Best Famous Self Pity Poems

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

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• All Famous Self Pity Poems

Written by Rudyard Kipling | A Death-Bed 1918 This is the State above the Law. The State exists for the State alone. " [This is a gland at the back of the jaw, And an answering lump by the collar-bone. ], Some die shouting in gas or fire; Some die silent, by shell and shot. Some die desperate, caught on the wire - Some die suddenly. This will not. "Regis suprema voluntas Lex" [It will follow the regular course of--throats. ] Some die pinned by the broken decks, Some die sobbing between the boats. Some die eloquent, pressed to death By the sliding trench as their friends can hear Some die wholly in half a breath. Some--give trouble for half a year. "There is neither Evil nor Good in life Except as the needs of the State ordain. " [Since it is rather too late for the knife, All we can do is to mask the pain. ] Some die saintly in faith and hope-- One died thus in a prison-yard-- Some die broken by rape or the rope; Some die easily. This dies hard. "I will dash to pieces who bar my way. Woe to the traitor! Woe to the weak! " [Let him write what he wishes to say. It tires him out if he tries to speak. ] Some die quietly. Some abound In loud self-pity. Others spread Bad morale through the cots around . This is a type that is better dead. "The war was forced on me by my foes. All that I sought was the right to live. " [Don't be afraid of a triple dose; The pain will neutralize all we give. Here are the needles. See that he dies While the effects of the drug endure. . . . What is the question he asks with his eyes?-- Yes, All-Highest, to God, be sure. ]

Written by William Matthews | Dire Cure "First, do no harm," the Hippocratic Oath begins, but before she might enjoy such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor. It was large, rare, and so anomalous in its behavior that at first they mis- diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it within a year. " But in ten days or so I sat beside her bed with hot-and-sour soup and heard an intern congratulate her on her new diagnosis: a children's cancer (doesn't that possessive break your heart?) had possessed her. I couldn't stop personifying it. Devious, dour, it had a clouded heart, like Iago's. It loved disguise. It was a garrison in a captured city, a bad horror film (The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job. If I could make it be like something else, I wouldn't have to think of it as what, in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife. Next, then, chemotherapy. Her hair fell out in tufts, her color dulled, she sat laced to bags of poison she endured somewhat better than her cancer cells could, though not by much. And indeed, the cancer cells waned more slowly than the chemical "cocktails" (one the bright color of Campari), as the chemo nurses called them, dripped into her. There were three hundred days of this: a week inside the hospital and two weeks out, the fierce elixirs percolating all the while. She did five weeks of radiation, too, Monday to Friday like a stupid job. She wouldn't eat the food the hospital wheeled in. "Pureed fish" and "minced fish" were worth, I thought, a sharp surge of food snobbery, but she'd grown averse to it all -- the nurses' crepe soles' muffled squeaks along the hall, the filtered air, the smothered urge to read, the fear, the perky visitors, flowers she'd not been sent when she was well, the room- mate (what do "semiprivate" and "extra virgin" have in common?) who died, the nights she wept and sweated faster than the tubes could moisten her with lurid poison. One chemotherapy veteran, six years in remission, chanced on her former chemo nurse at a bus stop and threw up. My wife's tumor has not come back. I like to think of it in Tumor Hell strapped to a dray, flat as a deflated football, bleak and nubbled like a poorly ironed truffle. There's one tense in Tumor Hell: forever, or what we call the present. For that long the flaccid tumor marinates in lurid toxins. Tumor Hell Clinic is, it turns out, a teaching hospital. Every century or so, the way we'd measure it, a chief doc brings a pack of students round. They run some simple tests: surge current through the tumor, batter it with mallets, push a wood-plane across its pebbled hide and watch a scurf of tumor- pelt kink loose from it, impale it, strafe it with lye and napalm. There might be nothing left in there but a still space surrounded by a carapace. "This one is nearly dead," the chief doc says. "What's the cure for that?" The students know: "Kill it slower, of course. " They sprinkle it with rock salt and move on. Here on the aging earth the tumor's gone: My wife is hale, though wary, and why not? Once you've had cancer, you don't get headaches anymore, you get brain tumors, at least until the aspirin kicks in. Her hair's back, her weight, her appetite. "And what about you?" friends ask me. First the fear felt like sudden weightlessness: I couldn't steer and couldn't stay. I couldn't concentrate: surely my spit would dry before I could slather a stamp. I made a list of things to do next day before I went to bed, slept like a cork, woke to no more memory of last night's list than smoke has of fire, made a new list, began to do the things on it, wept, paced, berated myself, drove to the hospital, and brought my wife food from the takeout joints that ring a hospital as surely as brothels surround a gold strike. I drove home rancid with anger at her luck and mine -- anger that filled me the same way nature hates a vacuum. "This must be hell for you," some said. Hell's not other people: Sartre was wrong about that, too. L'enfer, c'est moi? I've not got the ego for it. There'd be no hell if Dante hadn't built a model of his rage so well, and he contrived to get exiled from it, for it was Florence. Why would I live in hell? I love New York. Some even said the tumor and fierce cure were harder on the care giver -- yes, they said "care giver" -- than on the "sick person. " They were wrong who said those things. Of course I hated it, but some of "it" was me -- the self-pity I allowed myself, the brave poses I struck. The rest was dire threat my wife met with moral stubbornness, terror, rude jokes, nausea, you name it. No, let her think of its name and never say it, as if it were the name of God.

Written by Charles Bukowski | Friends Within The Darkness I can remember starving in a small room in a strange city shades pulled down, listening to classical music I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife inside because there was no alternative except to hide as long as possible-- not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance: trying to connect. the old composers -- Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and they were dead. finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and monotonous jobs by strange men behind desks men without eyes men without faces who would take away my hours break them piss on them. now I work for the editors the readers the critics but still hang around and drink with Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the Bee some buddies some men sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone are the dead rattling the walls that close us in.

Written by Frank Bidart | To The Dead What I hope (when I hope) is that we'll see each other again,-- . . . and again reach the VEIN in which we loved each other . . It existed. It existed. There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,-- . . . for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers) in The Gorilla, once we'd been battered by the gorilla we searched the walls, the intricately carved impenetrable paneling for a button, lever, latch that unlocks a secret door that reveals at last the secret chambers, CORRIDORS within WALLS, (the disenthralling, necessary, dreamed structure beneath the structure we see,) that is the HOUSE within the HOUSE . . . There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,-- . . . there were (for example) months when I seemed only to displease, frustrate, disappoint you--; then, something triggered a drunk lasting for days, and as you slowly and shakily sobered up, sick, throbbing with remorse and self-loathing, insight like ashes: clung to; useless; hated . . . This was the viewing of the power of the waters while the waters were asleep:-- secrets, histories of loves, betrayals, double-binds not fit (you thought) for the light of day . . . There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,-- . . . for, there at times at night, still we inhabit the secret place together . . . Is this wisdom, or self-pity?-- The love I've known is the love of two people staring not at each other, but in the same direction.

Written by Richard Wilbur | Advice to a Prophet When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God's name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?-- The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone's face? Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Written by Philip Larkin | Love We Must Part Now Love, we must part now: do not let it be Calamitious and bitter. In the past There has been too much moonlight and self-pity: Let us have done with it: for now at last Never has sun more boldly paced the sky, Never were hearts more eager to be free, To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I No longer hold them; we are husks, that see The grain going forward to a different use. There is regret. Always, there is regret. But it is better that our lives unloose, As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light, Break from an estuary with their courses set, And waving part, and waving drop from sight.

Written by D. H. Lawrence | Self-pity I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.