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Best Famous Foetid Poems

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

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Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

TO THE SOUND OF VIOLINS

 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming swarm

Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night

On my way from the ward where our son paces

And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning

Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality.
The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously "Are you on your own? Come and join us What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, Being complete in itself and out for a good night out, A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall Running from the reality of the ward where my son Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast My very existence with words like bullets.
The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces Again and again.
In Leeds City Square where Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block.
I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating At the thought of being told I’m past my Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms- Was it guns or drugs they were after I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar.
I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played, Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang The girls joined in but the young men knew The words no more than me.
Dancing as we knew it In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing And follow the beat, hampered by my bag I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search… What I’m searching for I don’t know Searching’s a way of life that has to grow "All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth" My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room, Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’ To an audience of one.
The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me: I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’ Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’ So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night.
Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms, Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager To pinpoint the moment’s crisis.
Normality was a bit of adrenaline, A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night.
"Are you on your own, love? Come and join us" People kept asking if I was alright and why I had that damned great shoulder bag.
I was introduced To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario In his midforties winked at me constantly, Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him.
Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds Disappeared to catch the last bus home.
The young aren’t As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised.
People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square But failed to.
Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous Thumbs-up signs from passing men.
I had to forgo A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing "I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight But being there had somehow put things right.


Written by Ezra Pound | Create an image from this poem

Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (Part I)

 "Vocat aestus in umbram" 
Nemesianus Es.
IV.
E.
P.
Ode pour l'élection de son sépulchre For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime" In the old sense.
Wrong from the start -- No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait: "Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year.
His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe's hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials.
Unaffected by "the march of events", He passed from men's memory in l'an trentiesme De son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses' diadem.
II.
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.
III.
The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos, The pianola "replaces" Sappho's barbitos.
Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel.
All things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall reign throughout our days.
Even the Christian beauty Defects -- after Samothrace; We see to kalon Decreed in the market place.
Faun's flesh is not to us, Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer; Franchise for circumcision.
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Peisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch To rule over us.
A bright Apollo, tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon, What god, man, or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon? IV.
These fought, in any case, and some believing, pro domo, in any case .
.
Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later .
.
.
some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor" .
.
walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places.
Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.
V.
There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old ***** gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization.
Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth's lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books.
Yeux Glauques Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced "Kings Treasuries"; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused.
Fœtid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun's head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers.
The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze.
The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days.
The thin, clear gaze, the same Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin'd face, Questing and passive .
.
.
.
"Ah, poor Jenny's case" .
.
.
Bewildered that a world Shows no surprise At her last maquero's Adulteries.
"Siena Mi Fe', Disfecemi Maremma" Among the pickled fœtuses and bottled bones, Engaged in perfecting the catalogue, I found the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog.
For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub .
.
.
But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed -- Tissue preserved -- the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.
Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels; Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church.
So spoke the author of "The Dorian Mood", M.
Verog, out of step with the decade, Detached from his contemporaries, Neglected by the young, Because of these reveries.
Brennbaum.
The sky-like limpid eyes, The circular infant's face, The stiffness from spats to collar Never relaxing into grace; The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years, Showed only when the daylight fell Level across the face Of Brennbaum "The Impeccable".
Mr.
Nixon In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht Mr.
Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer Dangers of delay.
"Consider Carefully the reviewer.
"I was as poor as you are; "When I began I got, of course, "Advance on royalties, fifty at first", said Mr.
Nixon, "Follow me, and take a column, "Even if you have to work free.
"Butter reviewers.
From fifty to three hundred "I rose in eighteen months; "The hardest nut I had to crack "Was Dr.
Dundas.
"I never mentioned a man but with the view "Of selling my own works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature "It gives no man a sinecure.
" And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
" * * * Likewise a friend of Bloughram's once advised me: Don't kick against the pricks, Accept opinion.
The "Nineties" tried your game And died, there's nothing in it.
X.
Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated, At last from the world's welter Nature receives him, With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress.
The haven from sophistications and contentions Leaks through its thatch; He offers succulent cooking; The door has a creaking latch.
XI.
"Conservatrix of Milésien" Habits of mind and feeling, Possibly.
But in Ealing With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen? No, "Milésian" is an exaggeration.
No instinct has survived in her Older than those her grandmother Told her would fit her station.
XII.
"Daphne with her thighs in bark Stretches toward me her leafy hands", -- Subjectively.
In the stuffed-satin drawing-room I await The Lady Valentine's commands, Knowing my coat has never been Of precisely the fashion To stimulate, in her, A durable passion; Doubtful, somewhat, of the value Of well-gowned approbation Of literary effort, But never of The Lady Valentine's vocation: Poetry, her border of ideas, The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending With other strata Where the lower and higher have ending; A hook to catch the Lady Jane's attention, A modulation toward the theatre, Also, in the case of revolution, A possible friend and comforter.
* * * Conduct, on the other hand, the soul "Which the highest cultures have nourished" To Fleet St.
where Dr.
Johnson flourished; Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses.
Written by Andrew Barton Paterson | Create an image from this poem

Clancy Of The Overflow

 I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
 Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
 Just on spec, addressed as follows, "Clancy, of The Overflow".
And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected, (And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar) 'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it: "Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are.
" In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go; As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing, For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars, And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, And at night the wond'rous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street, And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting, Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change with Clancy, Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go, While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal— But I doubt he'd suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.

Book: Shattered Sighs