Famous Attacks Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Attacks poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous attacks poems. These examples illustrate what a famous attacks poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Chris Tusa
Maybe it’s Emphysema, a shiny black jewel of phlegm
humming like a clump of bees in my chest.
Perhaps a tumor crawling in the crook of my armpit,
a blood clot opening like a tiny red flower in my brain.
Maybe it’s too early to show up on an X-ray,
a kind of cancerous seed planted deep
in my intestine,...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
THE Epigrams bearing the title of XENIA were written
by Goethe and Schiller together, having been first occasioned by
some violent attacks made on them by some insignificant writers.
They are extremely numerous, but scarcely any of them could be translated
into English. Those here given are merely presented as a specimen.
GOD gave to mortals birth,
In his own image...Read more of this...
by
Anne Kingsmill Finch
When such a day, blesst the Arcadian plaine,
Warm without Sun, and shady without rain,
Fann'd by an air, that scarsly bent the flowers,
Or wav'd the woodbines, on the summer bowers,
The Nymphs disorder'd beauty cou'd not fear,
Nor ruffling winds uncurl'd the Shepheards hair,
On the fresh grasse, they trod their measures light,
And a long Evening made, from noon, to night.
Come then my...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
My friend attacks my friend!
Oh Battle picturesque!
Then I turn Soldier too,
And he turns Satirist!
How martial is this place!
Had I a mighty gun
I think I'd shoot the human race
And then to glory run!...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Roach, foulest of creatures,
who attacks with yellow teeth
and an army of cousins big as shoes,
you are lumps of coal that are mechanized
and when I turn on the light you scuttle
into the corners and there is this hiss upon the land.
Yet I know you are only the common angel
turned into, by way of enchantment, the ugliest.
Your uncle was made into...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year 1815, and on the 18th day of June,
That British cannon, against the French army, loudly did boom,
Upon the ever memorable bloody field of Waterloo;
Which Napoleon remembered while in St. Helena, and bitterly did rue.
The morning of the 18th was gloomy and cheerless to behold,
But the British soon recovered from the severe cold
That they had...Read more of this...
by
Wilfred Owen
I
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us . . .
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
But nothing happens.
Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
Like twitching agonies of men...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Apart sweet women (for whom Heaven be blessed),
Comrades, you cannot think how thin and blue
Look the leftovers of mankind that rest,
Now that the cream has been skimmed off in you.
War has its horrors, but has this of good --
That its sure processes sort out and bind
Brave hearts in one intrepid brotherhood
And leave...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
called out by the sun
this easter saturday morning
i'm sitting on a bank
in pistyllgwyn
(house of the sacred spring)
against a tall oak
(close to a daffodil-clump)
overlooking the road
between brechfa and abergorlech
on the west side of the valley
of the afon cothi
reading a poem by taliesin
from the sixth century
(the first poem in the oxford book
of welsh poetry in english)
which begins
there was a...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
( I )
for ‘JC’ of the TLS
Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam
Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there
Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,
Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone –
Vague sad memories of mam n’dad
Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.
Hosannas of sweet May mornings
Whitsun glory of lilac blooming
Sixty years on I run and run
From death,...Read more of this...
by
Galway Kinnell
At intermission I find her backstage
still practicing the piece coming up next.
She calls it the "solo in high dreary."
Her bow niggles at the string like a hand
stroking skin it never wanted to touch.
Probably under her scorn she is sick
that she can't do better by it. As I am,
at the dreary in me, such as the disparity
between all the tenderness...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I looked like Abraham Lincoln.
I was one of you, Spoon River, in all fellowship,
But standing for the rights of property and for order.
A regular church attendant,
Sometimes appearing in your town meetings to warn you
Against the evils of discontent and envy,
And to denounce those who tried to destroy the Union,
And to point to the peril of the Knights of Labor.
My...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
OVER the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten’d—Affection shall solve the problems of Freedom yet;
Those who love each other shall become invincible—they shall yet make Columbia
victorious.
Sons of the Mother of All! you shall yet be victorious!
You shall yet laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the earth.
No danger shall balk Columbia’s...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
STATES!
Were you looking to be held together by the lawyers?
By an agreement on a paper? Or by arms?
Away!
I arrive, bringing these, beyond all the forces of courts and arms,
These! to hold you together as firmly as the earth itself is held together.
The old breath of life, ever new,
Here! I pass it by contact...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Men fight all shapes and sizes as the racing horses run,
And no man knows his courage till he stands before a gun.
At mixed-up fighting, hand to hand, and clawing men about
They reckon Fuzzy-Wuzzy is the hottest fighter out.
But Fuzzy gives himself away -- his style is out of date,
He charges like a driven grouse...Read more of this...
by
A S J Tessimond
This trumpeter of nothingness, employed
To keep our reason dull and null and void.
This man of wind and froth and flux will sell
The wares of any who reward him well.
Praising whatever he is paid to praise,
He hunts for ever-newer, smarter ways
To make the gilt seen gold; the shoddy, silk;
To cheat us legally; to bluff and bilk
By methods which no jury...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.
The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.
There is a dignity to this; there is a formality...Read more of this...
by
Forrest Hamer
It was 1963 or 4, summer,
and my father was driving our family
from Ft. Hood to North Carolina in our 56 Buick.
We'd been hearing about Klan attacks, and we knew
Mississippi to be more dangerous than usual.
Dark lay hanging from the trees the way moss did,
and when it moaned light against the windows
that night, my father pulled off the road to...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
I DREAM’D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of
the
earth;
I dream’d that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in...Read more of this...
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