Famous Filth Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Filth poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous filth poems. These examples illustrate what a famous filth poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...ke a crumpled sheet,
our lips pendulant like a chandelier;
we,
the convicts of the City Leprous,
where gold and filth spawned leper¡¯s sores,
we are purer than the azure of Venice,
washed by both the sea and the sun!
I spit on the fact
that neither Homer nor Ovid
invented characters like us,
pock-marked with soot.
I know
the sun would dim, on seeing
the gold fields of our souls!
Sinews and muscles are surer than prayers.
Must we implore the c...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...HOLD it up sternly! See this it sends back! (Who is it? Is it you?)
Outside fair costume—within ashes and filth,
No more a flashing eye—no more a sonorous voice or springy step;
Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,
A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh,
Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,
Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
Words babble, hear...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...u me *wiss and counsail* *direct and counsel*
How I may have thy grace and thy succour;
All have I been in filth and in errour,
Lady! *on that country thou me adjourn,* *take me to that place*
That called is thy bench of freshe flow'r,
There as that mercy ever shall sojourn.
X.
Xpe thy Son, that in this world alight,
Upon a cross to suffer his passioun,
And suffer'd eke that Longeus his heart pight,* ...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...splendor of things and the sacred
stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries
And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this
thing comes near us again I am finding it hard
To praise you with a whole heart.
I know what pain is, but pain can shine. I know what death is,
I have sometimes
Longed for it. But cruelty and slavery and degredation,
pestilence, filth, the pitifulness
Of men like hurt little birds and animals . . . if you were
only
Wa...Read more of this...
by
Jeffers, Robinson
...at soil its page,
And of your villanies—and this is why
You now must swell the stream that passes by
Of refuse filth. Oh, horrid scene to show
Of these young men and that young girl just now!
Oh! can you really be of human kind
Breathing pure air of heaven? Do we find
That you are men? Oh, no! for when you laid
Foul lips upon the mouth of sleeping maid,
You seemed but ghouls that had come furtively
From out the tombs; only a horrid lie
Your hu...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...trucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on *******, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each ot...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...falling down
Look'd up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insult, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.
Last, as by some one deathbed after wail
Of suffering, silence follows, or thro' death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas,
A dead...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...
And cast it in the gaping gullets, to foil
Gluttonous blind greed, and those fierce mouths and wide
Closed on the filth, and as the craving cur
Quietens, that strained and howled to reach his food,
Biting the bone, those squalid mouths subdued
And silenced, wont above the empty dead
To bark insatiate, while they tore unfed
The writhing shadows.
The straight persistent rain,
That altered never, had pressed the miry plain
With flattened shades that in thei...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...they will do it in conceit, word, and motion.
For they will go forth afield.
For the Devil can work upon stagnating filth to a very great degree.
For I prophecy that we shall have our horns again.
For in the day of David Men as yet had a glorious horn upon his forehead.
For this horn was a bright substance in colour and consistence as the nail of the hand.
For it was broad, thick and strong so as to serve for defence as well as ornament.
For it brightened to the...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...ach morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants' wear.
These are the tranquilized Fifties,
and I am forty. Ought I to regret my seedtime?
I was a fire-breathing Cath...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...lded up to their misrule;
And know not that I called, and drew them thither,
My Hell-hounds, to lick up the draff and filth
Which Man's polluting sin with taint hath shed
On what was pure; til, crammed and gorged, nigh burst
With sucked and glutted offal, at one sling
Of thy victorious arm, well-pleasing Son,
Both Sin, and Death, and yawning Grave, at last,
Through Chaos hurled, obstruct the mouth of Hell
For ever, and seal up his ravenous jaws.
Then Heaven and Eart...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...istening to me.
I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums, and the ground but wallow and filth;
That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare
crape, and tears.
Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids—conformity goes to
the fourth-remov’d;
I wear my hat as I please, indoors or out.
Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?
Having pried through the strata, analyz...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...en up a rent,
That longeth to my lorde's duety."
"Ah! art thou then a bailiff?" "Yea," quoth he.
He durste not for very filth and shame
Say that he was a Sompnour, for the name.
"De par dieux," quoth this yeoman, "leve* brother, *dear
Thou art a bailiff, and I am another.
I am unknowen, as in this country.
Of thine acquaintance I will praye thee,
And eke of brotherhood, if that thee list.* *please
I have gold and silver lying in my chest;
If that thee hap to come into our...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!
He had to abandon the madness of money,
the filth of the scholars, the snarl of his honey.
The man overcame the terrestrial gravity,
The priests, drinking beer, would laugh at his "vanity":
"A straight line is short, but it is much too simple,
He'd better depict beds of roses for people."
And yet, like a rocket, he flew off with ease
through winds penetrating his coat and his ears.
He d...Read more of this...
by
Voznesensky, Andrei
...ing down
Looked up for heaven, and only saw the mist;
And shouts of heathen and the traitor knights,
Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, labouring of the lungs
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying, and voices of the dead.
Last, as by some one deathbed after wail
Of suffering, silence follows, or through death
Or deathlike swoon, thus over all that shore,
Save for some whisper of the seething seas...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ries,—
But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world
stifled her sighs.
The white world's vermin and filth:
All the dirt of London,
All the scum of New York;
Valiant spoilers of women
And conquerers of unarmed men;
Shameless breeders of bastards,
Drunk with the greed of gold,
Baiting their blood-stained hooks
With cant for the souls of the simple;
Bearing the white man's burden
Of liquor and lust and lies!
Unthankful we wince in the East,
Unthan...Read more of this...
by
Du Bois, W. E. B.
...e hot soil
Foul with ceaseless decay steams into flies!
So thick they pile themselves in the air above
Their meal of filth, they seem like breathing heaps
Of formless life mounded upon the earth;
And buzzing always like the pipes and strings
Of solemn music made for sorcerers. --
I abhor flies, -- to see them stare upon me
Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes;
To feel the dry cool skin of their bodies alight
Perching upon my lips! -- O yea, a dream,
A dream of...Read more of this...
by
Abercrombie, Lascelles
...tween
devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—
and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday
to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no
peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt
sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror
under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express—
Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian b...Read more of this...
by
Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...
I ask: Old Brown, was it you?
"Was it me and you? Was it you and me?
(Is that grammar, or is it not?)
Who groveled in filth and misery,
Who gloried and groused and fought?
Which is the wrong and which is the right?
Which is the false and the true?
The man of peace or the man of fight?
Which is the ME and the YOU?"...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...eaching falsehood, and speaking with stupidity...until when shall you remain ignorant? Unit when shall you abide in the filth of life and continue to desert its gardens? Why wear you tattered robes of narrowness while the silk raiment of Nature's beauty is fashioned for you? The lamp of wisdom is dimming; it is time to furnish it with oil. The house of true fortune is being destroyed; it is time to rebuild it and guard it. The thieves of ignorance have stolen the treasure of ...Read more of this...
by
Gibran, Kahlil
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