Famous Trudge Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Hail! Childish Slave Of Social Rules

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 HAIL! Childish slaves of social rules
You had yourselves a hand in making!
How I could shake your faith, ye fools,
If but I thought it worth the shaking.
I see, and pity you; and then
Go, casting off the idle pity,
In search of better, braver men,
My own way freely through the city.

My own way freely, and not yours;
And, careless of a town's abusing,
Seek...Read more of this...

I am bound to this Land by blood

by Olu Oguibe
I am bound to this land by blood
That's why my vision is blurred
I am rooted in its soil
And its streams flood my veins
I smell the sweat of its men
And the million feet that plod
The dust of its streets
Leave their prints on my soul
I have walked the footpaths of this land
Climbed the snake-routes of its hills
I have known the heat of...Read more of this...

Children Selecting Books In A Library

by Randall Jarrell
 With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.
The child's head, bent to the book-colored shelves,
Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,
Moving in blind grace ... yet from the mural, Care
The grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,
Seizes the baby hero by the hair
And whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,
Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawn
But blanched like...Read more of this...

The Bear

by Galway Kinnell
1
In late winter 
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow 
and bend close and see it is lung-colored 
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear. 

2
I take a wolf's rib and whittle
it sharp at both ends
and coil it up
and freeze it in blubber and place it out
on the fairway of...Read more of this...

White in the Moon the Long Road Lies

by A E Housman
 White in the moon the long road lies, 
The moon stands blank above; 
White in the moon the long road lies 
That leads me from my love. 

Still hangs the hedge without a gust, 
Still, still the shadows stay: 
My feet upon the moonlit dust 
Pursue the ceaseless way. 

The world is round, so travellers tell, 
And straight though...Read more of this...

A Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor

by Ogden Nash
 The hands of the clock were reaching high
In an old midtown hotel;
I name no name, but its sordid fame
Is table talk in hell.
I name no name, but hell's own flame
Illumes the lobby garish,
A gilded snare just off Times Square
For the maidens of the parish.

The revolving door swept the grimy floor
Like a crinoline grotesque,
And a lowly bum from an ancient...Read more of this...

I have a King who does not speak

by Emily Dickinson
 I have a King, who does not speak --
So -- wondering -- thro' the hours meek
I trudge the day away --
Half glad when it is night, and sleep,
If, haply, thro' a dream, to peep
In parlors, shut by day.

And if I do -- when morning comes --
It is as if a hundred drums
Did round my pillow roll,
And shouts fill all...Read more of this...

Dulce Et Decorum Est

by Wilfred Owen
 Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick,...Read more of this...

Whether or Not

by D. H. Lawrence
I

Dunna thee tell me its his'n, mother,
      Dunna thee, dunna thee.
--Oh ay! he'll be comin' to tell thee his-sèn
      Wench, wunna he?

Tha doesna mean to say to me, mother,
      He's gone wi that--
--My gel, owt'll do for a man i' the dark,
   ...Read more of this...

Cornish Lullaby

by Eugene Field
 Out on the mountain over the town,
All night long, all night long,
The trolls go up and the trolls go down,
Bearing their packs and crooning a song;
And this is the song the hill-folk croon,
As they trudge in the light of the misty moon,--
This is ever their dolorous tune:
"Gold, gold! ever more gold,--
Bright red gold for dearie!"

Deep in the hill the...Read more of this...

Doors Doors Doors

by Anne Sexton
 1. Old Man

Old man, it's four flights up and for what?
Your room is hardly bigger than your bed.
Puffing as you climb, you are a brown woodcut
stooped over the thin tail and the wornout tread.

The room will do. All that's left of the old life
is jampacked on shelves from floor to ceiling
like a supermarket: your books, your dead wife
generously fat...Read more of this...

Late Love

by Jackie Kay
 How they strut about, people in love,
How tall they grow, pleased with themselves,
Their hair, glossy, their skin shining.
They don't remember who they have been.

How filmic they are just for this time.
How important they've become - secret, above
The order of things, the dreary mundane.
Every church bell ringing, a fresh sign.

How dull the lot that are not in love.
Their clothes shabby,...Read more of this...

The Author to Her Book

by Anne Bradstreet
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,
Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,
Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,
Where errors were not lessened (all may judge).
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast...Read more of this...

Nicholas Nye

by Walter de la Mare
 Thistle and darnell and dock grew there, 
And a bush, in the corner, of may, 
On the orchard wall I used to sprawl 
In the blazing heat of the day; 

Half asleep and half awake, 
While the birds went twittering by, 
And nobody there my lone to share 
But Nicholas Nye. 

Nicholas Nye was lean and gray, 
Lame of...Read more of this...

This Gloomy Northern Day

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 THIS gloomy northern day,
Or this yet gloomier night,
Has moved a something high
In my cold heart; and I,
That do not often pray,
Would pray to-night.

And first on Thee I call
For bread, O God of might!
Enough of bread for all, -
That through the famished town
Cold hunger may lie down
With none to-night.

I pray for hope no less,
Strong-sinewed hope, O Lord,
That to the struggling...Read more of this...

Houses -- so the Wise Men tell me

by Emily Dickinson
 "Houses" -- so the Wise Men tell me --
"Mansions"! Mansions must be warm!
Mansions cannot let the tears in,
Mansions must exclude the storm!

"Many Mansions," by "his Father,"
I don't know him; snugly built!
Could the Children find the way there --
Some, would even trudge tonight!...Read more of this...

Codicil

by Derek Walcott
 Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

Above the beached, rotting pirogues,
they were a venomous beaked cloud at...Read more of this...

Botany Bay Eclogues 03 - Humphrey And William

by Robert Southey
 (Time, Noon.)


HUMPHREY:

See'st thou not William that the scorching Sun
By this time half his daily race has run?
The savage thrusts his light canoe to shore
And hurries homeward with his fishy store.
Suppose we leave awhile this stubborn soil
To eat our dinner and to rest from toil!


WILLIAM:

Agreed. Yon tree whose purple gum bestows
A ready medicine for the sick-man's woes,
Forms with its shadowy...Read more of this...

The Drowned Man

by Alexander Pushkin
 Children running into izba,
Calling father, dripping sweat:
"Daddy, daddy! come -- there is a
Deadman caught inside our net."
"Fancy, fancy fabrication..."
Grumbled off their weary Pa,
"Have these imps imagination!
Deadman, really! ya-ha-ha...

"Well... the court may come to bother -
What'll I say before the judge?
Hey you brats, go have your mother
Bring my coat; I better trudge...
Show me, where?" -- "Right there, Dad, farther!"
On the...Read more of this...

At the Top of My voice

by Vladimir Mayakovsky
 My most respected
 comrades of posterity!
Rummaging among
 these days’ 
 petrified crap,
exploring the twilight of our times,
you,
 possibly,
 will inquire about me too.

And, possibly, your scholars
 will declare,
with their erudition overwhelming
 a swarm of problems;
once there lived
 a certain champion of boiled water,
and inveterate enemy of raw water.

Professor,
 take off your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
 those times
 and...Read more of this...

The Enthusiast

by Herman Melville
 "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him"

Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In youth's magnanimous years - 
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant, and trudge where worldlings go,
Conform and own them right?

Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? The heart
Pine for the heartless ones...Read more of this...

A Rolling Stone

by Robert William Service
 There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
 And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
 The...Read more of this...

In the Pink

by Siegfried Sassoon
 So Davies wrote: ' This leaves me in the pink. ' 
Then scrawled his name: ' Your loving sweetheart Willie ' 
With crosses for a hug. He'd had a drink 
Of rum and tea; and, though the barn was chilly, 
For once his blood ram warm; he had pay to spend, 
Winter was passing; soon the year would mend....Read more of this...

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