Famous Demons Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Beacons

by Charles Baudelaire
 Reubens, river of forgetfulness, garden of sloth,
Pillow of wet flesh that one cannot love,
But where life throngs and seethes without cease
Like the air in the sky and the water in the sea.

Leonardo da Vinci, sinister mirror,
Where these charming angels with sweet smiles
Charged with mystery, appear in shadows
Of glaciers and pines that close off the country.

Rembrandt, sad hospital full of...Read more of this...

The Humble Home

by Victor Hugo
 ("L'église est vaste et haute.") 
 
 {IV., June 29, 1839.} 


 The Church{1} is vast; its towering pride, its steeples loom on high; 
 The bristling stones with leaf and flower are sculptured wondrously; 
 The portal glows resplendent with its "rose," 
 And 'neath the vault immense at evening swarm 
 Figures of angel, saint, or demon's...Read more of this...

From Victor Hugo

by Thomas Hardy
 Child, were I king, I'd yield my royal rule, 
 My chariot, sceptre, vassal-service due, 
My crown, my porphyry-basined waters cool, 
My fleets, whereto the sea is but a pool, 
 For a glance from you! 

Love, were I God, the earth and its heaving airs, 
 Angels, the demons abject under me, 
Vast chaos with its teeming womby...Read more of this...

Henry James in the Heart of the City

by Erica Jong
 We have a small sculpture of Henry James on our terrace in New York City.

Nothing would surprise him.
The beast in the jungle was what he saw--
Edith Wharton's obfuscating older brother. . .

He fled the demons
of Manhattan
for fear they would devour
his inner ones
(the ones who wrote the books)
& silence the stifled screams
of his protagonists.

To Europe
like a wandering Jew--
WASP that he...Read more of this...

To Horror

by Robert Southey
 Dark HORROR, hear my call!
Stern Genius hear from thy retreat
On some old sepulchre's moss-cankered seat,
Beneath the Abbey's ivied wall
That trembles o'er its shade;
Where wrapt in midnight gloom, alone,
Thou lovest to lie and hear
The roar of waters near,
And listen to the deep dull groan
Of some perturbed sprite
Borne fitful on the heavy gales of night.

Or whether o'er some wide waste hill
Thou...Read more of this...

Ars Poetica?

by Czeslaw Milosz
 I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as...Read more of this...

The Tale of the Tiger-Tree

by Vachel Lindsay
 A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver Henderson, ten years old. 

The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in all ages. It shows how the mammoth forces may be either friends or enemies of the struggle for peace. It shows how the dream of peace is unconquerable and eternal.


I

Peace-of-the-Heart, my own for long,
Whose shining...Read more of this...

Love And Madness

by Thomas Campbell
 Hark ! from the battlements of yonder tower
The solemn bell has tolled the midnight hour !
Roused from drear visions of distempered sleep,
Poor Broderick wakes—in solitude to weep !

"Cease, Memory; cease (the friendless mourner cried)
To probe the bosom too severely tried !
Oh ! ever cease, my pensive thoughts, to stray
Through tie bright fields of Fortune's better day,
When youthful Hope, the...Read more of this...

The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, 
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...

Demon

by Anne Sexton
 A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand
over the demon's mouth sometimes...-- D. H. Lawrence

I mentioned my demon to a friend
and the friend swam in oil and came forth to me
greasy and cryptic
and said,
"I'm thinking of taking him out of hock.
I pawned him years ago."

Who would buy?
The pawned demon,
Yellowing with forgetfulness
and hand at his throat?
Take...Read more of this...

The Dark House

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Where a faint light shines alone, 
Dwells a Demon I have known. 
Most of you had better say 
"The Dark House," and go your way. 
Do not wonder if I stay.

For I know the Demon's eyes 
And their lure that never dies. 
Banish all your fond alarms, 
For I know the foiling charms 
Of her eyes and of her...Read more of this...

The Geebung Polo Club

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 It was somewhere up the country, in a land of rock and scrub, 
That they formed an institution called the Geebung Polo Club. 
They were long and wiry natives from the rugged mountain side, 
And the horse was never saddled that the Geebungs couldn't ride; 
But their style of playing polo was irregular and rash -- 
They had mighty...Read more of this...

New England

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Here where the wind is always north-north-east
And children learn to walk on frozen toes,
Wonder begets an envy of all those
Who boil elsewhere with such a lyric yeast
Of love that you will hear them at a feast
Where demons would appeal for some repose,
Still clamoring where the chalice overflows
And crying wildest who have drunk the least.

Passion is here a soilure of...Read more of this...

To the Muse of Poetry

by Mary Darby Robinson
 EXULT MY MUSE! exult to see 
Each envious, waspish, jealous thing, 
Around its harmless venom fling, 
And dart its powerless fangs at THEE! 
Ne'er shalt THOU bend thy radiant wing, 
To sweep the dark revengeful string; 
Or meanly stoop, to steal a ray, 
E'en from RINALDO'S glorious lay, 
Tho' his transcendent Verse should twine 
About thy heart, each bliss...Read more of this...

Rinaldo to Laura Maria

by Mary Darby Robinson
 THOU! whose sublime poetic art 
Can pierce the pulses of the heart, 
Can force the treasur'd tear to flow 
In prodigality of woe; 
Or lure each jocund bliss to birth 
Amid the sportive bow'rs of mirth: 
LAURA DIVINE! I call thee now 
To yonder promontory's brow 
That props the skies; while at its feet 
With fruitless ire the billows...Read more of this...

Thinking of Li Bai at the End of the Sky

by Du Fu
 Cold wind rise sky end Gentleman thought resemble what? Goose what time come? River lake autumn water much Literature hate fate eminent Demons happy people failure Respond together wronged person language Throw poems give Miluo  Cold wind rises at the end of the sky, What thoughts occupy the gentleman's mind? What time will the wild...Read more of this...

The Imperfect Lover

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I never asked you to be perfect—did I?— 
Though often I’ve called you sweet, in the invasion 
Of mastering love. I never prayed that you 
Might stand, unsoiled, angelic and inhuman, 
Pointing the way toward Sainthood like a sign-post. 

Oh yes, I know the way to heaven was easy. 
We found the little kingdom of our passion 
That all...Read more of this...

Ode to Despair

by Mary Darby Robinson
 TERRIFIC FIEND! thou Monster fell, 
Condemn'd in haunts profane to dwell, 
Why quit thy solitary Home, 
O'er wide Creation's paths to roam? 
Pale Tyrant of the timid Heart, 
Whose visionary spells can bind 
The strongest passions of the mind, 
Freezing Life's current with thy baneful Art. 

Nature recoils when thou art near, 
For round thy form all plagues are...Read more of this...

To Ladies Of A Certain Age

by John Trumbull
 Ye ancient Maids, who ne'er must prove
The early joys of youth and love,
Whose names grim Fate (to whom 'twas given,
When marriages were made in heaven)
Survey'd with unrelenting scowl,
And struck them from the muster-roll;
Or set you by, in dismal sort,
For wintry bachelors to court;
Or doom'd to lead your faded lives,
Heirs to the joys of former wives;
Attend! nor fear in state...Read more of this...

How I Walked Alone in the Jungles of Heaven

by Vachel Lindsay
 Oh, once I walked in Heaven, all alone
Upon the sacred cliffs above the sky.
God and the angels, and the gleaming saints
Had journeyed out into the stars to die.

They had gone forth to win far citizens,
Bought at great price, bring happiness for all:
By such a harvest make a holier town
And put new life within old Zion's wall.

Each chose a far-off...Read more of this...

Heccar and Gaira

by Thomas Chatterton
 Where the rough Caigra rolls the surgy wave, 
Urging his thunders thro' the echoing cave; 
Where the sharp rocks, in distant horror seen, 
Drive the white currents thro' the spreading green; 
Where the loud tiger, pawing in his rage, 
Bids the black archers of the wilds engage; 
Stretch'd on the sand, two panting warriors lay, 
In all the burning...Read more of this...

Clowns Houses

by Dame Edith Sitwell
 BENEATH the flat and paper sky 
The sun, a demon's eye, 
Glowed through the air, that mask of glass; 
All wand'ring sounds that pass

Seemed out of tune, as if the light 
Were fiddle-strings pulled tight. 
The market-square with spire and bell 
Clanged out the hour in Hell;

The busy chatter of the heat 
Shrilled like a parakeet; 
And shuddering at...Read more of this...

Innocence

by Robert William Service
 The height of wisdom seems to me
 That of a child;
So let my ageing vision be
 Serene and mild.
The depth of folly, I aver,
 Is to fish deep
In that dark pool of science where
 Truth-demons sleep.

Let me not be a bearded sage
 Seeing too clear;
In issues of the atom age
 Man-doom I fear.
So long as living's outward show
 To...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Soulful Sam

by Robert William Service
 You want me to tell you a story, a yarn of the firin' line,
Of our thin red kharki 'eroes, out there where the bullets whine;
Out there where the bombs are bustin',
and the cannons like 'ell-doors slam --
Just order another drink, boys, and I'll tell you of Soulful Sam.

Oh, Sam, he was never 'ilarious, though I've 'ad some mates as...Read more of this...

The Song of the Darling River

by Henry Lawson
 The skies are brass and the plains are bare, 
Death and ruin are everywhere -- 
And all that is left of the last year's flood 
Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud; 
The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver, 
And -- this is the dirge of the Darling River: 

`I rise in the drought from the Queensland rain,...Read more of this...

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