Famous Captured Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Captain Teach alias Black Beard

...Captajn Harnigold and Teach sailed from Providence
For the continent of America, and no further hence;
And in their way captured a vessel laden with flour,
Which they put on board their own vessels in the space of an hour. 

They also seized two other vessels snd took some gallons of wine,
Besides plunder to a considerable value, and most of it most costly design;
And after that they made a prize of a large French Guinea-man,
Then to act an independent part Teach now began. 
...Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz


Custer

...f heart and bold, 
Wept now like orphaned children as they told, 
With quivering muscles and with anguished breath, 
Of captured wives, whose fate was worse than death; 
Past naked bodies whose disfiguring wounds
Spoke of the hellish hate of human hounds; 
Past bleaching skeleton and rifled grave, 
On pressed th' avenging host, to rescue and to save.

VII.

Uncertain Nature, like a fickle friend, 
(Worse than the foe on whom we may depend) 
Turned on these dauntless souls a b...Read more of this...
by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Dire Cure

...n't stop
personifying it. Devious, dour,
it had a clouded heart, like Iago's.
It loved disguise. It was a garrison
in a captured city, a bad horror film
(The Blob), a stowaway, an inside job.
If I could make it be like something else,
I wouldn't have to think of it as what,
in fact, it was: part of my lovely wife.
Next, then, chemotherapy. Her hair fell
out in tufts, her color dulled, she sat laced
to bags of poison she endured somewhat
better than her cancer cells could, tho...Read more of this...
by Matthews, William

Freedom And Love

...Love to last for ever.
Love's a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel:
Love's wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
Can you keep the bee from ranging
Or the ringdove's neck from changing?
No! nor fetter'd Love from dying
In the knot there's no untying....Read more of this...
by Campbell, Thomas

Its This Way

...indow of the prison infirmary.

I can't smell the medicines--
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It's this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender....Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim


Ka Ba

...d noses, and arms, 
though we sprawl in grey chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured, 
brothers. And we labor
to make our getaway, into
the ancient image, into a new

correspondence with ourselves
and our black family. We read magic
now we need the spells, to rise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred words?...Read more of this...
by Baraka, Imamu Amiri

MFingal - Canto IV

...n Trenton's shore,
While Hessians spread their Christmas feasts,
Rush rude these uninvited guests;
Nor aught avails the captured crew
Their martial whiskers' grisly hue!
On Princeton plains our heroes yield,
And spread in flight the vanquish'd field;
While fear to Mawhood's heels puts on
Wings, wide as worn by Maia's son.
Behold the Pennsylvanian shore
Enrich'd with streams of British gore;
Where many a veteran chief in bed
Of honor rests his slumb'ring head,
And in soft vale...Read more of this...
by Trumbull, John

More Later Less The Same

...The common is unusually calm--they captured the storm
last night, it's sleeping in the stockade, relieved
of its duty, pacified, tamed, a pussycat.
But not before it tied the flagpole in knots,
and not before it alarmed the firemen out of their pants.
Now it's really calm, almost too calm, as though
anything could happen, and it would be a first.
It could be the worst thing that ever happened...Read more of this...
by Taylor, Edward

Now Listen to Me and Ill Tell You My Views

...ht. 
They're fighting in rags and in naked feet, like Wallace's Scotchmen fought! 
(And they clothe themselves from our captured troops -- and they're catching them every week; 
And they don't hand them -- and the shame is ours, but we cover the shame with a shriek!) 
And, lastly, we'll shriek the political shriek as we sit in the dark and doubt; 
Where the Birmingham Judas led us in, and there's no one to lead us out. 
And Rosebery -- whom we depended upon! Would only the Or...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton

Our biggest fish

...catch that gets away!

'T 'is even so in other things--yes, in our greedy eyes
The biggest boon is some elusive, never-captured prize;
We angle for the honors and the sweets of human life--
Like fishermen we brave the seas that roll in endless strife;

And then at last, when all is done and we are spent and gray,
We own the biggest fish we've caught are those that got away.

I would not have it otherwise; 't is better there should be
Much bigger fish than I have caught a-swi...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene

Senlin: His Cloudy Destiny

...voices 
Out of the darkness of this sea? 
But no: you cannot hear them; for if you heard them 
You would have heard and captured me. 
Yet I am here, talking of laughter. 
Laughter and love and work and god; 
As I shall talk of these same things hereafter 
In wave and sod. 
Walk on a hill and call me: "Senlin! . . . Senlin! . . ." 
Will I not answer you as clearly as now? 
Listen to rain, and you will hear me speaking. 
Look for my heart in the breaking of a bough . . .'

3

S...Read more of this...
by Aiken, Conrad

Tasker Norcross

...
And sand-grass of his own monotony 
That makes earth less than earth. He could see that,
And he could see no more. The captured light 
That may have been or not, for all he cared, 
The song that is in sculpture was not his, 
But only, to his God-forgotten eyes, 
One more immortal nonsense in a world
Where all was mortal, or had best be so, 
And so be done with. ‘Art,’ he would have said, 
‘Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;’ 
And with a few profundities like that 
He ...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

The Captured Goddess

...Over the housetops,
Above the rotating chimney-pots,
I have seen a shiver of amethyst,
And blue and cinnamon have flickered
A moment,
At the far end of a dusty street.
Through sheeted rain
Has come a lustre of crimson,
And I have watched moonbeams
Hushed by a film of palest green.
It was her wings,
Goddess!
Who stepped over the clouds,
And laid her rainbow...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Chinese Nightingale

...es of the harbor moan.
And this gray bird, in Love's first spring,
With a bright-bronze breast and a bronze-brown wing,
Captured the world with his carolling.
Do you remember, ages after,
At last the world we were born to own?
You were the heir of the yellow throne—
The world was the field of the Chinese man
And we were the pride of the Sons of Han?
We copied deep books and we carved in jade,
And wove blue silks in the mulberry shade...."

"I remember, I remember
That Spring ...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel

The General Prologue

...ll," or y-falle," would be
"gefallen", "y-run," or "y-ronne", would be "geronnen."

6. Alisandre: Alexandria, in Egypt, captured by Pierre de
Lusignan, king of Cyprus, in 1365 but abandoned immediately
afterwards. Thirteen years before, the same Prince had taken
Satalie, the ancient Attalia, in Anatolia, and in 1367 he won
Layas, in Armenia, both places named just below.

7. The knight had been placed at the head of the table, above
knights of all nations, in Prussia, whither...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Height of Land

...times over a revel
Of roses that nodded all night,
Dreaming within our dreams, 
To wake at dawn and find that they were captured
With no dew on their leaves;
Sometimes mid sheaves
Of bracken and dwarf-cornel, and again
On a wide blueberry plain 
Brushed with the shimmer of a bluebird's wing;
A rocky islet followed
With one lone poplar and a single nest
Of white-throat-sparrows that took no rest
But sang in dreams or woke to sing, --
To the last portage and the height of land ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Duncan Campbell

The Negatives

...obbed a 
government pay station at Orleansville. Because of the subsequent 
confession of Dauville the other three were captured or shot. Dauville 
was given his freedom and returned to the land of his birth, the U.S.A.

AUGUST REIN: 
from a last camp near St. Remy

 I dig in the soft earth all 
 afternoon, spacing the holes 
 a foot or so from the wall. 
 Tonight we eat potatoes, 
 tomorrow rice and carrots. 
 The earth here is like the earth 
 nowhere, ancient with wood rot...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

The Star-Apple Kingdom

...passed 
upward from that baptism, their history lessons, 
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break: 
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables, 
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake. 

Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals 
from Santiago to Caracas, where penitential archbishops 
washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment 
that made the Caribbean a baptismal font, 
turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves 
the buzzards circling mu...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

The Three Taverns

...here are many, 
Finding at last that words are not the Word, 
And finding only that, will flourish aloft,
Like heads of captured Pharisees on pikes, 
Our contradictions and discrepancies; 
And there are many more will hang themselves 
Upon the letter, seeing not in the Word 
The friend of all who fail, and in their faith
A sword of excellence to cut them down. 

As long as there are glasses that are dark— 
And there are many—we see darkly through them; 
All which have I conce...Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

Waring

...ames
To feast him with, as feasts an ogress
Her sharp-toothed golden-crowned child!
Or, as one feasts a creature rarely
Captured here, unreconciled
To capture; and completely gives
Its pettish humours licence, barely
Requiring that it lives.

Ichabod, Ichabod,
The glory is departed!
Travels Waring East away?
Who, of knowledge, by hearsay,
Reports a man upstarted
Somewhere as a God,
Hordes grown European-hearted,
Millions of the wild made tame
On a sudden at his fame?
In Vishn...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

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