Famous Coarse Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Absalom And Achitophel

...peculiar privilege affords,
Indulging latitude to deeds and words.
And Corah might for Agag's murther call,
In terms as coarse as Samuel us'd to Saul.
What others in his evidence did join,
(The best that could be had for love or coin,)
In Corah's own predicament will fall:
For Witness is a common name to all.

Surrounded thus with friends of every sort,
Deluded Absalom forsakes the court:
Impatient of high hopes, urg'd with renown,
And fir'd with near possession of a crown:
T...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John


Bishop Blougrams Apology

...y're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line 
Before your sages,--just the men to shrink 
From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad 
You offer their refinement. Fool or knave? 
Why needs a bishop be a fool or knave 
When there's a thousand diamond weights between? 
So, I enlist them. Your picked twelve, you'll find, 
Profess themselves indignant, scandalized 
At thus being held unable to explain 
How a superior man who disbelieves 
May not believe as well: ...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Comus

...emnities,
Where most may wonder at the workmanship.
It is for homely features to keep home;
They had their name thence: coarse complexions
And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply
The sampler, and to tease the huswife's wool.
What need a vermeil-tinctured lip for that,
Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the morn?
There was another meaning in these gifts;
Think what, and be advised; you are but young yet.
 LADY. I had not thought to have unlocked my lips
In this unhallowed ...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Custer

...fair woman for her true estate-
Man's tender comrade, and his equal mate, 
Not his competitor in toil and trade.
While coarser man, with greater strength was made
To fight her battles and her rights protect.
Ay! to protect the rights of earth's elect
(The virgin maiden and the spotless wife) 
From immemorial time has man laid down his life.

V.

And now brave Custer's valiant army pressed
Across the dangerous desert of the West, 
To rescue fair white captives from the hands
...Read more of this...
by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Monadnoc

...ot a minstrel seed,
But men of bone, and good at need.
Rallying round a parish steeple
Nestle warm the highland people,
Coarse and boisterous, yet mild,
Strong as giant, slow as child,
Smoking in a squalid room,
Where yet the westland breezes come.
Close hid in those rough guises lurk
Western magians, here they work;
Sweat and season are their arts,
Their talismans are ploughs and carts;
And well the youngest can command
Honey from the frozen land,
With sweet hay the swamp ad...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo


Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

...the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of wi...Read more of this...
by Ashbery, John

Sleepers The

...o the old homestead, 
On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for rush-bottoming chairs, 
Her hair, straight, shiny, coarse, black, profuse, half-envelop’d her face,
Her step was free and elastic, and her voice sounded exquisitely as she spoke. 

My mother look’d in delight and amazement at the stranger, 
She look’d at the freshness of her tall-borne face, and full and pliant limbs, 
The more she look’d upon her, she loved her, 
Never before had she seen such wonderful bea...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Song of Myself

...riant beard and curls protected his neck—he held his bride by the hand;

She had long eyelashes—her head was bare—her coarse straight locks
 descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside; 
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile; 
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak, 
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, 
And brought water, ...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

...in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.

He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats,
and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.

He does not know that sickening thirst
That sands one's throat, before
The hangman with his gardener's gloves
Slips through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no mor...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar

The Ballad of the White Horse

...h songs and spells that change the blood;
And on the King's right Harold stood,
The kinsman of the King.

Young Harold, coarse, with colours gay,
Smoking with oil and musk,
And the pleasant violence of the young,
Pushed through his people, giving tongue
Foewards, where, grey as cobwebs hung,
The banners of the Usk.

But as he came before his line
A little space along,
His beardless face broke into mirth,
And he cried: "What broken bits of earth
Are here? For what their clothe...Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

The Fish

...
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed 
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scr...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

The General Prologue

..., be was of Dartemouth. to the West*
He rode upon a rouncy*, as he couth, *hack
All in a gown of falding* to the knee. *coarse cloth
A dagger hanging by a lace had he
About his neck under his arm adown;
The hot summer had made his hue all brown;
And certainly he was a good fellaw.
Full many a draught of wine he had y-draw
From Bourdeaux-ward, while that the chapmen sleep;
Of nice conscience took he no keep.
If that he fought, and had the higher hand,
*By water he sent them ho...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Holy Grail

...n enow 
To scare them from me once; and then I came 
All in my folly to the naked shore, 
Wide flats, where nothing but coarse grasses grew; 
But such a blast, my King, began to blow, 
So loud a blast along the shore and sea, 
Ye could not hear the waters for the blast, 
Though heapt in mounds and ridges all the sea 
Drove like a cataract, and all the sand 
Swept like a river, and the clouded heavens 
Were shaken with the motion and the sound. 
And blackening in the sea-foam ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Millers Tale

...ones, layed fair apart
On shelves couched* at his bedde's head, *laid, set
His press y-cover'd with a falding* red. *coarse cloth
And all above there lay a gay psalt'ry
On which he made at nightes melody,
So sweetely, that all the chamber rang:
And Angelus ad virginem he sang.
And after that he sung the kinge's note;
Full often blessed was his merry throat.
And thus this sweete clerk his time spent
After *his friendes finding and his rent.* *Attending to his friends,
 a...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Prisoner of Chillon

...said my nearer brother pined,
I said his mighty heart declined,
He loathed and put away his food;
It was not that 'twas coarse and rude,
For we were used to hunter's fare,
And for the like had little care:
The milk drawn from the mountain goat
Was changed for water from the moat,
Our bread was such as captives' tears
Have moisten'd many a thousand years
Since man first pent his fellow men
Like brutes within an iron den;
But what were these to us or him?
These wasted not his h...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Schooner Flight

...her sleep, that insomniac's Bible,
a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye
center, from the Dominican Republic.
Its coarse pages were black with the usual
symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish:
an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered
like a butcher chart, delivered the future.
One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,
she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come."
She said, "I dreamt of whales and a storm,"
but for that dream, the book had no answer.
A next night I dr...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek

The Suicide

...earing a curious lock
Some chance had shown me fashioned faultily,
Whereof Life held content the useless key,
And great coarse hinges, thick and rough with rust,
Whose sudden voice across a silence must,
I knew, be harsh and horrible to hear,—
A strange door, ugly like a dwarf.—So near
I came I felt upon my feet the chill
Of acid wind creeping across the sill.
So stood longtime, till over me at last
Came weariness, and all things other passed
To make it room; the still night ...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

The Talking Oak

...tly murmur'd thine. 

"A teardrop trembled from its source, 
And down my surface crept. 
My sense of touch is something coarse, 
But I believe she wept. 

"Then flush'd her cheek with rosy light, 
She glanced across the plain; 
But not a creature was in sight: 
She kiss'd me once again. 

"Her kisses were so close and kind, 
That, trust me on my word, 
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind, 
But yet my sap was stirr'd: 

"And even into my inmost ring 
A pleasure I discern'd, 
Lik...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Teachers Monologue

...am 
I measure up so jealously, 
All the sweet thoughts I live on seem 
To vanish into vacancy: 
And then, this strange, coarse world around 
Seems all that's palpable and true; 
And every sight, and every sound, 
Combines my spirit to subdue 
To aching grief, so void and lone 
Is Life and Earth­so worse than vain, 
The hopes that, in my own heart sown, 
And cherished by such sun and rain 
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed, 
Have ripened to a harvest there: 
Alas ! methinks I h...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Charlotte

The Wizard Way

...one may not utter 
Rather than sink in the greasy splutter 
Of Britons munching their bread and butter;
Ailing boys and coarse-grained girls 
Grown to sloppy women and brutal churls. 
So, I am off with staff in hand 
To the endless light of the nameless land. 

Darkness spreads its sombre streams, 
Blotting out the elfin dreams. 
I might haply be afraid, 
Were it not the Feather-maid 
Leads me softly by the hand, 
Whispers me to understand. 
Now (when through the world of wee...Read more of this...
by Crowley, Aleister

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