Famous Hungry Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Cloud in Trousers

...perceive whom no one sees, 
crossing the mountains of time. 

Where men¡¯s eyes stop short, 
there, at the head of hungry hordes, 
the year 1916 cometh 
in the thorny crown of revolutions. 

In your midst, his precursor, 
I am where pain is ¨C everywhere; 
on each drop of the tear-flow 
I have nailed myself on the cross. 
Nothing is left to forgive. 
I¡¯ve cauterised the souls where tenderness was bred. 
It was harder than taking 
a thousand thousand Bastilles...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir


A Poets Voice XV

...Part One


The power of charity sows deep in my heart, and I reap and gather the wheat in bundles and give them to the hungry. 

My soul gives life to the grapevine and I press its bunches and give the juice to the thirsty. 

Heaven fills my lamp with oil and I place it at my window to direct the stranger through the dark. 

I do all these things because I live in them; and if destiny should tie my hands and prevent me from so doing, then death would be my only desire. For I...Read more of this...
by Gibran, Kahlil

Beowulf (Old English)

...hero. Long while of the day
fled ere he felt the floor of the sea.

Soon found the fiend who the flood-domain
sword-hungry held these hundred winters,
greedy and grim, that some guest from above,
some man, was raiding her monster-realm.
She grasped out for him with grisly claws,
and the warrior seized; yet scathed she not
his body hale; the breastplate hindered,
as she strove to shatter the sark of war,
the linked harness, with loathsome hand.
Then bore this brine...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,

Custer

...ks, panting, where his captive sister sleeps, 
And o'er his face the shade of murder creeps.
His nostrils quiver like a hungry beast
Who scents anear the bloody carnal feast.
He longs to leap down in that slumbering vale
And leave no foe alive to tell the awful tale.



XXXVII.
Not so, calm Custer. Sick of gory strife, 
He hopes for rescue with no loss of life; 
And plans that bloodless battle of the plains 
Where reasoning mind outwits mere savage brains.
The sullen soldiers...Read more of this...
by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

...long have been friendless and homeless,
Welcome once more to a home, that is better perchance than the old one!
Here no hungry winter congeals our blood like the rivers;
Here no stony ground provokes the wrath of the farmer.
Smoothly the ploughshare runs through the soil, as a keel through the water.
All the year round the orange-groves are in blossom; and grass grows
More in a single night than a whole Canadian summer.
Here, too, numberless herds run wild and unclaimed in th...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth


Eviradnus

...w let chance or fate 
 Decide for us which has the marquisate, 
 And which the girl." 
 
 Upon their faces now 
 A hungry tiger's look began to show. 
 "My brother, let us speak like men of sense," 
 Said Joss; "while Mahaud dreams in innocence, 
 We grasp all here—and hold the foolish thing— 
 Our Friend below to us success will bring. 
 He keeps his word; 'tis thanks to him I say, 
 No awkward chance has marred our plans to-day. 
 All has succeeded—now no human ...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor

Howl

...in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeare...Read more of this...
by Ginsberg, Allen

Hurry Up Please Its Time

...clothes a gonna melt. 
Hear that, Ms. Dog! 
You of the songs, 
you of the classroom, 
you of the pocketa-pocketa, 
you hungry mother, 
you spleen baby! 
Them angels gonna be cut down like wheat. 
Them songs gonna be sliced with a razor. 
Them kitchens gonna get a boulder in the belly. 
Them phones gonna be torn out at the root. 
There's power in the Lord, baby, 
and he's gonna turn off the moon. 
He's gonna nail you up in a closet 
and there'll be no more Atlantic, 
no more ...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Let America Be America Again

...bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the *****, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and s...Read more of this...
by Hughes, Langston

Love Sonnet XI

...body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue....Read more of this...
by Neruda, Pablo

Ode to a Nightingale

...and I have ears in vain¡ª 
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60 

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! 
No hungry generations tread thee down; 
The voice I hear this passing night was heard 
In ancient days by emperor and clown: 
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65 
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, 
She stood in tears amid the alien corn; 
The same that ofttimes hath 
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Ode To Silence

...ain!
I know the way you mean,—the little night,
And the long empty day,—never to see
Again the angry light,
Or hear the hungry noises cry my brain!
Ah, but she,
Your other sister and my other soul,
She shall again be mine;
And I shall drink her from a silver bowl,
A chilly thin green wine,
Not bitter to the taste,
Not sweet,
Not of your press, oh, restless, clamorous nine,—
To foam beneath the frantic hoofs of mirth—
But savoring faintly of the acid earth,
And trod by pensive...Read more of this...
by St. Vincent Millay, Edna

Snowbound a Winter Idyl

...the rocky Isles of Shoals 
The hake-broil on the drift-wood coals; 
The chowder on the sand-beach made, 
Dipped by the hungry, steaming hot, 
With spoons of clam-shell from the pot. 
We heard the tales of witchcraft old, 
And dream and sign and marvel told 
To sleepy listeners as they lay 
Stretched idly on the salted hay, 
Adrift along the winding shores, 
When favoring breezes deigned to blow 
The square sail of the gundelow 
And idle lay the useless oars. 

Our mother, wh...Read more of this...
by Whittier, John Greenleaf

The Boy Who Laughed At Santa Claus

...hid old ladies' reading glasses,
His mouth was open when he chewed,
And elbows to the table glued.
He stole the milk of hungry kittens,
And walked through doors marked NO ADMITTANCE.
He said he acted thus because
There wasn't any Santa Claus.


Another trick that tickled Jabez
Was crying 'Boo' at little babies.
He brushed his teeth, they said in town,
Sideways instead of up and down.
Yet people pardoned every sin,
And viewed his antics with a grin,
Till they were told by Jabe...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

The Bride of Abydos

...Their burthen round Sig?um's steep, 
And cast on Lemnos' shore: 
The sea-birds shriek above the prey, 
O'er which their hungry beaks delay, 
As shaken on his restless pillow, 
His head heaves with the heaving billow; 
That hand, whose motion is not life, 
Yet feebly seems to menace strife, 
Flung by the tossing tide on high, 
Then levell'd with the wave — 
What recks it, though that corse shall lie 
Within a living grave? 
The bird that tears that prostrate form 
Hath only ro...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Everlasting Mercy

...e, 
And guzzled spirits like a beast, 
To show contempt for Church and priest, 
Until, by six, my wits went round 
Like hungry pigs in parish pound. 
At half past six, rememb'ring Jane, 
I staggered into street again 
With mind made up (or primed for gin) 
To bash the coop who'd run me in; 
For well I knew I'd have to cock up 
My legs that night inside the lock-up, 
And it was my most fixed intent 
To have a fight before I went. 
Our Fates are strange, and no one now his; 
Ou...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John

The Ghosts

...oving-wistful, dreamy Brown, long and lean, with a smile askew,
Friendless he wandered up and down, gaunt as a wolf, as hungry too.
Brown with his lilt of saucy rhyme, Brown with his tilt of tender mirth
Garretless in the gloom and grime, singing his glad, mad songs of earth:
So at last with a faith divine, down and down to the Hunger-line.

There as he stood in a woeful plight, tears a-freeze on his sharp cheek-bones,
Who should chance to behold his plight, but the publisher...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

THE ILIAD (excerpt)

...y reign
  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
  Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
  Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.(41)
  Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
  Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!(42)

  Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour(43)
  Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power
  Latona's son a dire contagion spread,(44)
  And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead;
  The king of men his rever...Read more of this...
by Homer,

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

...The Argument.


Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along 
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth.

Till the villain ...Read more of this...
by Blake, William

The Rape of the Lock

...ghing, ogling, and all that.

Mean while declining from the Noon of Day,
The Sun obliquely shoots his burning Ray; 
The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign,
And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine;
The Merchant from th'exchange returns in Peace,
And the long Labours of the Toilette cease ----
Belinda now, whom Thirst of Fame invites,
Burns to encounter two adventrous Knights,
At Ombre singly to decide their Doom;
And swells her Breast with Conquests yet to come.
Strait the ...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander

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