Famous Battering Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Battering poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous battering poems. These examples illustrate what a famous battering poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Nandy, Pritish
...darkness flowers.
If only you could reach me, I would take me along with
you. We would listen to the frenzied wings battering
at the wind; we would watch the trees go down on their
knees before the evening sunlight on the hills. And
before my hands can memorise the braille of your
beautiful movements, I shall assume whatever promise
there is in silence and allow your slender body to wrap
itself around me. Your eyes return my words more
beautifully than the silence ...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...tent to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh a...Read more of this...
by
Heaney, Seamus
...ates inexorably.
II
And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely ...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...evening, a rope of pearls on her white shoulders … and a speaking, brooding black velvet, relapsing to the voiceless … battering Russian marches on a piano … drive of blizzards across Nebraska.
Yes, riding horseback on hills by the sea … sitting at the ivory keys in black velvet, a rope of pearls on white shoulders....Read more of this...
by
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
...rs,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!...Read more of this...
by
Housman, A E
...erefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.
ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reput...Read more of this...
by
Kunitz, Stanley
...cent image swims
through a mirror that flows,
you would surprise yourself
in that other flesh
heavy with milt,
bruised, battering toward the dam
that lips the orgiastic pool.
Come. Bathe in these waters.
Increase and die.
If the power were granted you
to break out of your cells,
but the imagination fails
and the doors of the senses close
on the child within,
you would dare to be changed,
as you are changing now,
into the shape you dread
beyond the merely hum...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...Rain filled the streets
once a year, rising almost
to door and window sills,
battering walls and roofs
until it cleaned away the mess
we'd made. My father told
me this, he told me it ran
downtown and spilled into
the river, which in turn
emptied finally into the sea.
He said this only once
while I sat on the arm
of his chair and stared out
at the banks of gray snow
melting as the March rain
streaked past. All ...Read more of this...
by
Stafford, William
...requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
they class my voice among tentative things,
And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.
Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
it bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean--
well, Right has a long and intricate name.
And the saying of it is a lonely t...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...rty-pounder guns.
Jiggery-jolty to and fro,
Each as big as a launch in tow --
Blind-dumb-broad-breeched--beggars o' battering-guns!
My Lord the Elephant....Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...less pealed
With noises loud and ruinous (to compare
Great things with small) than when Bellona storms
With all her battering engines, bent to rase
Some capital city; or less than if this frame
Of Heaven were falling, and these elements
In mutiny had from her axle torn
The steadfast Earth. At last his sail-broad vans
He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke
Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league,
As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides
Audaciou...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...t vaunts
Girls fit—each one—for queen!
Had they but promised us the pick,
Perchance we had joined, all;
But battering bastions built of brick—
Bah, give me wooden wall!
By Leghorn, twenty caravels
Came 'cross our lonely sail—
Spinoza's Sea-Invincibles!
But, whew! our shots like hail
Made shortish work of galley long
And chubby sailing craft—
Our making ready first to close
Sent them a-spinning aft.
Off Marseilles, ne'er by sun f...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...he rush of friend and foe thither,
The siege of revolted lieges determin’d for liberty,
The summons to surrender, the battering at castle gates, the truce and parley;
The sack of an old city in its time,
The bursting in of mercenaries and bigots tumultuously and disorderly,
Roar, flames, blood, drunkenness, madness,
Goods freely rifled from houses and temples, screams of women in the gripe of brigands,
Craft and thievery of camp-followers, men running, old persons despa...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...a,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shi...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...the red star burn.
"One man shall drive a hundred,
As the dead kings drave;
Before me rocking hosts be riven,
And battering cohorts backwards driven,
For I am the first king known of Heaven
That has been struck like a slave.
"Up on the old white road, brothers,
Up on the Roman walls!
For this is the night of the drawing of swords,
And the tainted tower of the heathen hordes
Leans to our hammers, fires and cords,
Leans a little and falls.
"Follow the star that ...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...mother trucks,
its engines of amputation.
Whereas last night
the cock knew its way home,
as stiff as a hammer,
battering in with all
its awful power.
That theater.
Today it is tender,
a small bird,
as soft as a baby's hand.
She is the house.
He is the steeple.
When they **** they are God.
When they break away they are God.
When they snore they are God.
In the morning thet butter the toast.
They don't say much.
They...Read more of this...
by
Southey, Robert
...stone lake.
And the loud commotion, like the rushing of ocean,
Grew momently more and more;
And strokes as of a battering ram
Did shake the strong church door.
The bellmen, they for very fear
Could toll the bell no longer;
And still as louder grew the strokes
Their fear it grew the stronger.
The Monk and Nun forgot their beads,
They fell on the ground in dismay;
There was not a single Saint in heaven
To whom they did not pray.
And the Choriste...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...I
I AM the undertow
Washing tides of power
Battering the pillars
Under your things of high law.
II
I am a sleepless
Slowfaring eater,
Maker of rust and rot
In your bastioned fastenings,
Caissons deep.
III
I am the Law
Older than you
And your builders proud.
I am deaf
In all days
Whether you
Say "Yes" or "No".
I am the crumbler:
To-morrow....Read more of this...
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