 
 trun...Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other....Read more of this...

by Nash, Ogden
...fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Someone sailed the ocean blue.
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain
For a business trip on the bounding main,
And to prove to the people, by actual test,
You could get to the East by sailing West.
Somebody said, Sail on! Sail on!
And studied China and China's lingo,
And cried from the bow, There's China now!
And promptly bumped into San Domingo.
Somebody murmured, Oh dear, oh dear!
I've discovered the Western Hemisphere.

And t...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather'd every rack, 
the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! 
O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. 
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and...Read more of this...

by Bishop, Elizabeth
...g, travelling, 
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, 
slime-hung and barnacled. 

Think of the long trip home. 
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? 
Where should we be today? 
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play 
in this strangest of theatres? 
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life 
in our bodies, we are determined to rush 
to see the sun the other way around? 
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world? ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...cipher and show me a cent, 
Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is
 ahead? 

4
Trippers and askers surround me; 
People I meet—the effect upon me of my early life, or the ward and city I
 live in, or the nation, 
The latest dates, discoveries, inventions, societies, authors old and new,
My dinner, dress, associates, looks, compliments, dues, 
The real or fancied indifference of some man or woman I love, 
The sickness of one of my...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...The clutter of worship
that you taught me, Mary Gray,
is old. I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own. I trip
on your death and jesus, my stranger
floats up over
my Christian home, wearing his straight
thorn tree. I have cast my lot
and am one third thief
of you. Time, that rearranger
of estates, equips
me with your garments, but not with grief.

2.
This winter when
cancer began its ugliness
I grieved with you each day
for three months
and found...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...got when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
 And the clothes he had bought for the trip.

He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
 With his name painted clearly on each:
But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
 They were all left behind on the beach.

The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
 He had seven coats on when he came,
With three pair of boots--but the worst of it was,
 He had wholly forgotten his name.Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...could he letten blood, and clip, and shave,
And make a charter of land, and a quittance.
In twenty manners could he trip and dance,
After the school of Oxenforde tho*, *then
And with his legges caste to and fro;
And playen songes on a small ribible*; *fiddle
Thereto he sung sometimes a loud quinible* *treble
And as well could he play on a gitern.* *guitar
In all the town was brewhouse nor tavern,
That he not visited with his solas*, *mirth, sport
There as that any...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...nning; but this firebrand--gentleness 
To such as her! if Cyril spake her true, 
To catch a dragon in a cherry net, 
To trip a tigress with a gossamer 
Were wisdom to it.' 
'Yea but Sire,' I cried, 
'Wild natures need wise curbs. The soldier? No: 
What dares not Ida do that she should prize 
The soldier? I beheld her, when she rose 
The yesternight, and storming in extremes, 
Stood for her cause, and flung defiance down 
Gagelike to man, and had not shunned the death,...Read more of this...

by Paz, Octavio
...It’s a long and silent street.
I walk in the dark and trip and fall
and get up and step blindly
on the mute stones and dry leaves
and someone behind me is also walking:
if I stop, he stops;
if I run,, he runs. I turn around: no one.
Everything is black, there is no exit,
and I turn and turn corners
that always lead to the street
where no one waits for me, no one follows,
where I follow a man who trips...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs