Famous Madman Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Madman poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous madman poems. These examples illustrate what a famous madman poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking;
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ,
With something new to wish, or to enjoy!
Railing and praising were his usual themes;
And both (to show his judgment) in extremes:
So over violent, or over civil,
That every man, with him, was god or devil.
In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded, but desert.
Beggar'd by fools, whom still he fou...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...ayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"
The madman saith He said so: it is strange....Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...g; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her...Read more of this...
by
Rilke, Rainer Maria
...rs of terror, numb and endlessly long;
Night with its weary waiting, fighting the shadows back,
And ever the crouching madman singing his crazy song.
Cold with its creeping terror, cold with its sudden clinch;
Cold so utter you wonder if 'twill ever again be warm;
Clancy grinned as he shuddered, "Surely it isn't a cinch
Being wet-nurse to a looney in the teeth of an arctic storm.
"The blizzard passed and the dawn broke, knife-edged and crystal clear;
The sky was a blue-...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...ll trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
Not fortune's worshipper, nor fashion's fool,
Not lucre's madman, nor ambition's tool,
Not proud, nor servile, be one poet's praise,
That, if he pleas'd, he pleas'd by manly ways;
That flatt'ry, even to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in verse or prose the same:
That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,
But stoop'd to truth, and moraliz'd his song:
That not for fame, but virtue's better end,
He stood the...Read more of this...
by
Pope, Alexander
...y's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insa...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...pled current underneath, the knight,
That named himself the Star of Evening, stood.
And Gareth, 'Wherefore waits the madman there
Naked in open dayshine?' 'Nay,' she cried,
'Not naked, only wrapt in hardened skins
That fit him like his own; and so ye cleave
His armour off him, these will turn the blade.'
Then the third brother shouted o'er the bridge,
'O brother-star, why shine ye here so low?
Thy ward is higher up: but have ye slain
The damsel's champion?' and th...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...he first thing I found
in the living room.
I quit shaving
but the eyes that glanced at me
remained in the mirror.
The madman
emerges from the movies:
the street at lunchtime.
Cities of boys
are in their graves,
and in this town...
Lying on my side
in the void:
the breath in my nose.
On the fifteenth floor
the dog chews a bone-
Screech of taxicabs.
A hardon in New York,
a boy
in San Fransisco.
The moon over the roof,
worms in the garden.
I rent this house.
[Haiku com...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...riefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...o be told,
And most of them are children all their lives.
The good God in his wisdom had them so,
That now and then a madman or a seer
May shake them out of their complacency
And shame them into deeds. The major file
See only what their fathers may have seen,
Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing.
I do not say it matters what they saw.
Now and again to some lone soul or other
God speaks, and there is hanging to be done,—
As once there was a burning of our bo...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...re starting awake, --
Yearning beyond all sanity for some echo of that Song
Of Songs that was sung to the soul of the madman, Blake!...Read more of this...
by
Benet, William Rose
...ence all doubts with a shriek!)
And first let us shriek the unstinted abuse that the Tory Press prefer --
De Wet is a madman, and Steyn is a liar, and Kruger a pitiful cur!
(Though I think if Oom Paul -- as old as he is -- were to walk down the Strand with his gun,
A lot of these heroes would hide in the sewers or take to their heels and run!
For Paul he has fought like a man in his day, but now that he's feeble and weak
And tired, and lonely, and old and grey, of cours...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...treet lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”
The memory ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...much sense in defeat as
in victory; slow days like mules
humping it slagged and sullen and sun-glazed
up a road where a madman sits waiting among
bluejays and wrens netted in and sucked a flakey
grey.
good days too of wine and shouting, fights
in alleys, fat legs of women striving around
your bowels buried in moans,
the signs in bullrings like diamonds hollering
Mother Capri, violets coming out of the ground
telling you to forget the dead armies and the loves
that robbed you....Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...me:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man's heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer th...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...ack bolts,
As mad as twenty blooded colts;
And out into the street I pass,
As mad as two-year-olds at grass
A naked madman saving grand
A blazing lamp in either hand.
I yelled like twenty drunken sailors,
:The devil's come among the tailors."
A blaze of flame behind me streamed,
And then I clashed the lamps and screamed
"I'm Satan, newly come from hell."
And then I spied the fire bell.
I've been a ringer, so I know
How best to make a big bell go.
So on to bell-...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...ds black-eyed daughter,
Had watched her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.
Back, he spurred like a madman, shreiking a curse to the sky,
with the white road smoking behind him, and his rapier brain dished high!
Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat.
When they shot him down in the highway,
Down like a dog on the highway,
And he lay his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat.
And still of a winter's n...Read more of this...
by
Noyes, Alfred
...never there.
And so for ever, day and night the same,
Years flying swiftly nowhere, like a game
Played random by a madman, without end
Or any reasoned object but to spend
What is unspendable -- Eternal Woe!
O Weariness of Time that fast or slow
Goes never further, never has in view
An ending to the thing it seeks to do,
And so does nothing: merely ebb and flow,
From nowhere into nowhere, touching so
The shores of many stars and passing on,
Careless of what may c...Read more of this...
by
Stephens, James
...hes than old.
And should some great court-lady say, the Prince
Hath picked a ragged-robin from the hedge,
And like a madman brought her to the court,
Then were ye shamed, and, worse, might shame the Prince
To whom we are beholden; but I know,
That when my dear child is set forth at her best,
That neither court nor country, though they sought
Through all the provinces like those of old
That lighted on Queen Esther, has her match.'
Here ceased the kindly mother out o...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...and had fun and drank wine
Past the white columns of Senate
Where it's dark, dark again.
"What are you doing, you madman!"
"No, I am only in love with thee!
This evening is wide and noisy,
Ship will have lots of fun at the sea!"
Horror tightly clutches the throat,
Shuttle took us at dusk on our turn..
The tough smell of ocean tightrope
Inside trembling nostrils did burn.
"Say, you most probably know:
I don't sleep? Thus in sleep it can be"
Only oars splash...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
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