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Famous Blunders Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...dapple,
As sleek’s a mouse, as round’s an apple,
That when thou pleasest canst do wonders;
But when thy luckless rider blunders,
Or if thy fancy should demur there,
Wilt break thy neck ere thou go further.


 These things premised, I sing a Fox,
Was caught among his native rocks,
And to a dirty kennel chained,
How he his liberty regained.


 Glenriddell! Whig without a stain,
A Whig in principle and grain,
Could’st thou enslave a free-born creature,
A native denizen ...Read more of this...



by Pope, Alexander
...rules
Fill half the land with imitating fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take,
And of one beauty many blunders make;
Load some vain church with old theatric state,
Turn arcs of triumph to a garden gate;
Reverse your ornaments, and hang them all
On some patch'd dog-hole ek'd with ends of wall;
Then clap four slices of pilaster on't,
That lac'd with bits of rustic, makes a front.
Or call the winds through long arcades to roar,
Proud to catch cold at a Vene...Read more of this...

by Pope, Alexander
...theft,
Steals much, spends little, yet has nothing left:
And he, who now to sense, now nonsense leaning,
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning:
And he, whose fustian's so sublimely bad,
It is not poetry, but prose run mad:
All these, my modest satire bade translate,
And own'd, that nine such poets made a Tate.
How did they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe?
And swear, not Addison himself was safe.

Peace to all such! but were there one whose fires
True geni...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...your beauty

For a moment’s gift then cast you with your seven year old son adrift.

The sun has gone but birdsong blunders on 

As I take courage from the gone, the waving grass,

The sculptured pylons of my shadowed past....Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...prodigality of gold
That larger generosity of thought, -- 
These are the fleshly clogs of human greed,
The fundamental blunders of mankind. 

XXII 

Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance;
The master of the moment, the clean seer
Of ages, too securely scans what is,
Ever to be appalled at what is not;
He sees beyond the groaning borough lines
Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows
That Love's complete communion is the end
Of anguish to the liberated man. 

X...Read more of this...



by Kipling, Rudyard
...ate's hand
(Here at the top on loses sight o' God),
Commend you, then, to something more than you --
The Other People's blunders and
 . . . that's all.
I'd agonize to serve you if I could.
It's incommunicable, like the cast
That drops the tackle with the gut adry.
Too much -- too little -- there's your salmon lost!
And so I tell you nothing --with you luck,
And wonder -- how I wonder! -- for your sake
And triumph for my own. You're young, you're yo...Read more of this...

by Pastan, Linda
...vides the two parts of the body, leaving
the soft belly in the center
vulnerable to anything.
As for my country, it blunders along
as well intentioned as Eve choosing
cider and windfalls, oblivious
to the famine soon to come.
I stir pots, bury my face in books, or hold
a telephone to my ear as if its cord
were the umbilicus of the world
whose voices still whisper to me
even after they have left their bodies....Read more of this...

by Rich, Adrienne
...ign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth. And even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy; you and I
Still look from separa...Read more of this...

by Gorman, Amanda
...errupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children's birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will r...Read more of this...

by Sassoon, Siegfried
...ow some sport. 

Ay, Hell was thick with captains, and I rode 
The lumbering brute that’s beat in half a mile, 
And blunders into every blind old ditch. 
Hell was the coldest scenting land I’ve known,
And both my whips were always lost, and hounds 
Would never get their heads down; and a man 
On a great yawing chestnut trying to cast ’em 
While I was in a corner pounded by 
The ugliest hog-backed stile you’ve clapped your eyes on.
There was an iron-spiked fence ro...Read more of this...

by Lindsay, Vachel
...>..

This Huckleberry Finn is but the race,
America, still lovely in disgrace,
New childhood of the world, that blunders on
And wonders at the darkness and the dawn,
The poor damned human race, still unimpressed
With its damnation, all its gamin breast
Chorteling at dukes and kings with ****** Jim,
Then plotting for their fall, with jestings grim.

Behold a Republic
Where a river speaks to men
And cries to those that love its ways,
Answering again
When in the hear...Read more of this...

by Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...to do our dooty,
Outspell the rest an' set 'em down, an' carry home the booty.
'T was then the merry times began, the blunders, an' the laffin',
The nudges an' the nods an' winks an' stale good-natured chaffin'.
Ole Uncle Hiram Dane was there, the clostest man a-livin',
Whose only bugbear seemed to be the dreadful fear o' givin'.
His beard was long, his hair uncut, his clothes all bare an' dingy;
It wasn't 'cause the man was pore, but jest so mortal stingy;
An' there ...Read more of this...

by Jackson, Helen Hunt
...century's date, 
The mulberry leaf made robe for emperor! 
Shall man alone thy law deny? --refuse 
Thy healing for his blunders and his sins? 
Oh, make us thine! Teach us who waits best sues; 
Who longest waits of all most surely wins. 
When Time is spent, Eternity begins. 
To doubt, to chafe, to haste, doth God accuse....Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things