Famous Marine Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Marine poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous marine poems. These examples illustrate what a famous marine poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Sexton, Anne
...ather men are wringing their necks,
where the sea has turned into a pond of urine.
There is no place to wash and no marine beings to stir in.
In this hole your mother is crying out each day.
Your father is eating cake and digging her grave.
In this hole your baby is strangling. Your mouth is clay.
Your eyes are made of glass. They break. You are not brave.
You are alone like a dog in a kennel. Your hands
break out in boils. Your ar...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...rge amativeness,
The perfect equality of the female with the male, the fluid movement of the population,
The superior marine, free commerce, fisheries, whaling, gold-digging,
Wharf-hemm’d cities, railroad and steamboat lines, intersecting all points,
Factories, mercantile life, labor-saving machinery, the north-east, north-west,
south-west,
Manhattan firemen, the Yankee swap, southern plantation life,
Slavery—the murderous, treacherous conspiracy to raise it upon the ru...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...et not exalt alone;
At his right hand stood winged Love, and on
His left sat smiling Beauty's paragon.
Far as the mariner on highest mast
Can see all round upon the calmed vast,
So wide was Neptune's hall: and as the blue
Doth vault the waters, so the waters drew
Their doming curtains, high, magnificent,
Aw'd from the throne aloof;--and when storm-rent
Disclos'd the thunder-gloomings in Jove's air;
But sooth'd as now, flash'd sudden everywhere,
Noiseless, sub-marine clo...Read more of this...
by
Breton, Andre
...throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop ...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...Black is the hate that sends them
To murder but not to fight.
Flower of the German Culture,
Boast of the Kaiser's Marine,
Choose for your emblem the vulture,
Cowardly, cruel, obscene!
Forth from her sheltered haven
Our peaceful ship glides slow,
Noiseless in flight as a raven,
Gray as a hoodie crow.
She doubles and turns in her bearing,
Like a twisting plover she goes;
The way of her westward faring
Only the captain knows.
In a lonely bay concealing
She l...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...With whistling winds and music of the waves—the large imperious waves—In
such,
Or some lone bark, buoy’d on the dense marine,
Where, joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether, mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star
at night,
By sailors young and old, haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.
2
Here are our thoughts—voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may th...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...Is it too late to touch you, Dear?
We this moment knew --
Love Marine and Love terrene --
Love celestial too --...Read more of this...
by
Lux, Thomas
...As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge,
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell-plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food traps,
fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts,
sand grains, pollen....And inside
these jagged f...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...mangled at one tip,
but constantly
reborn,
at anchor in the current,
winged fins
windmilling
in the swift
flight
of
the
marine
shadow,
a mourning arrow,
dart of the sea,
olive, oily fish.
I saw you dead,
a deceased king
of my own ocean,
green
assault, silver
submarine fir,
seed
of seaquakes,
now
only dead remains,
yet
in all the market
yours
was the only
purposeful form
amid
the bewildering rout
of nature;
amid the fragile greens
you were
a solitary ship,
armed
among the...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the da...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the da...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...t mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone
cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street's
summer green leafed trees.
III
This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you
father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress
and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers,
you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and
consonants to breath's end
take this i...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...vivi tuoi, e l'un l'altro si rode
di quei ch'un muro e una fossa serra.
Cerca, misera, intorno da le prode
le tue marine, e poi ti guarda in seno,
s'alcuna parte in te di pace gode.
Che val perché ti racconciasse il freno
Iustiniano, se la sella è vota?
Sanz'esso fora la vergogna meno.
Ahi gente che dovresti esser devota,
e lasciar seder Cesare in la sella,
se bene intendi ciò che Dio ti nota,
guarda come esta fiera è fatta fella
per non esser corretta da li ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...with glass and iron façades.
Gladdening the sun and sky—enhued in cheerfulest hues,
Bronze, lilac, robin’s-egg, marine and crimson,
Over whose golden roof shall flaunt, beneath thy banner, Freedom,
The banners of The States, the flags of every land,
A brood of lofty, fair, but lesser Palaces shall cluster.
Somewhere within the walls of all,
Shall all that forwards perfect human life be started,
Tried, taught, advanced, visibly exhibited.
Here shall you...Read more of this...
by
Turner Smith, Charlotte
...chalky bourn,
Her gay unconscious children, soon amus'd;
Who pick the fretted stone, or glossy shell,
Or crimson plant marine: or they contrive
The fairy vessel, with its ribband sail
And gilded paper pennant: in the pool,
Left by the salt wave on the yielding sands,
They launch the mimic navy--Happy age!
Unmindful of the miseries of Man!--
Alas! too long a victim to distress,
Their Mother, lost in melancholy thought,
Lull'd for a moment by the murmurs low
Of sullen billows,...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...rs upon the ways.
The Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard is coming
In his ten-oared barge from the King's Stairs;
The Marine's band will play "God Save Great George Our King";
And there is to be a dinner afterwards at the Crown, with speeches.
The wind screeches, and flaps the flags till they pound like hammers.
The wind hums over the ship,
And slips round the dog-shores,
Jostling them almost to falling.
There is no time now to wait for Commissioners and marine ...Read more of this...
by
Rakosi, Carl
...and is the largest
cell in the world.
Young sea horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old,
nobody has ever
seen this marine
freak blink.
It radiates on
terminal vertebra
a comb of twenty
upright spines
and curls
its rocky tail.
Saltflush lobster
bull encrusted swims
backwards from the rock.
From The Collected Poems of Carl Rakosi. Copyright © 1986 by Callman Rawley....Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...n the love of my woman.
I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok
crystallize in The Twelve. Was between
the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana
one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their
noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.
They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one
with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets,
and the echo of power at the end...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...—and
that is the last of them!
Of the solemn and murky mystery about the fate of the President;
Of the flower of the marine science of fifty generations, founder’d off the Northeast
coast, and going down—Of the steamship Arctic going down,
Of the veil’d tableau—Women gather’d together on deck, pale, heroic,
waiting the
moment that draws so close—O the moment!
A huge sob—A few bubbles—the white foam spirting up—And then the women
gone,
Sinking there, while the passion...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.
And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say three things and I always get by—gimme a plate of ham and eggs—how much?—and—do you love me, kid?...Read more of this...
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