Famous Boom Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Degrees Of Gray In Philipsburg

by Richard Hugo
 You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not...Read more of this...

The sunshine seeks my little room

by Robert William Service
 The sunshine seeks my little room
To tell me Paris streets are gay;
That children cry the lily bloom
All up and down the leafy way;
That half the town is mad with May,
With flame of flag and boom of bell:
For Carnival is King to-day;
So pen and page, awhile farewell....Read more of this...

The Torrent

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 I found a torrent falling in a glen 
Where the sun’s light shone silvered and leaf-split; 
The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it 
All made a magic symphony; but when 
I thought upon the coming of hard men
To cut those patriarchal trees away, 
And turn to gold the silver of that spray, 
I shuddered. Yet a...Read more of this...

The Warrior

by John McCrae
 He wrought in poverty, the dull grey days,
But with the night his little lamp-lit room
Was bright with battle flame, or through a haze
Of smoke that stung his eyes he heard the boom
Of Bluecher's guns; he shared Almeida's scars,
And from the close-packed deck, about to die,
Looked up and saw the "Birkenhead"'s tall spars
Weave wavering lines across the Southern sky:

Or in...Read more of this...

Nocturne of the Wharves

by Arna Bontemps
 All night they whine upon their ropes and boom
against the dock with helpless prows:
these little ships that are too worn for sailing
front the wharf but do not rest at all.
Tugging at the dim gray wharf they think
no doubt of China and of bright Bombay,
and they remember islands of the East,
Formosa and the mountains of Japan.
They think of cities ruined...Read more of this...

The Battle of the Baltic

by Thomas Campbell
 Of Nelson and the North 
Sing the glorious day's renown, 
When to battle fierce came forth 
All the might of Denmark's crown, 
And her arms along the deep proudly shone;
By each gun the lighted brand 
In a bold determined hand, 
And the Prince of all the land 
Led them on. 

Like leviathans afloat 
Lay their bulwarks on the brine,...Read more of this...

A Runnable Stag

by John Davidson
 When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom, 
And apples began to be golden-skinn'd, 
We harbour'd a stag in the Priory coomb, 
And we feather'd his trail up-wind, up-wind, 
We feather'd his trail up-wind- 
A stag of warrant, a stag, a stag, 
A runnable stag, a kingly crop, 
Brow, bay and tray and three on top, 
A...Read more of this...

The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...

Lepanto

by G K Chesterton
 White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; 
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the...Read more of this...

Golgotha

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Through darkness curves a spume of falling flares 
That flood the field with shallow, blanching light. 
The huddled sentry stares 
On gloom at war with white, 
And white receding slow, submerged in gloom.
Guns into mimic thunder burst and boom, 
And mirthless laughter rakes the whistling night. 
The sentry keeps his watch where no one stirs 
But the brown rats,...Read more of this...

Night on the Convoy

by Siegfried Sassoon
 (ALEXANDRIA-MARSEILLES)


Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck 
A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black, 
The lean Destroyers, level with our track, 
Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way 
Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.
One sentry by the davits, in the gloom 
Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night. 
Shrouded is...Read more of this...

Wise I

by Imamu Amiri Baraka
    WHYS (Nobody Knows
    The Trouble I Seen)
    Traditional

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep
trouble

humph!

probably take you several hundred...Read more of this...

View Of The Capitol From The Library Of Congress

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Moving from left to left, the light
is heavy on the Dome, and coarse.
One small lunette turns it aside
and blankly stares off to the side
like a big white old wall-eyed horse.

On the east steps the Air Force Band
in uniforms of Air Force blue
is playing hard and loud, but--*****--
the music doesn't quite come through.

It comes in snatches, dim then keen,
then mute,...Read more of this...

The Cambaroora Star

by Henry Lawson
 So you're writing for a paper? Well, it's nothing very new 
To be writing yards of drivel for a tidy little screw; 
You are young and educated, and a clever chap you are, 
But you'll never run a paper like the CAMBAROORA STAR. 
Though in point of education I am nothing but a dunce, 
I myself -- you mayn't...Read more of this...

I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night

by Stephen Crane
 I explain the silvered passing of a ship at night,
The sweep of each sad lost wave,
The dwindling boom of the steel thing's striving,
The little cry of a man to a man,
A shadow falling across the greyer night,
And the sinking of the small star;
Then the waste, the far waste of waters,
And the soft lashing of black waves
For long and in...Read more of this...

The Hermit

by Aleister Crowley
 WHAT moves that lonely man is not the boom 
Of waves that break agains the cliff so strong; 
Nor roar of thunder, when that travelling voice 
Is caught by rocks that carry far along.

'Tis not the groan of oak tree i its prime, 
When lightning strikes its solid heart to dust; 
Nor frozen pond when, melted by the sun,...Read more of this...

Tarantella

by Hilaire Belloc
 Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the bedding
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers...Read more of this...

The Songs of the Lathes

by Rudyard Kipling
 1918Being the Words of the Tune Hummed at Her Lathe by Mrs. L. Embsay, Widow
The fans and the beltings they roar round me.
The power is shaking the floor round me
Till the lathes pick up their duty and the midnight-shift takes over.
 It is good for me to be here!

Guns in Flanders--Flanders guns!
(I had a man that worked 'em once!)
Shells...Read more of this...

The Poets Of The Tomb

by Henry Lawson
 The world has had enough of bards who wish that they were dead, 
'Tis time the people passed a law to knock 'em on the head, 
For 'twould be lovely if their friends could grant the rest they crave -- 
Those bards of `tears' and `vanished hopes', those poets of the grave. 
They say that life's an awful thing,...Read more of this...

The Rhyme of the Three Captains

by Rudyard Kipling
 This ballad appears to refer to one of the exploits of the notorious
Paul Jones, the American pirate. It is founded on fact.


 . . . At the close of a winter day,
Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay;
And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye,
And one was Lord of the Wessex...Read more of this...

The Sleepout

by Les Murray
 Childhood sleeps in a verandah room
in an iron bed close to the wall
where the winter over the railing 
swelled the blind on its timber boom

and splinters picked lint off warm linen
and the stars were out over the hill;
then one wall of the room was forest
and all things in there were to come.

Breathings climbed up on the verandah
when dark cattle...Read more of this...

The Bombardment

by Amy Lowell
 Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the 
city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping 
and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit 
of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple...Read more of this...

Far Rockaway Night till Morning

by Carl Sandburg
 WHAT can we say of the night?
The fog night, the moon night, the fog moon night last night?

There swept out of the sea a song.
There swept out of the sea—torn white plungers.
There came on the coast wind drive
In the spit of a driven spray,
On the boom of foam and rollers,
The cry of midnight to morning:
 Hoi-a-loa.
 Hoi-a-loa.
 Hoi-a-loa.

Who has...Read more of this...

Clay comes out to meet Liston

by Muhammad Ali
Clay comes out to meet Liston 
and Liston starts to retreat, 
if Liston goes back an inch farther 
he'll end up in a ringside seat. 
Clay swings with his left, 
Clay swings with his right, 
Look at young Cassius 
carry the fight 
Liston keeps backing, but there's not enough room, 
It's a matter of time till Clay lowers the boom....Read more of this...

The Thrill came slowly like a Boom for

by Emily Dickinson
 The Thrill came slowly like a Boom for
Centuries delayed
Its fitness growing like the Flood
In sumptuous solitude --
The desolations only missed
While Rapture changed its Dress
And stood amazed before the Change
In ravished Holiness --...Read more of this...

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