Famous Flesh And Blood Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Man Young And Old: I. First Love

...murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler


A Minor Poet

...ery simply's said,
"There is no place for me in all the world"?
The world's a rock, and I will beat no more
A breast of flesh and blood against a rock. . .
A stride across the planks for old time's sake.
Ah, bare, small room that I have sorrowed in; 
Ay, and on sunny days, haply, rejoiced;
We know some things together, you and I!
Hold there, you rangèd row of books ! In vain
You beckon from your shelf. You've stood my friends
Where all things else were foes; yet now I'll turn...Read more of this...
by Levy, Amy

A Satyre Against Mankind

...cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man -
A spirit free to choose for my own share
What sort of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

His senses are too gross; and he'll contrive
A sixth, to contradict the other five;
And before certain instinct will prefer
Reason, which fifty times for one does err.
Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which leaving l...Read more of this...
by Wilmot, John

Absalom And Achitophel

...ent:
Impoverish'd and depriv'd of all command,
Their taxes doubled as they lost their land;
And, what was harder yet to flesh and blood,
Their gods disgrac'd, and burnt like common wood.
This set the heathen priesthood in a flame;
For priests of all religions are the same:
Of whatsoe'er descent their godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold,
As if he had been born of beaten gold.
The Jewish Rabbins though their Enemies,
In th...Read more of this...
by Dryden, John

Cows

...Even as we speak, there's a smoker's cough
from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks;
a distant tingle of water into a trough.

In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck
all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil—
we've consoled ourselves with the dregs

of a bottle of Redbreast. Had Hawthorne been a Gael,
I insist, the scarlet A on...Read more of this...
by Muldoon, Paul


Four Quartets 2: East Coker

...blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood—
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.


V

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Fra Lippo Lippi

...n a titter 
Like the skipping of rabbits by moonlight,--three slim shapes, 
And a face that looked up . . . zooks, sir, flesh and blood, 
That's all I'm made of! Into shreds it went, 
Curtain and counterpane and coverlet, 
All the bed-furniture--a dozen knots, 
There was a ladder! Down I let myself, 
Hands and feet, scrambling somehow, and so dropped, 
And after them. I came up with the fun 
Hard by Saint Laurence, hail fellow, well met,-- 
Flower o' the rose, 
If I've been m...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert

Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament (excerpt)

...right to bind them to himself?
Dropt down from heaven? wash'd up from out the deep?
They fail'd to trace him thro' the flesh and blood
Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord
To bind them by inviolable vows,
Which flesh and blood perforce would violate:
For feel this arm of mine--the tide within
Red with free chase and heather-scented air,
Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure
As any maiden child? lock up my tongue
From uttering freely what I freely hear?
Bind me ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Interim

...To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—

 * * * * * * *

Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep....Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

Love

...f joy;  It came at once to do me good;  I waked, and saw my little boy,  My little boy of flesh and blood;  Oh joy for me that sight to see!  For he was here, and only he.   Suck, little babe, oh suck again!  It cools my blood; it cools my brain;  Thy lips I feel them, baby! they  Draw from my heart the pain away.  Oh! press me with thy little hand;  It loosens...Read more of this...
by Wordsworth, William

Ode To Joy

...Wild and fearful in his cavern
Hid the naked troglodyte,
And the homeless nomad wandered
Laying waste the fertile plain.
Menacing with spear and arrow
In the woods the hunter strayed ...
Woe to all poor wreteches stranded
On those cruel and hostile shores!

From the peak of high Olympus
Came the mother Ceres down,
Seeeking in those savage regions...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,

Satyr

...Were I (who to my cost already am 
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man) 
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, 
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare, 
I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear, 
Or any thing but that vain Animal, 
Who is so proud of being rational. 
The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive 
A Sixth, to contradict th...Read more of this...
by Wilmot, John

Sea Dreams

...the crowd
Broke, mixt with awful light, and show'd their eyes
Glaring, and passionate looks, and swept away
The men of flesh and blood, and men of stone,
To the waste deeps together. 

`Then I fixt
My wistful eyes on two fair images,
Both crown'd with stars and high among the stars,--
The Virgin Mother standing with her child
High up on one of those dark minster-fronts--
Till she began to totter, and the child
Clung to the mother, and sent out a cry
Which mixt with little Ma...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Song of Myself

...entity, 
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins, 
Treacherous tip of me reaching and crowding to help them, 
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different from
 myself; 
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs,
Straining the udder of my heart for its withheld drip, 
Behaving licentious toward me, taking no denial, 
Depriving me of my best, as for a purpose, 
Unbuttoning my clothes, holding me by the bare waist, 
Deludin...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

The Broken Men

...ake,
We feel there's Something Waiting,
 And -- we meet It when we wake.

Ah God! One sniff of England --
 To greet our flesh and blood --
To hear the traffic slurring
 Once more through London mud!
Our towns of wasted honour --
 Our streets of lost delight!
How stands the old Lord Warden?
 Are Dover's cliffs still white?...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Dance Of Death

...il vertebrae. 
O charm of nothing decked in folly! they 

Who laugh and name you a Caricature, 
They see not, they whom flesh and blood allure, 
The nameless grace of every bleached, bare bone, 
That is most dear to me, tall skeleton! 

Come you to trouble with your potent sneer 
The feast of Life! or are you driven here, 
To Pleasure's Sabbath, by dead lusts that stir 
And goad your moving corpse on with a spur? 

Or do you hope, when sing the violins, 
And the pale candle-f...Read more of this...
by Baudelaire, Charles

The Growth of Love

...that is heaven's praise:
And if we look for any praise on earth,
'Tis in man's love: all else is nothing worth. 

21
O flesh and blood, comrade to tragic pain
And clownish merriment whose sense could wake
Sermons in stones, and count death but an ache,
All things as vanity, yet nothing vain:
The world, set in thy heart, thy passionate strain
Reveal'd anew; but thou for man didst make
Nature twice natural, only to shake
Her kingdom with the creatures of thy brain. 
Lo, Shakes...Read more of this...
by Bridges, Robert Seymour

The Hippopotamus

...aodiceans.



THE BROAD-BACKED hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems so firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo’s feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The ’potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegrana...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

The Last Tournament

...ht to bind them to himself? 
Dropt down from heaven? washed up from out the deep? 
They failed to trace him through the flesh and blood 
Of our old kings: whence then? a doubtful lord 
To bind them by inviolable vows, 
Which flesh and blood perforce would violate: 
For feel this arm of mine--the tide within 
Red with free chase and heather-scented air, 
Pulsing full man; can Arthur make me pure 
As any maiden child? lock up my tongue 
From uttering freely what I freely hear? ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift

...had the Dean, in all the nation,
No worthy friend, no poor relation?
So ready to do strangers good,
Forgetting his own flesh and blood!"

Now Grub Street wits are all employed;
With elegies the town is cloyed:
Some paragraph in ev'ry paper,
To curse the Dean, or bless the Drapier.

The doctors, tender of their fame,
Wisely on me lay all the blame:
"We must confess his case was nice;
But he would never take advice.
Had he been ruled, for aught appears,
He might have lived the...Read more of this...
by Swift, Jonathan

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