Famous Hateful Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Egg and the Machine

by Robert Frost
 He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.
He wished when he had had the track alone
He had attacked it with a club or stone
And bent some rail wide open like switch
So as to wreck the engine in...Read more of this...

The Lotos-eaters

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 "Courage!" he said, and pointed toward the land, 
"This mounting wave will roll us shoreward soon."
In the afternoon they came unto a land 
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
Full-faced above the valley stood the moon;
And like a downward smoke, the slender stream 
Along the...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Hank The Finn

by Robert William Service
 Now Fireman Flynn met Hank the Finn where lights of Lust-land glow;
"Let's leave," says he, "the lousy sea, and give the land a show.
I'm fed up to the molar mark with wallopin' the brine;
I feel the bloody barnacles a-carkin' on me spine.
Let's hit the hard-boiled North a crack, where creeks are paved with gold."
"You count me in," says Hank...Read more of this...

Ariosto. Orlando Furioso Canto X 91-99

by Alan Seeger
 Ruggiero, to amaze the British host, 
And wake more wonder in their wondering ranks, 
The bridle of his winged courser loosed, 
And clapped his spurs into the creature's flanks; 
High in the air, even to the topmost banks 
Of crudded cloud, uprose the flying horse, 
And now above the Welsh, and now the Manx, 
And now across the sea...Read more of this...

De Amicitiis

by Eugene Field
 Though care and strife
Elsewhere be rife,
Upon my word I do not heed 'em;
In bed I lie
With books hard by,
And with increasing zest I read 'em.

Propped up in bed,
So much I've read
Of musty tomes that I've a headful
Of tales and rhymes
Of ancient times,
Which, wife declares, are "simply dreadful!"

They give me joy
Without alloy;
And isn't that what books are made for?
And yet--and...Read more of this...

Demeter And Persephone

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Faint as a climate-changing bird that flies
All night across the darkness, and at dawn
Falls on the threshold of her native land,
And can no more, thou camest, O my child,
Led upward by the God of ghosts and dreams,
Who laid thee at Eleusis, dazed and dumb,
With passing thro' at once from state to state,
Until I brought thee hither, that the day,
When...Read more of this...

Fatima

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!
O sun, that from thy noonday height
Shudderest when I strain my sight,
Throbbing thro' all thy heat and light,
 Lo, falling from my constant mind,
 Lo, parch'd and wither'd, deaf and blind,
 I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

Last night I wasted hateful hours
Below the city's eastern towers:
I thirsted for the brooks, the showers:
I...Read more of this...

Psalm XXXVI: High in the Heavns

by Isaac Watts
 High in the heav'ns, eternal God,
Thy goodness in full glory shines;
Thy truth shall break through ev'ry cloud
That veils and darkens thy designs.

For ever firm thy justice stands,
As mountains their foundations keep;
Wise are the wonders of thy hands;
Thy judgments are a mighty deep.

Thy providence is kind and large,
Both man and beast thy bounty share;
The whole creation is thy charge,
But saints...Read more of this...

Venus and Adonis

by William Shakespeare
 Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty;
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold.

Venus salutes him with this fair good-morrow;
"O thou clear god, and patron of all light,
From whom each lamp and shining star...Read more of this...

As if a Phantom Caress'd Me

by Walt Whitman
 AS if a phantom caress’d me, 
I thought I was not alone, walking here by the shore; 
But the one I thought was with me, as now I walk by the shore—the one I loved, that
 caress’d me, 
As I lean and look through the glimmering light—that one has utterly
 disappear’d, 
And those appear that are hateful to me,...Read more of this...

Canzone IV

by Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE IV. Si è debile il filo a cui s' attene. HE GRIEVES IN ABSENCE FROM LAURA.  The thread on which my weary life dependsSo fragile is and weak,If none kind succour lends,Soon 'neath the painful burden will it break;Since doom'd to take my sad farewell of her,In whom begins...Read more of this...

The Wife

by Robert William Service
 "Tell Annie I'll be home in time
To help her with her Christmas-tree."
That's what he wrote, and hark! the chime
Of Christmas bells, and where is he?
And how the house is dark and sad,
And Annie's sobbing on my knee!

The page beside the candle-flame
With cruel type was overfilled;
I read and read until a name
Leapt at me and my heart was stilled:
My eye...Read more of this...

The Cremation Of Sam McGee

by Robert William Service
 There are strange things done in the midnight sun
 By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
 That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen ***** sights,
 But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
 I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee,...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXIX

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XXIX. S' io credessi per morte essere scarco. HE PRAYS FOR DEATH, BUT IN VAIN.  Had I believed that Death could set me freeFrom the anxious amorous thoughts my peace that mar,With these my own hands which yet stainless are,Life had I loosed, long hateful grown to me.Yet, for I...Read more of this...

Sonnet For The End Of A Sequence

by Dorothy Parker
 So take my vows and scatter them to sea;
Who swears the sweetest is no more than human.
And say no kinder words than these of me:
"Ever she longed for peace, but was a woman!
And thus they are, whose silly female dust
Needs little enough to clutter it and bind it,
Who meet a slanted gaze, and ever must
Go build themselves a soul...Read more of this...

The Whipping

by Robert Hayden
 The old woman across the way
 is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
 her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
 pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
 pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
 boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
 to woundlike...Read more of this...

The Rape of the Lock: Canto 4

by Alexander Pope
 But anxious cares the pensive nymph oppress'd, 
And secret passions labour'd in her breast.
Not youthful kings in battle seiz'd alive,
Not scornful virgins who their charms survive,
Not ardent lovers robb'd of all their bliss,
Not ancient ladies when refus'd a kiss,
Not tyrants fierce that unrepenting die,
Not Cynthia when her manteau's pinn'd awry,
E'er felt such rage, resentment, and despair,
As thou, sad virgin!...Read more of this...

Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova
 Not under foreign skies
 Nor under foreign wings protected -
 I shared all this with my own people
 There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
 [1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her...Read more of this...

The Broken Balance

by Robinson Jeffers
 I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla

The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers...Read more of this...

Song of the Lotos-Eaters

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
THERE is sweet music here that softer falls 
Than petals from blown roses on the grass, 
Or night-dews on still waters between walls 
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; 
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies, 5 
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes; 
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies. 
Here are cool mosses deep, 
And...Read more of this...

The Progress of Spring

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 THE groundflame of the crocus breaks the mould, 
Fair Spring slides hither o'er the Southern sea, 
Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold 
That trembles not to kisses of the bee: 
Come Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves 
The spear of ice has wept itself away, 
And hour by hour unfolding woodbine leaves 
O'er his uncertain...Read more of this...

Gamblers All

by Charles Bukowski
 sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, 
I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside 
remembering all the times you've felt that way, and 
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face 
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway, 
get into...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of Pious Pete

by Robert William Service
 "The North has got him." --Yukonism.


I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.
I grieved for his fate, and early and late I watched over him like a kid.
I gave him excuse, I bore his abuse in every way that I could;
I swore to prevail; I camped on his trail; I plotted and planned for...Read more of this...

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

by Robert Browning
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who...Read more of this...

Famine Song

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Third Song, written during Fever

   To-night the clouds hang very low,
       They take the Hill-tops to their breast,
       And lay their arms about the fields.
   The wind that fans me lying low,
       Restless with great...Read more of this...

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