Famous Decrepitude Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Tower

by William Butler Yeats
 I

What shall I do with this absurdity -
O heart, O troubled heart - this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
 Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible -
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back
And had...Read more of this...

Greater Love

by Wilfred Owen
 Red lips are not so red
 As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
 When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
 Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
 Cramps...Read more of this...

The Mutes

by Denise Levertov
 Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such...Read more of this...

After Long Silence

by William Butler Yeats
 Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant....Read more of this...

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