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Famous Blotted Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Rosenberg, Isaac
...apnel called "an end!"
But not to all. In bleeding pangs
Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

A man's brains splattered on
A stretcher-bearer's face;
His shook shoulders slipped their load,
But when they bent to look again
The drowning soul was sunk too deep
For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,
Stretched at the cross roads.
Burnt black by strange decay,
Their sinister faces lie
The li...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...weight of the dead leaf bore it down.
Thicker the drizzle grew, deeper the gloom;
Last, as it seem'd, a great mist-blotted light
Flared on him, and he came upon the place. 

Then down the long street having slowly stolen,
His heart foreshadowing all calamity,
His eyes upon the stones, he reach'd the home
Where Annie lived and loved him, and his babes
In those far-off seven happy years were born;
But finding neither light nor murmur there
(A bill of sale gleam'd thro'...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something....Read more of this...

by Bryant, William Cullen
...reen pupilage, their lore half learned--
Ere guilt has quite o'errun the simple heart
God gave them at their birth, and blotted out
His image. Thou dost mark them, flushed with hope,
As on the threshold of their vast designs
Doubtful and loose they stand, and strik'st them down.

Alas, I little thought that the stern power
Whose fearful praise I sung, would try me thus
Before the strain was ended. It must cease--
For he is in his grave who taught my youth
The art ...Read more of this...

by Rich, Adrienne
...-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.

The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this
long-dreamed, involuntary landing
on the arm of an inland sea.
The glitter of the shoal
depleting into shadow
I recognize: the stand of pines
violet-black really, green i...Read more of this...



by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...mph and defeat, 
Of struggle, and temptation, and retreat! 
What records of regrets, and doubts, and fears! 
What pages blotted, blistered by our tears! 
What lovely landscapes on the margin shine, 
What sweet, angelic faces, what divine 
And holy images of love and trust, 
Undimmed by age, unsoiled by damp or dust!
Whose hand shall dare to open and explore 
These volumes, closed and clasped forevermore? 
Not mine. With reverential feet I pass; 
I hear a voice that cries,...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant's price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet's heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and t...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...nities; 
And Powers that erst in Heaven sat on thrones, 
Though on their names in Heavenly records now 
Be no memorial, blotted out and rased 
By their rebellion from the Books of Life. 
Nor had they yet among the sons of Eve 
Got them new names, till, wandering o'er the earth, 
Through God's high sufferance for the trial of man, 
By falsities and lies the greatest part 
Of mankind they corrupted to forsake 
God their Creator, and th' invisible 
Glory of him that made the...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...sought
In love from his unquiet thought
In distant lands, and been deceived
By some strange show; for there were found,
Blotted with tears--as those relieved 
By their own words are wont to do--
These mournful verses on the ground,
By all who read them blotted too.

'How am I changed! my hopes were once like fire;
I loved, and I believed that life was love.
How am I lost! on wings of swift desire
Among Heaven's winds my spirit once did move.
I slept, and silver dr...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...with scorn sublime of death.
I saw him gently kiss the Cross, and then I held by breath.
That blessed smile was blotted out; they dropped the hood of black;
They fixed the noose around his neck, the rope was hanging slack.
I heard him pray, I saw him sway, then . . . then he was not there;
A rope, a ghastly yellow rope was jerking in the air;
A jigging rope that soon was still; a hush as of the tomb,
And Hank the Finn, that man of sin, had met his righ...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...he Lord Who gave us Earth and Heaven 
Takes that as thanks for all He's given. 
The book He lent is given back 
All blotted red and smutted black. 

"Open the door," said Jim, "and call." 
Jane gasped "They'll see me. Loose me, Saul." 
She pushed me by, and ducked downstair 
With half the pins out of her hair. 
I went inside the lit room rollen 
Her scented handkerchief I'd stolen. 
"What would you fancy, Saul?" they said. 
"A gin punch hot and...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...old our marvelling boyhood legends store
          Of their strange ventures happed by land or sea,
     How are they blotted from the things that be!
          How few, all weak and withered of their force,
     Wait on the verge of dark eternity,
          Like stranded wrecks, the tide returning hoarse,
     To sweep them from out sight! Time rolls his ceaseless course.

     Yet live there still who can remember well,
          How, when a mountain chief his bugl...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...ind what he had never found.
Slowly the autumn morning warmed, flocks of starlings
rose above the vacant fields and blotted out the sun.
I drove on until I found the grove of apple trees
heavy with fruit, and left the car, the motor running,
beside a sagging fence, and entered his life
on my own for maybe the first time. A crow welcomed
me home, the sun rode above, austere and silent,
the early afternoon was cloudless, perfect.
When the crow dragged itself off...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...winding them on strings,
Hang garlands before her, and burn perfumes,
Chanting strangely, while the fumes
Wreathed and blotted the shadow face,
As with a cloudy, nacreous lace.
There were days when he wooed as a lover, sighed
In tenderness, spoke to his bride,
Urged her to patience, said his skill
Should break the spell. A man's sworn will
Could compass life, even that, he knew.
By Christ's Blood! He would prove it true!
The edge of the Shadow never blurred.
...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...you, O my masters! let me die.

 A little heap of ashes, grey and sodden by the rain,
 Wind-scattered, blurred and blotted by the snow:
Let that be all to tell of me, and glorious again,
 Ye things of greening gladness, leap and glow!
A black scar in the sunshine by the palm-leaf or the pine,
 Blind to the night and dead to all desire;
Yet oh, of life and uplift what a symbol and a sign!
Yet oh, of power and conquest what a destiny is mine!
A little heap of ashes -- Yea!...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...ife! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To follow Time's dying melodies through,
And never to lose the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true --
Love alone can do.
And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying,
And ever Love hears the women's sighin...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...y over-subtle thought
Or anything called conscience once;
And that if memory recur, the sun's
Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

 III

It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone; I declare
They shall inherit my pride,
The pride of people that were
Bound neither to Cause nor to State.
Neither to slaves that were spat on,
Nor to the tyrants that s...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...wed: with my friend 
I climbed the fo'c's'le-head to see; we saw 
The waters hurrying shoreward without end. 

Haze blotted out the river's lowest reach; 
Out of the gloom the steamers, passing by, 
Called with their sirens, hooting their sea-speech; 
Out of the dimness others made reply. 

And as we watched, there came a rush of feet 
Charging the fo'c's'le till the hatchway shook. 
Men all about us thrust their way, or beat, 
Crying, "Wanderer! Down the river! L...Read more of this...

by Carman, Bliss
...-bound pond
Are made once more a trackless wilderness
In the white hush where not a creature stirs;
And the pale sun is blotted from the sky.
In that strange twilight the lone traveller halts
To listen to the stealthy snowflakes fall.
And then far off toward the Stamford shore,
Where through the storm the coastwise liners go,
Faint and recurrent on the muffled air,
A foghorn booming through the Smother--hark!
IV

When the day changed and the mad wind died down,
The po...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...an letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems....Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs