Famous Beheaded Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Beheaded poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous beheaded poems. These examples illustrate what a famous beheaded poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Lima, Rossy Evelin
...sail at will.
My shattered hands are deer crowns,
rooted stems
that whittle their own path.
Hands so free!
I am a beheaded woman,
a glorified decapitated woman.
My head is a nimbus,
for I am the queen
and my body is the empire.
I
go on
limitless,
vacant in all my sovereignty.
The shackles that once held me
slid through my broken bones.
I am the liberated severed woman,
the woman without yoke or teth...Read more of this...
by
Manrique, Jorge
...we have known
When loved and dreaded,—
What need to tell of his disaster,
Since we behold him overthrown
And swift beheaded!
His treasures that defied accounting,
His manors and his feudal lands,
His boundless power,—
What more than tears were their amounting?
What more than bonds to tie his hands
At life's last hour?
That other twain, Grand-Masters solely,
Yet with the fortunes as of kings
Fraternal reigning,—
Who brought the high as well as lowly
Submiss...Read more of this...
by
Matthew, John
...you with awe,
When you are the city of kingly fratricides and parricides.
Remember how Dara Shukoh was marched and beheaded,
In your own street of Chandni Chowk, of not long ago?
The secrets of your devious present and past mingle,
Where now stand glitzy malls, I know, blood had flowed,
In your dark corners soldiers, spies, princes plotted to kill,
You witnessed the dethroning of emperor Shah Jehan,
And the ascendance of his wily progeny, Aurangazeb,
And you covered you...Read more of this...
by
Hirsch, Edward
...d man's eyelids
like eyebrights, like medieval trumpet flowers
that will flourish, this time, in the shade.
Let the beheaded tulips glisten with rain.
Lay these words on his drowned eyelids
like coins or stars, ancillary eyes.
Canopy the swollen sky with sunspots
while thunder addresses the ground.
Syllable by syllable, clawed and handled,
the words have united in grief.
It is the ghostly hour of lamentation,
the void's turn, mournful and absolute.
...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...
You enter now,
Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,
And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse
To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,
A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth
Hangs in its lugubious pout. Where are
The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?
The red, royal robes of Phedre? The tear-dazzled
Sorrows of Malfi's gentle duchess?
Gone
In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles
And sinews bunched, victorious, as the c...Read more of this...
by
Heaney, Seamus
...rkings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence....Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...is he who is sparing in his cups.
That they are such as are most thirsty of man's blood—
Yet he will see a slave beheaded whilst he sups.
But be this as it all may, glory gilds his reign,
He has overrun Africa, the old and black;
Asia as well—holding them both beneath a rain
Of bloody drops from scaffold, pyre, the stake, or rack,
To leave his empire's confines, one must run a race
Far past the river Baxtile southward; in the north,
To the rude, ro...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...nt came over the shoes.
But each time the twelve dancing princesses
gave the snoopy man a Mickey Finn
and so he was beheaded.
Poof! Like a basketball.
It so happened that a poor soldier
heard about these strange goings on
and decided to give it a try.
On his way to the castle
he met an old old woman.
Age, for a change, was of some use.
She wasn't stuffed in a nursing home.
She told him not to drink a drop of wine
and gave him a cloak that would ma...Read more of this...
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