Famous Abrupt Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Abrupt poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous abrupt poems. These examples illustrate what a famous abrupt poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Rupert Brooke
In a flowered dell the Lady Venus stood,
Amazed with sorrow. Down the morning one
Far golden horn in the gold of trees and sun
Rang out; and held; and died.… She thought the wood
Grew quieter. Wing, and leaf, and pool of light
Forgot to dance. Dumb lay the unfalling stream;
Life one eternal instant rose in dream
Clear out...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
He said that he had hurt himself on a wall or that he had fallen.
But there was probably another reason
for the wounded and bandaged shoulder.
With a somewhat abrupt movement,
to bring down from a shelf some
photographs that he wanted to see closely,
the bandage was untied and a little blood ran.
I bandaged the shoulder again, and while bandaging it
I was somewhat...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
I
What's become of Waring
Since he gave us all the slip,
Chose land-travel or seafaring,
Boots and chest, or staff and scrip,
Rather than pace up and down
Any longer London-town?
Who'd have guessed it from his lip,
Or his brow's accustomed bearing,
On the night he thus took ship,
Or started landward?—little caring
For us, it seems, who supped together,
(Friends of his too, I remember)
And walked home through...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
As the night was falling slowly down on city, town and bush,
From a slum in Jones's Alley sloped the Captain of the Push;
And he scowled towards the North, and he scowled towards the South,
As he hooked his little finger in the corners of his mouth.
Then his whistle, loud and shrill, woke the echoes of the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth
Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark
In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts
Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s
Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…
Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,
Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol
Hold no sway on ward one, nor even...Read more of this...
by
Marriott Edgar
I'll tell you a seafaring story,
Of a lad who won honour and fame
Wi' Nelson at Battle 'Trafalgar,
Joe Moggeridge, that were his name.
He were one of the crew of the Victory,
His job when a battle begun
Was to take cannon balls out o' basket
And shove 'em down front end o' gun.
One day him...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
There's been a Death, in the Opposite House,
As lately as Today --
I know it, by the numb look
Such Houses have -- alway --
The Neighbors rustle in and out --
The Doctor -- drives away --
A Window opens like a Pod --
Abrupt -- mechanically --
Somebody flings a Mattress out --
The Children hurry by --
They wonder if it died -- on that...Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The poet wishes well to the divine genius of Purcell
and praises him that, whereas other musicians have
given utterance to the moods of man's mind, he has,
beyond that, uttered in notes the very make and
species of man as created both in him and in all men
generally.
Have, fair fallen, O fair,...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Oh! the calm summer garden where nothing moves! Unless it be, near the middle of the bright and radiant pond, the goldfish like tongues of fire.
They are our memories playing in our thoughts that are calm and stilled and limpid, like the trustful and restful water.
And the water brightens and the fishes leap at the abrupt and marvellous sun, not...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
On the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a
girl are sitting,
She across his knee and they are looking face into face
Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in
silence to each other.
A funnel of white ranges the blue dusk from an out-
going boat,
Playing its searchlight, puzzled, abrupt, over a streak of
green,
And two on...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Read by the poet at The Public Ceremonial of The Naional Institute
of Arts and Letters at Carnegie Hall, New York, January 18th, 1941.
Great Muse, that from this hall absent for long
Hast never been,
Great Muse of Song,
Colossal Muse of mighty Melody,
Vocal Calliope,
With thine august and contrapuntal brow
And thy vast throat builded for Harmony,
For the strict monumental pure design,
And...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
The Russian grin bellows his condolence
tó the family: ah but it's Kay,
& Ted, & Chris & Anne,
Henry thinks of: who eased his fearful way
from here, in here, to there. This wants thought.
I won't make it out.
Maybe the source of noble such may come
clearer to dazzled Henry. It may come.
I'd say it will come with pain,
in mystery. I'd rather leave...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
I SEE before me now, a traveling army halting;
Below, a fertile valley spread, with barns, and the orchards of summer;
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt in places, rising high;
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes, dingily seen;
The numerous camp-fires scatter’d near and far, some away up on the mountain;
The shadowy forms...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
In a flowered dell the Lady Venus stood,
Amazed with sorrow. Down the morning one
Far golden horn in the gold of trees and sun
Rang out; and held; and died. . . . She thought the wood
Grew quieter. Wing, and leaf, and pool of light
Forgot to dance. Dumb lay the unfalling stream;
Life one eternal instant rose in dream
Clear out of time,...Read more of this...
by
Margaret Atwood
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
Bells are booming down the bohreens,
White the mist along the grass,
Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens
Move between the fields to Mass.
Twisted trees of small green apple
Guard the decent whitewashed chapel,
Gilded gates and doorway grained,
Pointed windows richly stained
With many-coloured Munich glass.
See the black-shawled congregations
On the broidered vestment gaze
Murmer past the painted stations
As Thy Sacred Heart displays
Lush Kildare of scented meadows,
Roscommon,...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
IN a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
The fields fall...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
AS toilsome I wander’d Virginia’s woods,
To the music of rustling leaves, kick’d by my feet, (for ’twas autumn,)
I mark’d at the foot of a tree the grave of a soldier,
Mortally wounded he, and buried on the retreat, (easily all could I understand;)
The halt of a mid-day hour, when up! no time to lose—yet this sign...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Slessor
After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country
As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.
And over the flat earth of empty...Read more of this...
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