Famous Madhouse Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Madhouse poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous madhouse poems. These examples illustrate what a famous madhouse poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Dylan Thomas
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Some good people, daring & subtle voices
and their tense faces, as I think of it
I see sank underground.
I see. My radar digs. I do not dig.
Cool their flushing blood, them eyes is shut-”
eyes?
Appalled: by all the dead: Henry brooded.
Without exception! All.
ALL.
The senior population waits. Come down! come down!
A ghastly & flashing pause, clothed,
life called; us do.
In a madhouse heard...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk
of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner....Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
"Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me?"
1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS
Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,
that green mama who first forced me to sing,
who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime
of brown where I was beggar and she was king?
I said, "The devil is down that...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
Great rocks hoisted in air;
And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . .
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
It was the lunatic poet escaped from the local asylum,
Loudly he twanged on his banjo and sang with his voice like a saw-mill,
While as with fervour he sang there was borne o'er the shuddering wildwood,
Borne on the breath of the poet a flavour of rum and of onions.
He sang of the Deficit Demon that dqelt...Read more of this...
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