Famous Lust Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Peace, for whose presence did we erewhile call

by Hafez
Peace, for whose presence did we erewhile call
With cry sincere, vowing (God knoweth, those
Prótests how passionate were) to love thee all,
Yet when thou camest, pander’d to thy foes
Weaklier than ever, now again the throes
Convulse our being; now, Peace, may’st thou see,
This lust-devoted land is not for thee.

Farewell! Small wonder is it if thou flee
Such faithlessness, yet doth thy memory still
Dwell...Read more of this...

Proverbs of Hell (Excerpt from The Marriage of Heaven and H

by William Blake
 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool...Read more of this...

The Passing Strange

by John Masefield
 Out of the earth to rest or range
Perpetual in perpetual change,
The unknown passing through the strange.

Water and saltness held together
To tread the dust and stand the weather,
And plough the field and stretch the tether,

To pass the wine-cup and be witty,
Water the sands and build the city,
Slaughter like devils and have pity,

Be red with rage and pale with lust,
Make beauty...Read more of this...

doughnut denial

by Rg Gregory
 (an ascetic poem for karen's birthday)

fancy having a birthday on a thursday
when you do the buying of the doughnuts
and others lick their sticky fingers
thinking good old karen letting
us share the eating of her birthday

not me of course - i sit at home (alone)
reflecting it is purification day
today and i do not have a doughnut
thank you karen for letting me...Read more of this...

After Hearing a Waltz by Bartok

by Amy Lowell
 But why did I kill him? Why? Why?
In the small, gilded room, near the stair?
My ears rack and throb with his cry,
And his eyes goggle under his hair,
As my fingers sink into the fair
White skin of his throat. It was I!
I killed him! My God! Don't you hear?
I shook him until his red tongue
Hung flapping out through the black,...Read more of this...

Prelude to Space

by C S Lewis
 An Epithaliamium

So Man, grown vigorous now,
Holds himself ripe to breed,
Daily devises how
To ejaculate his seed
And boldly fertilize
The black womb of the unconsenting skies.

Some now alive expect
(I am told) to see the large,
Steel member grow erect,
Turgid with the fierce charge
Of our whole planet's skill,
Courage, wealth, knowledge, concentrated will,

Straining with lust to stamp
Our likeness on the abyss-
Bombs, gallows, Belsen camp,
Pox, polio,...Read more of this...

Tomlinson

by Rudyard Kipling
 Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair --
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way...Read more of this...

Botany Bay Eclogues 02 - Elinor

by Robert Southey
 (Time, Morning. Scene, the Shore.)

Once more to daily toil--once more to wear
The weeds of infamy--from every joy
The heart can feel excluded, I arise
Worn out and faint with unremitting woe;
And once again with wearied steps I trace
The hollow-sounding shore. The swelling waves
Gleam to the morning sun, and dazzle o'er
With many a splendid hue the breezy strand.
Oh there was once a...Read more of this...

from the Ansty Experience

by Rg Gregory
 (a)
they seek to celebrate the word
not to bring their knives out on a poem
dissecting it to find a heart
whose beat lies naked on a table
not to score in triumph on a line
no sensitive would put a nostril to
but simply to receive it as an
offering glimpsing the sacred there

poem probes the poet's once-intention
but each time said budges its truth
afresh (leaving...Read more of this...

Houses chapter IX

by Kahlil Gibran
 A mason came forth and said, "Speak to us of Houses." 

And he answered and said: 

Build of your imaginings a bower in the wilderness ere you build a house within the city walls. 

For even as you have home-comings in your twilight, so has the wanderer in you, the ever distant and alone. 

Your house is your larger...Read more of this...

John Ballard

by Edgar Lee Masters
 In the lust of my strength
I cursed God, but he paid no attention to me:
I might as well have cursed the stars.
In my last sickness I was in agony, but I was resolute
And I cursed God for my suffering;
Still He paid no attention to me;
He left me alone, as He had always done.
I might as well have cursed the...Read more of this...

How To Write The Great American Indian Novel

by Sherman Alexie
All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms.
Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food.

The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably
from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory.

If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender
and...Read more of this...

Love Among The Ruins

by Robert Browning
 I

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles
 Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
 Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
 As they crop— 
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
 (So they say)
Of our country's very capital, its prince
 Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
 Peace or war.

II

Now—the country...Read more of this...

From Pauline

by Robert Browning
 O God, where does this tend—these struggling aims? 
What would I have? What is this ‘sleep’, which seems 
To bound all? can there be a ‘waking’ point 
Of crowning life? The soul would never rule— 
It would be first in all things—it would have 
Its utmost pleasure filled,—but that complete 
Commanding for commanding sickens it. 
The last point I...Read more of this...

Happy Dust

by Aleister Crowley
 For Margot


Snow that fallest from heaven, bear me aloft on thy wings
To the domes of the star-girdled Seven, the abode of
ineffable things,
Quintessence of joy and of strength, that, abolishing
future and past,
Mak'st the Present an infinite length, my soul all-One
with the Vast,
The Lone, the Unnameable God, that is ice of His
measureless cold,
Without being or form or abode, without motion or
matter,...Read more of this...

War Song

by John Davidson
 In anguish we uplift 
A new unhallowed song: 
The race is to the swift; 
The battle to the strong. 

Of old it was ordained 
That we, in packs like curs, 
Some thirty million trained 
And licensed murderers, 

In crime should live and act, 
If cunning folk say sooth 
Who flay the naked fact 
And carve the heart of truth....Read more of this...

To Elsie

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

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...Read more of this...

Mactavish

by Robert William Service
 I do not write for love of pelf,
Nor lust for phantom fame;
I do not rhyme to please myself,
Nor yet to win acclaim:
No, strange to say it is my plan,
What gifts I have, to lavish
Upon a simple working man
 MACTAVISH.

For that's the rather smeary name,
Of dreary toil a hinter,
That heads the galley proofs that came
This morning from my printer;
My patient...Read more of this...

Humility

by Robert William Service
 My virtues in Carara stone
Cut carefully you all my scan;
Beneath I lie, a fetid bone,
The marble worth more than the man.

If on my pure tomb they should grave
My vices,--how the folks would grin!
And say with sympathetic wave:
"Like us he was a man of sin."

And somehow he consoled thereby,
Knowing they may, though Hades bent,
When finally they come to die,
Enjoy a...Read more of this...

The Atavist

by Robert William Service
 What are you doing here, Tom Thorne, on the white top-knot o' the world,
Where the wind has the cut of a naked knife and the stars are rapier keen?
Hugging a smudgy willow fire, deep in a lynx robe curled,
You that's a lord's own son, Tom Thorne -- what does your madness mean?

Go home, go home to your clubs, Tom...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 05: The snow floats down upon us mingled with rain

by Conrad Aiken
 The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain . . .
It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls
Down golden-windowed walls.
We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain,
We do not remember the red roots whence we rose,
But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while
We shall lie down again.

The snow floats down upon...Read more of this...

Elegy XVI: On His Mistress

by John Donne
 By our first strange and fatal interview,
By all desires which thereof did ensue,
By our long starving hopes, by that remorse
Which my words' masculine persuasive force
Begot in thee, and by the memory
Of hurts, which spies and rivals threatened me,
I calmly beg: but by thy father's wrath,
By all pains, which want and divorcement hath,
I conjure thee, and all the oaths which...Read more of this...

Psalm 119 part 6

by Isaac Watts
 Holiness and comfort from the word.

ver. 128 

Lord, I esteem thy judgments right,
And all thy statutes just;
Thence I maintain a constant fight
With every flatt'ring lust.

ver. 97,9 

Thy precepts often I survey;
I keep thy law in sight,
Through all the business of the day,
To form my actions right.

ver. 62 

My heart in midnight silence cries,
"How sweet thy comforts be!"
My thoughts in...Read more of this...

Im Scared Of It All

by Robert William Service
 I'm scared of it all, God's truth! so I am;
It's too big and brutal for me.
My nerve's on the raw and I don't give a damn
For all the "hoorah" that I see.
I'm pinned between subway and overhead train,
Where automobillies swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again --
I'm scared of the terrible town.

I want to go...Read more of this...

Toad Dreams

by Marge Piercy
 That afternoon the dream of the toads 
rang through the elms by Little River
and affected the thoughts of men, 
though they were not conscious that 
they heard it.--Henry Thoreau 


The dream of toads: we rarely 
credit what we consider lesser 
life with emotions big as ours, 
but we are easily distracted, 
abstracted. People sit nibbling 
before television's flicker watching...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Lust poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace