Famous Brutal Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Brutal poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous brutal poems. These examples illustrate what a famous brutal poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Mark Doty
"I've been having these
awful dreams, each a little different,
though the core's the same-
we're walking in a field,
Wally and Arden and I, a stretch of grass
with a highway running beside it,
or a path in the woods that opens
onto a road. Everything's fine,
then the dog sprints ahead of us,
exicted; we're calling but
he's racing down a scent and doesn't hear us,
and that's...Read more of this...
by
Eavan Boland
Here is the city—
its worn-down mountains,
its grass and iron,
its smoky coast
seen from the high roads
on the Wicklow side.
From Dalkey Island
to the North Wall,
to the blue distance seizing its perimeter,
its old divisions are deep within it.
And in me also.
And always will be.
Out of my mouth they come:
The spurred and booted garrisons.
The men and women
they dispossessed.
What is a colony
if not the...Read more of this...
by
Emanuel Xavier
“Ye shall hear of wars and rumors of wars;
see that ye not be troubles;
all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet”
-Matthew 24:6
1.
I escape the horrors of war
with a towel and a room
Offering myself
to Palestinian and Jewish boys
as a ‘piece’ to the Middle East
when I should be concerned with the untimely deaths
of dark-skinned...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when "Butch" Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm scared of it all, God's truth! so I am;
It's too big and brutal for me.
My nerve's on the raw and I don't give a damn
For all the "hoorah" that I see.
I'm pinned between subway and overhead train,
Where automobillies swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again --
I'm scared of the terrible town.
I want to go...Read more of this...
by
C K Williams
The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening...Read more of this...
by
Edith Nesbit
1 The garden mould was damp and chill,
2 Winter had had his brutal will
3 Since over all the year's content
4 His devastating legions went.
5 Then Spring's bright banners came: there woke
6 Millions of little growing folk
7 Who thrilled to know the winter done,
8 Gave thanks, and strove towards the sun.
9 Not so the elect; reserved, and slow
10...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
There once was a limpet puffed with pride
Who said to the ribald sea:
"It isn't I who cling to the rock,
It's the rock that clings to me;
It's the silly old rock who hugs me tight,
Because he loves me so;
And though I struggle with all my might,
He will not let me go."
Then said the sea, who hates the rock
That defies him...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
A music-stand of crimson lacquer, long since brought
In some fast clipper-ship from China, quaintly wrought
With bossed and carven flowers and fruits in blackening gold,
The slender shaft all twined about and thickly scrolled
With vine leaves and young twisted tendrils, whirling, curling,
Flinging their new shoots over the four wings, and swirling
Out on the three wide feet in golden lumps and streams;
Petals...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Please master can I touch your cheeck
please master can I kneel at your feet
please master can I loosen your blue pants
please master can I gaze at your golden haired belly
please master can I have your thighs bare to my eyes
please master can I take off my clothes below your chair
please master can I can I kiss your ankles and...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
[Dedicated to General J.C.F. Fuller]
Velvet soft the night-star glowed
Over the untrodden road,
Through the giant glades of yew
Where its ray fell light as dew
Lighting up the shimmering veil
Maiden pure and aery frail
That the spiders wove to hide
Blushes of the sylvan bride
Earth, that trembled with delight
At the male caress of Night.
Velvet...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Where the needle-woman toils
Through the night with hand and brain,
Till the sickly daylight shudders like a spectre at the pain –
Till her eyes seem to crawl,
And her brain seems to creep –
And her limbs are all a-tremble for the want of rest and sleep!
It is there the fire-brand blazes in my blood; and...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Her little head just topped the window-sill;
She even mounted on a stool, maybe;
She pressed against the pane, as children will,
And watched us playing, oh so wistfully!
And then I missed her for a month or more,
And idly thought: "She's gone away, no doubt,"
Until a hearse drew up beside the door . . .
I saw a tiny coffin carried out.
And after...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
If you danced from midnight
to six A.M. who would understand?
The runaway boy
who chucks it all
to live on the Boston Common
on speed and saltines,
pissing in the duck pond,
rapping with the street priest,
trading talk like blows,
another missing person,
would understand.
The paralytic's wife
who takes her love to town,
sitting on the bar stool,
downing stingers and peanuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.
The...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Henry of Donnybrook bred like a pig,
bred when he was brittle, bred when big,
how he's sweating to support them.
Which birthday of the brighter darker man,
the Goya of the Globe & Blackfriars, whom-”
our full earth smiled on him
squeezing his old heart with a daughter loose
(hostages they áre)-”the world's produced,
so far, alarms, alarms.
Fancy the chill & fatigue four hundred years
award a...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
How should I sing when buffeting salt waves
And stung with bitter surges, in whose might
I toss, a cockleshell? The dreadful night
Marshals its undefeated dark and raves
In brutal madness, reeling over graves
Of vanquished men, long-sunken out of sight,
Sent wailing down to glut the ghoulish sprite
Who haunts foul seaweed forests and their caves.
No parting cloud reveals a watery star,
My cries are...Read more of this...
by
Robert Southey
(Time, Morning. Scene, the Shore.)
Once more to daily toil--once more to wear
The weeds of infamy--from every joy
The heart can feel excluded, I arise
Worn out and faint with unremitting woe;
And once again with wearied steps I trace
The hollow-sounding shore. The swelling waves
Gleam to the morning sun, and dazzle o'er
With many a splendid hue the breezy strand.
Oh there was once a...Read more of this...
by
Les Murray
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
The last judgment.
The Lord, the Sovereign, sends his summons forth,
Calls the south nations and awakes the north;
From east to west the sounding orders spread,
Through distant worlds and regions of the dead:
No more shall atheists mock his long delay;
His vengeance sleeps no more: behold the day!
Behold, the Judge descends, his guards are nigh;
Tempest and fire attend him down the sky:
Heav'n,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Oh ye whose hearts are resonant, and ring to War's romance,
Hear ye the story of a boy, a peasant boy of France;
A lad uncouth and warped with toil, yet who, when trial came,
Could feel within his soul upleap and soar the sacred flame;
Could stand upright, and scorn and smite, as only heroes may:
Oh, harken! Let me try to tell...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
O sight of shame, and pain, and dole!
O fearful thought—a convict Soul!
RANG the refrain along the hall, the prison,
Rose to the roof, the vaults of heaven above,
Pouring in floods of melody, in tones so pensive, sweet and strong, the like whereof was
never
heard,
Reaching the far-off sentry, and the armed guards, who ceas’d...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
(July 15)
We know who
the guards are
in those POW
movies with brutal
but easy to
fool fat Germans
or sadistic Japanese
who never smiled
they're the grown-ups
we're the kids
that's the secret...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
There all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.
II
Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a...Read more of this...
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