Famous Happening Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Happening poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous happening poems. These examples illustrate what a famous happening poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Iqbal, Allama Muhammad
...ld
For sometime remained quiet.
Then lamp in his hand held
He spoke thus:
Are you wondering,
What to this is happening?
Your tears flowing
Has barred it from burning....Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...Maybe he will grow his body again, three years later. Maybe he won't.
There is nothing to do, to keep this from happening.
It occurs to me that the greatest gentleness would put a bullet into his bright eye. And when I look in his eye, it is not his eye that I see....Read more of this...
by
Flynn, Nick
...ryone's eyes
running over it. The week before
he'd said I had a problem with time,
that in my poems everything
kept happening at once. In 1969,
the voice of Mission Control
told a man named Buzz
that there was a bunch of guys turning blue
down here on Earth, and now I can understand
it was with anticipation, not sickness. Next,
Dugan says, Let's move on. The attempted poem
was about butterflies and my recurring desire
to return to a place I've never been.
...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...serve him
Against the fiery art that has no mercy
But what's in that prodigious grand new House.
I gather something happening in his boyhood
Fulfilled him with a boy's determination
To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well,
I hope at last he'll have his joy of it,
And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,
And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,
Be less than hell to his attendant ears.
Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him.
He may be wi...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...azzi, intelligent gawkers
Everyone knew they were part of 'History" except the deceased
who never knew exactly what was happening even when I was alive
February 22, 1997...Read more of this...
by
Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...uthFrom ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,A way of happening, a mouth.
Earth, receive an honoured guest:William Yeats is laid to rest.Let the Irish vessel lieEmptied of its poetry.In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark,And the living nations wait,Each sequestered in its hate;Intellectual disgraceStares from every human face,And...Read more of this...
by
García Lorca, Federico
...nd more bull rings without walls.
Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone.
All is finished. What is happening! Contemplate his face:
death has covered him with pale sulphur
and has place on him the head of dark minotaur.
All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth.
The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,
and Love, soaked through with tears of snow,
warms itself on the peak of the herd.
What is they saying? A stenching silen...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...What's wrong with you, with us,
what's happening to us?
Ah our love is a harsh cord
that binds us wounding us
and if we want
to leave our wound,
to separate,
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us
to drain our blood and burn together.
What's wrong with you? I look at you
and I find nothing in you but two eyes
like all eyes, a mouth
lost among a thousand mouths that I have kiss...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...mule, George, from Pleas-
anton. George carried up the other half of the roof.
The mule didn't like what was happening at all. He lost a
lot of weight because of the ticks, and the smell of the wild-
cats up on the plateau made him too nervous to graze there.
My friend said jokingly that George had lost around two hun-
dred pounds. The good wine country around Pleasanton in the
Livermore Valley probably had looked a lot better to George
than the w...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...were close to
the shore. That's where the important things were happen-
ing and that's where the good things were happening.
Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud
puddles, so I could look into the deeper water but it was not
nearly as good as the water in close to the shore.
The water bugs were so small I practically had to lay my
vision like a drowned orange on the mud puddle. There is a
romance about fruit floating outside on the ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ent inside Hotel Trout Fish-
ing in America. It was with a friend to meet some people.
"I'11 tell you what's happening, " he said. "She's an ex-
hustler who works for the telephone company. He went to
medical school for a while during the Great Depression and
then he went into show business. After that, he was an errand
boy for an abortion mill in Los Angeles. He took a fall and
did some time in San Quentin.
"I think you'll like them....Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...get a drink
of water. There was a small monument in the forest. I
walked over to the monument to see what was happening. The
glass door of the lookout was partly open and a towel was
hanging on the other side.
At the center of the monument was a photograph. It was
the classic forest lookout photograph Ihave seen before, from
that America that existed during the 1920s and 30s.
There was a man in the photograph who looked a lot like
Charles A....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...to?
Her hours went by in a long constant fleeing
The thought of that one morning. And her being
Bruised itself on a happening so rude.
XXXIX
It grew ripe Summer, when one morning came Her
tirewoman with a letter, printed
Upon the seal were the Deane crest and name. With utmost gentleness,
the letter hinted
His understanding and his deep regret. But would she not permit
him once again
To pay her his profound respects? No
word Of what had passed should pain...Read more of this...
by
Estep, Maggie
...cided to to seek gainful employment.
We got hired on as part time maids at the Holiday Inn while a maid strike
was happening. We were scab maids on speed and we were coming to clean
your room.
We were subsequently fired for pilfering a Holiday Inn guest's quaalude
stash which we did only because we never thought someone would have the
nerve to call the front desk and say; THE MAIDS STOLE MY LUUDES MAN. But
someone did - or so we surmised - because we were fi...Read more of this...
by
Levertov, Denise
...arning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"-Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been
happening to me"-
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness
twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.
They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given
the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck
has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...nt unacknowledged. Whalebone, the fellow-tutor he commended, also stayed silent.
Had the event been cancelled? Happening to be in Huddersfield on Good Friday
I staggered up three flights of stone steps in the Byram Arcade to the Poetry Business
Where, next to the ‘closed’ sign an out-of-date poster announced the reading in Leeds
At a date long gone.
I peered through the slats at empty desks, at brimming racks of books,
At overflowing bin-bags and the yello...Read more of this...
by
Ashbery, John
...lares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
"I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is
fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now,
day after day."
But how late to be regretting all this, even
...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...clock.
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real...Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...t, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that...Read more of this...
by
Milosz, Czeslaw
...ry day
Melancholy with remaining identical to himself.
If only the stars contained me.
If only everything kept happening in such a way
That the so-called world opposed the so-called flesh.
Were I at least not contradictory. Alas....Read more of this...
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