Famous Cobra Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Cobra poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cobra poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cobra poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...y took their way to the fen
Where they hunted or hid all night;
No enemies, they, of men.
Evil had entered not
The cobra, since defiled.
He watched, when the beasts had gone
Our kissing and singing wild.
Beautiful friend he was,
Sage, not a tempter grim.
Many a year should pass
Ere Satan should enter him.
He danced while the evening dove
And the nightingale kept in tune.
I sang of the angel sun:
You sang of the angel-moon:
We sang of the angel-chief
Who blew...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...bilee
Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
And unthinkable deaths like Harpo M...Read more of this...
by
Corso, Gregory
...all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
O...Read more of this...
by
Bogan, Louise
...a sleepy gong,
summoning nothing to nothing.
In winter time, the zoo reverts to metaphor,
God's poetry of boredom:
the cobra knits her Fair-Isle skin,
rattlers titter over the same joke.
All of them endlessly finish spaghetti.
The python runs down like a spring,
and time stops on some ancient Sabbath.
Pythagorean bees are shut inside the hive,
which hymns and hums like Sunday chapel--
drowsy thoughts in a wrinkled brain.
The fire's gone out--
crocodiles lie like wet beams,...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Craig
...od and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle-Favour go with thee!
Kaa
Anger is the egg of Fear--
Only lidless eyes see clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech--
Even so with Cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length.
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep ?
Look thy den be hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Dr...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...iece of paper
bag. With a little square for a sawmill.
THE BALLET FOR
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
How the Cobra Lily traps insects is a ballet for Trout Fishing
in America, a ballet to be performed at the University of
California at Los Angeles.
The plant is beside me here on the back porch.
It died a few days after I bought it at Woolworth's. That
was months ago, during the presidential election of nineteen
hundred and sixty.
I buried the plant in an ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...boards,
And every private twinge a hissing asp
To petrify your eyes, and every village
Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,
And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast
Anacnoda.
Imagine: the world
Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed
With suffering from conception upwards, and there
You have it in hand. Grit in the eye or a sore
Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe
Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.
Those rocks, cleft and worn, t...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...e; a river
tugs at their slow feet.
I stand alone & amazed,
with a pill-happy door gunner
signaling for me to board the Cobra.
I remember how one day
I almost bowed to such figures
walking toward me, under
a corporal's ironclad stare.
I can't say why.
From a half-mile away
trees huddle together,
& the prisoners look like
marionettes hooked to strings of light....Read more of this...
by
Komunyakaa, Yusef
...ted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...langed with a hissing whir
On the lashing blade of the rapier.
Hawk roared and charged like a maddened buck.
As the cobra strikes, Sir Henry struck,
Pouring his life in a single thrust,
And the cutlass shivered to sparks and dust.
Sir Henry stood on the blood-stained deck,
And set his foot on his foe's neck.
Then from the hatch, where the rent decks slope,
Where the dead roll and the wounded grope,
He dragged the serpent of the rope.
The sky was blue, and the ...Read more of this...
by
Benet, Stephen Vincent
...round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces
On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.
Shall the hood of the cobra appall me ----
The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains
Through which the sky eternally threads itself?
The world is blood-hot and personal
Dawn says, with its blood-flush.
There is no terminus, only suitcases
Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,
Notions and tickets, short circuits and fo...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
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