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Famous Disfigured Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Yeats, William Butler
...th his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies? -
How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfigured shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Casts upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?
And what's the good of an escape
If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most...Read more of this...



by Doolittle, Hilda
...not honey but seething life. 

And in these dark cells, 
packed street after street, 
souls live, hideous yet -- 
O disfigured, defaced, 
with no trace of the beauty 
men once held so light. 

Can we think a few old cells 
were left -- we are left -- 
grains of honey, 
old dust of stray pollen 
dull on our torn wings, 
we are left to recall the old streets? 

Is our task the less sweet 
that the larve still sleep in their cells? 
Or crawl out to attack our frail stren...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ss restored by that refining fire
 Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
 He left me, with a kind of valediction,
 And faded on the blowing of the horn.


III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Whi...Read more of this...

by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...IHe disappeared in the dead of winter:The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,And snow disfigured the public statues;The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.What instruments we have agreeThe day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illnessThe wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;By mourning tonguesThe death of the poet was kept from...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...he was in her sight,
Living. They gave him back to her alive
How else? They are not known to send the dead
And not disfigured visibly. His face?
His hands? She had to look, and ask,
"What was it, dear?" And she had given all
And still she had all they had they the lucky!
Wasn't she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, "What was it, dear?"

"Enough,"
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,
High in t...Read more of this...



by Milton, John
...ctised to deceive 
Uriel once warned; whose eye pursued him down 
 The way he went, and on the Assyrian mount 
 Saw him disfigured, more than could befall 
 Spirit of happy sort; his gestures fierce 
 He marked and mad demeanour, then alone, 
 As he supposed, all unobserved, unseen. 
 So on he fares, and to the border comes 
 Of Eden, where delicious Paradise, 
 Now nearer, crowns with her enclosure green, 
 As with a rural mound, the champaign head 
 Of a steep wildernes...Read more of this...

by Carroll, Lewis
...The Milk-and-Water School 
Alas! she would not hear my prayer!
Yet it were rash to tear my hair;
Disfigured, I should be less fair.

She was unwise, I may say blind;
Once she was lovingly inclined;
Some circumstance has changed her mind.


The Strong-Minded or Matter-of-Fact School 
Well! so my offer was no go!
She might do worse, I told her so;
She was a fool to answer "No".

However, things are as they stood;
Nor would I have her if I coul...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...d,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is wholly autumn: in the late
Afternoon as I walked toward the ridge where the hills
 begin,
There is a whir, a thrashing in the bush, and a startled
 pheasant, flying out and up,
Suddenly astonished me, breaking the waking dream.

Last night
Snatches of sleep, streaked by dreams and half dreams
- So that, aloft in the dim sky,...Read more of this...

by Taylor, Edward
...mies of the iris, 
wireworms are worse than their parents, 
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, 
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently 
at me, the me who so loves to garden 
because it prevents the heaving of the ground 
and the untimely death of porch furniture, 
and dark, murky days in a large city 
and the dream home under a permanent storm 
is also a factor to keep in mind."...Read more of this...

by Tate, James
...mies of the iris, 
wireworms are worse than their parents, 
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, 
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently 
at me, the me who so loves to garden 
because it prevents the heaving of the ground 
and the untimely death of porch furniture, 
and dark, murky days in a large city 
and the dream home under a permanent storm 
is also a factor to keep in mind."...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into gingerbrea...Read more of this...

by Simic, Charles
...ing crazily.

I let them have my black raincoat.

Thinking constantly of the Divine Love 
 and the Absolute had disfigured me.
People mistook me for someone else.
I heard voices after me calling out unknown names.
"I'm searching for someone to sell my soul to,"
The drunk who followed me whispered,
While appraising me from head to foot.

At the address I had been given.
The building had large X's over its windows.
I knocked but no one came to op...Read more of this...

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