Famous Distraught Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Distraught poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous distraught poems. These examples illustrate what a famous distraught poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Charles Baudelaire
O SWARMING city, city full of dreams,
Where in a full day the spectre walks and speaks;
Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins
My story flows as flows the rising sap.
One morn, disputing with my tired soul,
And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,
I trod a suburb shaken by the jar
Of rolling wheels, where the...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Heart's ease or pansy, pleasure or thought,
Which would the picture give us of these?
Surely the heart that conceived it sought
Heart's ease.
Surely by glad and divine degrees
The heart impelling the hand that wrought
Wrought comfort here for a soul's disease.
Deep flowers, with lustre and darkness fraught,
From glass that gleams as the chill still seas
Lean and lend for a heart distraught
Heart's ease....Read more of this...
by
George Meredith
What links are ours with orbs that are
So resolutely far:
The solitary asks, and they
Give radiance as from a shield:
Still at the death of day,
The seen, the unrevealed.
Implacable they shine
To us who would of Life obtain
An answer for the life we strain
To nourish with one sign.
Nor can imagination throw
The penetrative shaft: we pass
The breath of thought, who would divine
If haply...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
owls and pussy cats can make up their minds
to sail out to sea and even get married
but they don't have parents or other such binds
whose one job in life is to see that they're harried
now a seven year old boy whose mind is quite clear
about what the world is and his proper place
will feel deeply distraught and totally drear
when...Read more of this...
by
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
Again I am raging,
I am in such a state by your soul that every
bond you bind, I break, by your soul.
I am like heaven, like the moon, like a candle by your glow;
I am all reason, all love, all soul, by your soul. My joy is of your doing, my hangover of your thorn;
whatever side you turn your...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Always we are following a light,
Always the light recedes; with groping hands
We stretch toward this glory, while the lands
We journey through are hidden from our sight
Dim and mysterious, folded deep in night,
We care not, all our utmost need demands
Is but the light, the light! So still it stands
Surely our own if we exert our might.
Fool! Never can'st thou grasp...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Deeming that I were better dead,
"How shall I kill myself?" I said.
Thus mooning by the river Seine
I sought extinction without pain,
When on a bridge I saw a flash
Of lingerie and heard a splash . . .
So as I am a swimmer stout
I plunged and pulled the poor wretch out.
The female that I saved? Ah yes,
To yield the Morgue...Read more of this...
by
Sherman Alexie
When I was twelve, I shoplifted a pair
Of basketball shoes. We could not afford
Them otherwise. But when I tied them on,
I found that I couldn’t hit a shot.
When the ball clanked off the rim, I felt
Only guilt, guilt, guilt. O, immoral shoes!
O, kicks made of paranoia and rue!
Distraught but unwilling to get caught
Or confess, I threw those cursed Nikes
Into the...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I
Its roots are bristling in the air
Like some mad Earth-god's spiny hair;
The loud south-wester's swell and yell
Smote it at midnight, and it fell.
Thus ends the tree
Where Some One sat with me.
II
Its boughs, which none but darers trod,
A child may step on from the sod,
And twigs that earliest...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Let lovers all distraught and frenzied be,
And flown with wine, and reprobates, like me;
When sober, I find everything amiss,
But in my cups cry, «Let what will be, be.»...Read more of this...
by
Michael Drayton
As other men, so I myself do muse
Why in this sort I wrest invention so,
And why these giddy metaphors I use,
Leaving the path the greater part do go.
I will resolve you: I am lunatic,
And ever this in madmen you shall find,
What they last thought of when the brain grew sick
In most distraction...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I towered far, and lo! I stood within
The presence of the Lord Most High,
Sent thither by the sons of earth, to win
Some answer to their cry.
--"The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so...Read more of this...
by
Charles Baudelaire
THE Moon more indolently dreams to-night
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
(Retold in Rhyme)
They threw him in a prison cell;
He moaned upon his bed.
And when he crept from coils of hell:
"Last night you killed," they said.
"last night in drunken rage you slew
A being brave with breath;
A radiant soul, because of you
Lies dark in death."
"last night I killed," he moaned distraught,
"When I was wild with wine;
I slew, and I remember naught...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
I
=A Snowy Day in School=
All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class,
Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence
Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass
Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly--
But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light
Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars,
Like full-blown...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
At dawn to tavern haunts I wend my way,
And with distraught Kalendars pass the day;
O Thou! who know'st things secret, and things known,
Grant me Thy grace, that I may learn to pray!...Read more of this...
by
Omer Tarin
I. You are not dead
Why do they call you
Mohen-jo-daro,
“ Mounds-of-the-Dead”?
You are not dead!
You have never been dead
Or buried
Or cremated
By the scorching banks of the Sindhu;
Historians have conspired against you
A thousand and one tales
Have besmirched your name
Misguided fools have imagined
Your obituary to be true;
Sentimental fools have sung elegies
By their own graves
Garlanded their own biers,
Cursed the stars and howled...Read more of this...
by
Aleister Crowley
[Dedicated to G. M. Marston]
Pale as the night that pales
In the dawn's pearl-pure pavillion,
I wait for thee, with my dove's breast
Shuddering, a god its bitter guest-
Have I not gilded my nails
And painted my lips with vermillion ?
Am I not wholly stript
Of the deeds and thoughts that obscure thee?
I wait for thee, my soul distraught
With aching for some nameless naught
In...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
It was the steamer Alice May that sailed the Yukon foam.
And touched in every river camp from Dawson down to Nome.
It was her builder, owner, pilot, Captain Silas Geer,
Who took her through the angry ice, the last boat of the year;
Who patched her cracks with gunny sacks and wound her pipes with wire,
And cut the spruce upon the banks...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind.
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
Dry timber under that rich foliage,
At wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood,
Too old for a man's love I stood in rage
Imagining men. Imagining that I could
A greater with a lesser pang assuage
Or but to find if withered vein ran blood,
I tore my body that its wine might cover
Whatever could rccall the lip of lover.
And after that I held my...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
If she met him or he met her,
I knew that something must occur;
For they were just like flint and steel
To strike the spark of woe and weal;
Or like two splinters broken fine,
In perfect fitness to combine;
And so I ept them well apart,
For she was precious to my heart.
One time we all three met at church
I tried to give the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Saave only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
Save only me
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
The gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
But it is long ago--
It seems forever--
Since...Read more of this...
by
William Vaughn Moody
A mile behind is Gloucester town
Where the flishing fleets put in,
A mile ahead the land dips down
And the woods and farms begin.
Here, where the moors stretch free
In the high blue afternoon,
Are the marching sun and talking sea,
And the racing winds that wheel and flee
On the flying heels of June.
Jill-o'er-the-ground is...Read more of this...
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