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Best Famous Black Dog Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Black Dog poems. This is a select list of the best famous Black Dog poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Black Dog poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of black dog poems.

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Written by Les Murray | Create an image from this poem

Travels With John Hunter

 We who travel between worlds 
lose our muscle and bone. 
I was wheeling a barrow of earth 
when agony bayoneted me. 

I could not sit, or lie down, 
or stand, in Casualty. 
Stomach-calming clay caked my lips, 
I turned yellow as the moon 

and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel 
in a hospital where I met no one 
so much was my liver now my dire 
preoccupation. I was sped down a road. 

of treetops and fishing-rod lightpoles 
towards the three persons of God 
and the three persons of John Hunter 
Hospital. Who said We might lose this one. 

Twenty days or to the heat-death 
of the Universe have the same duration: 
vaguely half a hour. I awoke 
giggling over a joke 

about Paul Kruger in Johannesburg 
and missed the white court stockings 
I half remembered from my prone 
still voyage beyond flesh and bone. 

I asked my friend who got new lungs 
How long were you crazy, coming back? 
Five days, he said. Violent and mad. 
Fictive Afrikaner police were at him, 

not unworldly Oom Paul Kruger. 
Valerie, who had sat the twenty days 
beside me, now gently told me tales 
of my time-warp. The operative canyon 

stretched, stapled, with dry roseate walls 
down my belly. Seaweed gel 
plugged views of my pluck and offal. 
The only poet whose liver 

damage hadn't been self-inflicted, 
grinned my agent. A momentarily 
holed bowel had released flora 
who live in us and will eat us 

when we stop feeding them the earth. 
I had, it did seem, rehearsed 
the private office of the grave, 
ceased excreting, made corpse gases 

all while liana'd in tubes 
and overseen by cockpit instruments 
that beeped or struck up Beethoven's 
Fifth at behests of fluid. 

I also hear when I lay lipless 
and far away I was anointed 
first by a mild metaphoric church 
then by the Church of no metaphors. 

Now I said, signing a Dutch contract 
in a hand I couldn't recognise, 
let's go and eat Chinese soup 
and drive to Lake Macquarie. Was I 

not renewed as we are in Heaven? 
In fact I could hardly endure 
Earth gravity, and stayed weak and cranky 
till the soup came, squid and vegetables, 

pure Yang. And was sane thereafter. 
It seemed I'd also travelled 
in a Spring-in-Winter love-barque of cards, 
of flowers and phone calls and letters, 

concern I'd never dreamed was there 
when black kelp boiled in my head. 
I'd awoken amid my State funeral, 
nevermore to eat my liver 

or feed it to the Black Dog, depression 
which the three Johns Hunter seem 
to have killed with their scalpels: 
it hasn't found its way home, 

where I now dodder and mend 
in thanks for devotion, for the ambulance 
this time, for the hospital fork lift, 
for pethidine, and this face of deity: 

not the foreknowledge of death 
but the project of seeing conscious life 
rescued from death defines and will 
atone for the human.


Written by Louis MacNeice | Create an image from this poem

Soap Suds

 This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop 
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.
Written by R S Thomas | Create an image from this poem

The Village

 Scarcely a street, too few houses
To merit the title; just a way between
The one tavern and the one shop
That leads nowhere and fails at the top
Of the short hill, eaten away
By long erosion of the green tide
Of grass creeping perpetually nearer 
This last outpost of time past.

So little happens; the black dog
Cracking his fleas in the hot sun
Is history. Yet the girl who crosses
From door to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day's two dimensions.

Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On a slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any posed
By great Plato's solitary mind.
Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

Five Flights Up

 Still dark.
The unknown bird sits on his usual branch.
The little dog next door barks in his sleep
inquiringly, just once.
Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires
once or twice, quavering.
Questions--if that is what they are--
answered directly, simply,
by day itself.

Enormous morning, ponderous, meticulous;
gray light streaking each bare branch,
each single twig, along one side,
making another tree, of glassy veins...
The bird still sits there. Now he seems to yawn.

The little black dog runs in his yard.
His owner's voice arises, stern,
"You ought to be ashamed!"
What has he done?
He bounces cheerfully up and down;
he rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.

Obviously, he has no sense of shame.
He and the bird know everything is answered,
all taken care of,
no need to ask again.
--Yesterday brought to today so lightly!
(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)
Written by R S Thomas | Create an image from this poem

The Village

 Scarcely a street, too few houses
To merit the title; just a way between
The one tavern and the one shop
That leads nowhere and fails at the top
Of the short hill, eaten away
By long erosion of the green tide
Of grass creeping perpetually nearer 
This last outpost of time past.

So little happens; the black dog
Cracking his fleas in the hot sun
Is history. Yet the girl who crosses
From door to door moves to a scale
Beyond the bland day's two dimensions.

Stay, then, village, for round you spins
On a slow axis a world as vast
And meaningful as any posed
By great Plato's solitary mind.



Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry