Famous Blast Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Blast poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous blast poems. These examples illustrate what a famous blast poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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A Dialogue Of Self And Soul

...until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler


Beowulf (Old English)

...ess quest, --
and sea-snakes and monsters. These started away,
swollen and savage that song to hear,
that war-horn’s blast. The warden of Geats,
with bolt from bow, then balked of life,
of wave-work, one monster, amid its heart
went the keen war-shaft; in water it seemed
less doughty in swimming whom death had seized.
Swift on the billows, with boar-spears well
hooked and barbed, it was hard beset,
done to death and dragged on the headland,
wave-roamer wondrous. Wa...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,

Charmides

...lamp
Far out at sea off Sunium, or cast
The net for tunnies, heard a brazen tramp
Of horses smite the waves, and a wild blast
Divide the folded curtains of the night,
And knelt upon the little poop, and prayed in holy fright.

And guilty lovers in their venery
Forgat a little while their stolen sweets,
Deeming they heard dread Dian's bitter cry;
And the grim watchmen on their lofty seats
Ran to their shields in haste precipitate,
Or strained black-bearded throats across the d...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

Endymion: Book IV

...ring, flush Summer, golden store
In Autumn's sickle, Winter frosty hoar,
Join dance with shadowy Hours; while still the blast,
In swells unmitigated, still doth last
To sway their floating morris. "Whose is this?
Whose bugle?" he inquires: they smile--"O Dis!
Why is this mortal here? Dost thou not know
Its mistress' lips? Not thou?--'Tis Dian's: lo!
She rises crescented!" He looks, 'tis she,
His very goddess: good-bye earth, and sea,
And air, and pains, and care, and sufferin...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...aven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean
Naught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre.

Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,
Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman's devotion,
List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;
...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Eviradnus

...
 In joy from rock to rock, like answering cheer 
 To howling January now so near— 
 "Come on!" the Donjon cries to blasts o'erhead— 
 It has seen Attila, and knows not dread. 
 Oh, dismal nights of contest in the rain 
 And mist, that furious would the battle gain, 
 'The tower braves all, though angry skies pour fast 
 The flowing torrents, river-like and vast. 
 From their eight pinnacles the gorgons bay, 
 And scattered monsters, in their stony way, 
 Are grow...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Frost at Midnight

...pple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. ...Read more of this...
by Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Howl

...thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the gh...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Humanitad

...keys,
Fled shuddering, for that immemorial knell
With which oblivion buries dynasties
Swept like a wounded eagle on the blast,
As to the holy heart of Rome the great triumvir passed.

He knew the holiest heart and heights of Rome,
He drave the base wolf from the lion's lair,
And now lies dead by that empyreal dome
Which overtops Valdarno hung in air
By Brunelleschi - O Melpomene
Breathe through thy melancholy pipe thy sweetest threnody!

Breathe through the tragic stops such ...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

Inferno (English)

...darkening all the colder skies, 
 In crowded troops their wings up-bear, so here 
 These evil-doers on each contending blast 
 Were lifted upward, whirled, and downward cast, 
 And swept around unceasing. Striving airs 
 Lift them, and hurl, nor ever hope is theirs 
 Of rest or respite or decreasing pains, 
 But like the long streaks of the calling cranes 
 So came they wailing down the winds, to meet 
 Upsweeping blasts that ever backward beat 
 Or sideward flung them on th...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante

Ravenna

...der strain,
Or tell thy days of glory; - poor indeed
Is the low murmur of the shepherd's reed,
Where the loud clarion's blast should shake the sky,
And flame across the heavens! and to try
Such lofty themes were folly: yet I know
That never felt my heart a nobler glow
Than when I woke the silence of thy street
With clamorous trampling of my horse's feet,
And saw the city which now I try to sing,
After long days of weary travelling.


VII.


Adieu, Ravenna! but a year ago,
I s...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

The Ballad of the White Horse

...h murkily
In mirrors of ice and night,
Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,
As death and a shock of evil words
Blast a man's hair with white.

And the cry of the palms and the purple moons,
Or the cry of the frost and foam,
Swept ever around an inmost place,
And the din of distant race on race
Cried and replied round Rome.

And there was death on the Emperor
And night upon the Pope:
And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,
Hardened his heart with hope.

A sea-folk blinder t...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Everlasting Mercy

...es's little cat. 
At four I called, "You devil's own, 
The second trumpet shall be blown. 
The second trump, the second blast; 
Hell's flames are loosed, and judgment's passed. 
Too late for mercy now. Take warning. 
I'm death and hell and Judgment morning." 
I hurled the bench into the settle, 
I banged the table on the kettle, 
I sent Joe's quart of cider spinning. 
"Lo, here begins my second inning." 
Each bottle, mug, and jug and pot 
I smashed to crocks in half a tot; 
A...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John

The Holy Grail

...erlin's chair. 

`And all at once, as there we sat, we heard 
A cracking and a riving of the roofs, 
And rending, and a blast, and overhead 
Thunder, and in the thunder was a cry. 
And in the blast there smote along the hall 
A beam of light seven times more clear than day: 
And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail 
All over covered with a luminous cloud. 
And none might see who bare it, and it past. 
But every knight beheld his fellow's face 
As in a glory, and all the kn...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Lady of the Lake

...The eagles answered with their scream,
     Round and around the sounds were cast,
     Till echo seemed an answering blast;
     And on the Hunter tried his way,
     To join some comrades of the day,
     Yet often paused, so strange the road,
     So wondrous were the scenes it showed.
     XI.

     The western waves of ebbing day
     Rolled o'er the glen their level way;
     Each purple peak, each flinty spire,
     Was bathed in floods of living fire.
   ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter

The Princess (prologue)

...r seemed as lost-- 
Her stature more than mortal in the burst 
Of sunrise, her arm lifted, eyes on fire-- 
Brake with a blast of trumpets from the gate, 
And, falling on them like a thunderbolt, 
She trampled some beneath her horses' heels, 
And some were whelmed with missiles of the wall, 
And some were pushed with lances from the rock, 
And part were drowned within the whirling brook: 
O miracle of noble womanhood!' 

So sang the gallant glorious chronicle; 
And, I all rapt...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Seasons: Winter

...to sing, 
Returning to her nobler Theme in view --

FOR, see! where Winter comes, himself, confest,
Striding the gloomy Blast. First Rains obscure
Drive thro' the mingling Skies, with Tempest foul;
Beat on the Mountain's Brow, and shake the Woods, 
That, sounding, wave below. The dreary Plain
Lies overwhelm'd, and lost. The bellying Clouds
Combine, and deepening into Night, shut up
The Day's fair Face. The Wanderers of Heaven,
Each to his Home, retire; save those that love 
T...Read more of this...
by Thomson, James

The Triumph of Life

...The crowd gave way, & I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast
The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around; such seemed the jubilee
As when to greet some conqueror's advance
Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senatehouse & prison & theatre
When Freedom left those who upon the free
Had bound a yoke which soon they stooped to bear.
Nor wanted here the true similitude
Of a triumphal pagean...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

The Waste Land

...Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp g...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

To a Mouse

...h snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
          Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
          Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
          But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
          An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no t...Read more of this...
by Burns, Robert

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