Famous Accident Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Accident poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous accident poems. These examples illustrate what a famous accident poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Plath, Sylvia
...ere bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...scapeth by the flight,
And makes her absence valiant, not her might.
''O, pardon me, in that my boast is true:
The accident which brought me to her eye
Upon the moment did her force subdue,
And now she would the caged cloister fly:
Religious love put out Religion's eye:
Not to be tempted, would she be immured,
And now, to tempt, all liberty procured.
''How mighty then you are, O, hear me tell!
The broken bosoms that to me belong
Have emptied all their fountains in m...Read more of this...
by
Silverstein, Shel
...s tent,
With his head drooped low and his shoulders bent.
And he said,"THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT -
I'M FUNNY JUST BY ACCIDENT."
And while the world laughed outside.
Cloony the Clown sat down and cried....Read more of this...
by
Ammons, A R
...1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:
an order of instinct prevails
through all accidents of circumstance,
though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
webs:
you can go all
around the fringing attachments
and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
numerous occasions of accident:
2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:
how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you coul...Read more of this...
by
Moore, Marianne
...aking of the serpent --
that shed snakeskin in the history of politeness
not to be returned to again --
that invaluable accident
exonerating Adam.
And he has beauty also;
it's distressing -- the O thou
to whom, from whom,
without whom nothing -- Adam;
"something feline,
something colubrine" -- how true!
a crouching mythological monster
in that Persian miniature of emerald mines,
raw silk -- ivory white, snow white,
oyster white and six others --
that paddock full of leopa...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...e mind
of the twentieth century —
this world of wonders
not divine creation
but a big bang
of blind chance,
purposeless accident,
mother earth’s children,
their living and loving,
their delight in being
not joy but chemistry,
stimulus, reflex,
valueless, meaningless,
while to our machines
we impute intelligence,
in computers and robots
we store information
and call it knowledge,
we seek guidance
by dialling numbers,
pressing buttons,
throwing switches,
in place of family
our...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...n in proportion to the basin?
No, none of these has raised me to my throne
Of intellectual dissatisfaction,
But the sad accident of having seen
Our actual mountains given in a map
Of early times as twice the height they are—
Ten thousand feet instead of only five—
Which shows how sad an accident may be.
Five thousand is no longer high enough.
Whereas I never had a good idea
About improving people in the world,
Here I am overfertile in suggestion,
And cannot rest from ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...by secretly thinking about
it too hard.
A year later I found out the true significance of 208's
name, purely by accident. My telephone rang one Saturday
morning when the sun was shining on the hills. It was a
close friend of mine and he said, "I'm in the slammer. Come
and get me out. They're burning black candles around the
drunk tank. "
I went down to the Hall of Justice to bail my friend out,
and discovered that 208 is the room number of t...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...towering up behind her red dress.
There was a brick john between her dress and the church. It
was there by no accident. Ladies to the left and gents to the
right.
A red dress, I thought. Wasn't the woman who set John
Dillinger up for the FBI wearing a red dress? They called
her "The Woman in Red. "
It seemed to me that was right. It was a red dress, but so
far, John Dillinger was nowhere in sight. my daughter
played alone in the sand...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...usedly at first; and
afterward more distinctly relating the Catastrophe, what Samson
had done to the Philistins, and by accident to himself; wherewith
the Tragedy ends.
The Persons
Samson.
Manoa the father of Samson.
Dalila his wife.
Harapha of Gath.
Publick Officer.
Messenger.
Chorus of Danites
The Scene before the Prison in Gaza.
Sam: A little onward lend thy guiding hand
To these dark steps, a little further on;
For yonder bank hath ch...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...rent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze
Round Ridley or Servetus; all thy days
Smell scorched; I would
"-- Thou base-born Accident of time and place --
Bigot Pretender unto Judgment's throne --
Bastard, that claimest with a cunning face
Those rights the true, true Son of Man doth own
By Love's authority -- thou Rebel cold
At head of civil wars and quarrels old --
Thou Knife on a throne --
"I would thou left'st me free, to live with love,
And faith, that through the love of lov...Read more of this...
by
Jeffers, Robinson
...her
Future, and the last man dying
Without succession under the confident eyes of the stars.
It was only a moment's accident,
The race that plagued us; the world resumes the old lonely immortal
Splendor; from here I can even
Perceive that that snuffed candle had something . . . a fantastic virtue,
A faint and unshapely pathos . . .
So death will flatter them at last: what, even the bald ape's by-shot
Was moderately admirable?
VI. Palinode
All...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...rogue to run at a proper rate,
And our wine-skin, tight once, shows each flaccid dent,
I shall drop in with---as if by accident---
``You never knew, then, how it all ended,
``What fortune good or bad attended
``The little lady your Queen befriended?''
---And when that's told me, what's remaining?
This world's too hard for my explaining.
The same wise judge of matters equine
Who still preferred some slim four-year-old
To the big-boned stock of mighty Berold,
And, fur stro...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...nd Miriam found it out . . .
And after that, when eight deep years had passed—
Or nine—we met once more,—by accident . . .
But was it just by accident, I wonder,
She played this tune?—Or what, then, was intended? . . .
V. MELODY IN A RESTAURANT
The cigarette-smoke loops and slides above us,
Dipping and swirling as the waiter passes;
You strike a match and stare upon the flame.
The tiny fire leaps in your eyes a moment,
And dwindl...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...ting Sound and Sense,
And careless of all consequence:
"Mind - I believe - is Essence - Ent -
Abstract - that is - an Accident -
Which we - that is to say - I meant - "
When, with quick breath and cheeks all flushed,
At length his speech was somewhat hushed,
She looked at him, and he was crushed.
It needed not her calm reply:
She fixed him with a stony eye,
And he could neither fight nor fly.
While she dissected, word by word,
His speech, half guessed at and h...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...
of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism,
as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
In the first part of Part V three themes are employed:
the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous
(see Miss Weston's book) and the present decay of eastern Europe.
357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush
which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of
B...Read more of this...
by
Brecht, Bertolt
...street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?
It is true: I earn my living
But, believe me, it is only an accident.
Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill.
By chance I was spared. (If my luck leaves me
I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it!
But how can I eat and drink
When my food is snatched from the hungry
And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty?
And yet I eat and drink.
I would gladly be wise.
Th...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...it's hard not to make
a sort of furtive prayer from this skin's scrawl,
his UNITED mean 'in Heaven' for their sake,
an accident of meaning to redeem
an act intended as mere desecration
and make the thoughtless spraying of his team
apply to higher things, and to the nation.
Some, where kids use aerosols, use giant signs
to let the people know who's forged their fetters
Like PRI CE O WALES above West Yorkshire mines
(no prizes for who nicked the missing letters!)
The big...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...
That street which was not on the map entire!
Upon the sound of voice behind an open door,
Upon the sight of every accidental letter,
You will remember: "Here has she herself
Come to assist my disbelief unfettered."
x x x
Did not scold me, did not praise me,
Like friends and like enemies.
Only left his soul to me
And then said, "Now keep in peace."
And one thing worries me so:
If this moment he will die,
God's archangel will come to me
...Read more of this...
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