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Best Famous Fatuous Poems

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

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Written by Billy Collins | Create an image from this poem

Child Development

 As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with challenge.
Nothing Samuel Johnson would bother tossing out
in a pub, but then the toddlers are not trying
to devastate some fatuous Enlightenment hack.

They are just tormenting their fellow squirts
or going after the attention of the giants
way up there with their cocktails and bad breath
talking baritone nonsense to other giants,
waiting to call them names after thanking
them for the lovely party and hearing the door close.

The mature save their hothead invective
for things: an errant hammer, tire chains,
or receding trains missed by seconds,
though they know in their adult hearts,
even as they threaten to banish Timmy to bed
for his appalling behavior,
that their bosses are Big Fatty Stupids,
their wives are Dopey Dopeheads
and that they themselves are Mr. Sillypants.


Written by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope | Create an image from this poem

Standardization

 When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age, 
The journalist with his marketable woes 
Fills up once more the inevitable page 
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose; 

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop 
With horror at the house not made with hands 
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup 
Another pure theosophist demands 

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars 
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone 
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars 
And celluloid and rubber are unknown; 

When from his vegetable Sunday School 
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase 
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool 
About the "Standardization of the Race"; 

I see, stooping among her orchard trees, 
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in, 
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees, 
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin. 

For there is no manufacturer competes 
With her in the mass production of shapes and things. 
Over and over she gathers and repeats 
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings. 

She does not tire of the pattern of a rose. 
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise. 
She cannot recall how long ago she chose 
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes, 

Love, which still pours into its ancient mould 
The lashing seed that grows to a man again, 
From whom by the same processes unfold 
Unending generations of living men. 

She has standardized his ultimate needs and pains. 
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in 
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains, 
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin. 

And beauty standing motionless before 
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile, 
A long queue in an unknown corridor, 
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.
Written by Lisel Mueller | Create an image from this poem

The Laughter Of Women

 The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness

It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other

What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.
Written by Wilfred Owen | Create an image from this poem

Futility

 Move him into the sun --
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds --
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, -- still warm, -- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

The Well-Beloved

 I wayed by star and planet shine 
 Towards the dear one's home 
At Kingsbere, there to make her mine 
 When the next sun upclomb. 

I edged the ancient hill and wood 
 Beside the Ikling Way, 
Nigh where the Pagan temple stood 
 In the world's earlier day. 

And as I quick and quicker walked 
 On gravel and on green, 
I sang to sky, and tree, or talked 
 Of her I called my queen. 

- "O faultless is her dainty form, 
 And luminous her mind; 
She is the God-created norm 
 Of perfect womankind!" 

A shape whereon one star-blink gleamed 
 Glode softly by my side, 
A woman's; and her motion seemed 
 The motion of my bride. 

And yet methought she'd drawn erstwhile 
 Adown the ancient leaze, 
Where once were pile and peristyle 
 For men's idolatries. 

- "O maiden lithe and lone, what may 
 Thy name and lineage be, 
Who so resemblest by this ray 
 My darling?--Art thou she?" 

The Shape: "Thy bride remains within 
 Her father's grange and grove." 
- "Thou speakest rightly," I broke in, 
 "Thou art not she I love." 

- "Nay: though thy bride remains inside 
 Her father's walls," said she, 
"The one most dear is with thee here, 
 For thou dost love but me." 

Then I: "But she, my only choice, 
 Is now at Kingsbere Grove?" 
Again her soft mysterious voice: 
 "I am thy only Love." 

Thus still she vouched, and still I said, 
 "O sprite, that cannot be!" . . . 
It was as if my bosom bled, 
 So much she troubled me. 

The sprite resumed: "Thou hast transferred 
 To her dull form awhile 
My beauty, fame, and deed, and word, 
 My gestures and my smile. 

"O fatuous man, this truth infer, 
 Brides are not what they seem; 
Thou lovest what thou dreamest her; 
 I am thy very dream!" 

- "O then," I answered miserably, 
 Speaking as scarce I knew, 
"My loved one, I must wed with thee 
 If what thou say'st be true!" 

She, proudly, thinning in the gloom: 
 "Though, since troth-plight began, 
I've ever stood as bride to groom, 
 I wed no mortal man!" 

Thereat she vanished by the Cross 
 That, entering Kingsbere town, 
The two long lanes form, near the fosse 
 Below the faneless Down. 

- When I arrived and met my bride, 
 Her look was pinched and thin, 
As if her soul had shrunk and died, 
 And left a waste within.



Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry