Famous Maimed Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Carol of Harvest for 1867

...rear—O you dread, accruing army! 
O you regiments so piteous, with your mortal diarrhoea! with your fever!
O my land’s maimed darlings! with the plenteous bloody bandage and the crutch! 
Lo! your pallid army follow’d!) 

7
But on these days of brightness, 
On the far-stretching beauteous landscape, the roads and lanes, the high-piled
 farm-wagons, and
 the fruits and barns, 
Shall the dead intrude?

Ah, the dead to me mar not—they fit well in Nature; 
They fit very well in t...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt


A Minor Poet

...d
By mortal brain, by brain Divine devised,
Darker, more fraught with torment, than the world
For such as I? A creature maimed and marr'd 
From very birth. A blot, a blur, a note
All out of tune in this world's instrument.
A base thing, yet not knowing to fulfil
Base functions. A high thing, yet all unmeet
For work that's high. A dweller on the earth,
Yet not content to dig with other men
Because of certain sudden sights and sounds
(Bars of broke music; furtive, fleeting glim...Read more of this...
by Levy, Amy

Burning of the Exeter Theatre

...dy saw,
Human remains, beyond recognition, covered with a heap of straw;
And here and there a body might be seen, and a maimed hand,
Oh, such a sight, that the most hard-hearted person could hardly withstand! 

The number of people in the theatre was between seven and eight thousand,
But alas! one hundred and fifty by the fire have been found dead;
And the most lives were lost on the stairs leading from the gallery,
And these were roasted to death, which was sickening to see....Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz

Elegy For Jane

...f wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover....Read more of this...
by Roethke, Theodore

Frankincense and Myrrh

...ffled wings
Against the walls of circumstance, and hoards
Of torn desires, broken joys; records
Of all a bruised life's maimed imaginings.
Now you are come! You tremble like a star
Poised where, behind earth's rim, the sun has set.
Your voice has sung across my heart, but numb
And mute, I have no tones to answer. Far
Within I kneel before you, speechless yet,
And life ablaze with beauty, I am dumb....Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy


Gareth And Lynette

...horse and shield: wonders ye have done; 
Miracles ye cannot: here is glory enow 
In having flung the three: I see thee maimed, 
Mangled: I swear thou canst not fling the fourth.' 

'And wherefore, damsel? tell me all ye know. 
You cannot scare me; nor rough face, or voice, 
Brute bulk of limb, or boundless savagery 
Appal me from the quest.' 

'Nay, Prince,' she cried, 
'God wot, I never looked upon the face, 
Seeing he never rides abroad by day; 
But watched him have I like...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

God

...ursed souls.
The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat
To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power,
On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry,
He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more.
But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze,
Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws,
And he would weigh the heavier on those after.

Who rests in God's mean flattery now? Your wealth
Is but his cunning to make death more hard.
Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking....Read more of this...
by Rosenberg, Isaac

Inferno (English)

...at slime malign 
 Were muddied shades, that not with hands, heads, 
 And teeth and feet besides, contending tore, 
 And maimed each other in beast-like rage. 

 My guide 
 Expounded, "Those whom anger overbore 
 On earth, behold ye. Mark the further sign 
 Of bubbles countless on the slime that show. 
 These from the sobs of those immersed arise; 
 For buried in the choking filth they cry, 
 We once were sullen in the rain-sweet air, 
 When waked the light, and all the earth ...Read more of this...
by Alighieri, Dante

Paradise Lost: Book 01

...
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries 
Of alienated Judah. Next came one 
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark 
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off, 
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge, 
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers: 
Dagon his name, sea-monster,upward man 
And downward fish; yet had his temple high 
Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast 
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon, 
And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds. 
Him followed Ri...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

The Artists

...riant floods of harmony.
To beauty's richer, more majestic stream,--
The fair members of the world's vast scheme,
That, maimed, disgrace on his creation bring,
He sees the lofty forms then perfecting--

The fairer riddles come from out the night--
The richer is the world his arms enclose,
The broader stream the sea with which he flows--
The weaker, too, is destiny's blind might--
The nobler instincts does he prove--
The smaller he himself, the greater grows his love.
Thus is ...Read more of this...
by Schiller, Friedrich von

The Childrens Song

...ons live.

Teach us to rule ourselves alway,
Controlled and cleanly night and day;
That we may bring, if need arise,
No maimed or worthless sacrifice.

Teach us to look in all our ends
On Thee for judge, and not our friends;
That we, with Thee, may walk uncowed
By fear or favour of the crowd.

Teach us the Strength that cannot seek,
By deed or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under Thee, we may possess
Man's strength to comfort man's distress.

Teach us Delight in simple thin...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Cockney Soul

...London and died for home in the nineteen-fourteen shock. 

Oh, this is a pork-shop warrior's chant – come back from it, maimed and blind, 
To a little old counter in Grey's Inn-road and a tiny parlour behind; 
And the bedroom above, where the wife and he go silently mourning yet 
For a son-in-law who shall never come back and a dead son's room "To Let". 

(But they have a boy "in the fried-fish line" in a shop across the "wye", 
Who will take them "aht" and "abaht" to-night a...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry

The Congo: A Study of the Negro Race

...te men,
HOO, HOO, HOO.
Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost
Like the wind in the chimney.
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Listen to the creepy proclamation,
Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,
Blown past the white-ants' hill of clay,
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play: --
"Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
All the "O" sounds very golden. Heavy ac...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel

The Country of the Blind

...Hard light bathed them-a whole nation of eyeless men, 
Dark bipeds not aware how they were maimed. A long 
Process, clearly, a slow curse,
Drained through centuries, left them thus.

At some transitional stage, then, a luckless few, 
No doubt, must have had eyes after the up-to-date, 
Normal type had achieved snug
Darkness, safe from the guns of heavn;

Whose blind mouths would abuse words that belonged to their 
Great-grandsires, unabashed, talki...Read more of this...
by Lewis, C S

The Earthly Paradise: The Lady of the Land

...the country people, in their fear
Of wizardry, had wrought destruction here,

And piteously these fair things had been maimed;
There stood great Jove, lacking his head of might;
Here was the archer, swift Apollo, lamed;
The shapely limbs of Venus hid from sight
By weeds and shards; Diana's ankles light
Bound with the cable of some coasting ship;
And rusty nails through Helen's maddening lip.

Therefrom unto the chambers did he pass,
And found them fair still, midst of their ...Read more of this...
by Morris, William

The Jacquerie A Fragment

...at crowd that thronged the market-place
In fair Clermont to hear him prophesy.
Midst of the crowd old Gris Grillon, the maimed,
-- A wretched wreck that fate had floated out
From the drear storm of battle at Poictiers.
A living man whose larger moiety
Was dead and buried on the battle-field --
A grisly trunk, without or arms or legs,
And scarred with hoof-cuts over cheek and brow,
Lay in his wicker-cradle, smiling.
"Jacques,"
Quoth he, "My son, I would behold this priest
That...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

The Last Tournament

...hedge of splintered teeth, 
Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump 
Pitch-blackened sawing the air, said the maimed churl, 

`He took them and he drave them to his tower-- 
Some hold he was a table-knight of thine-- 
A hundred goodly ones--the Red Knight, he-- 
Lord, I was tending swine, and the Red Knight 
Brake in upon me and drave them to his tower; 
And when I called upon thy name as one 
That doest right by gentle and by churl, 
Maimed me and mauled, and would...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Light That Failed

...he last, with his masters around him,
He spoke of the Faith as a master to slave.
Yet at the last though the Kafirs had maimed him,
Broken by bondage and wrecked by the reiver,
Yet at the last, tho' the darkness had claimed him,
He colled on Allah and died a Believer!...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Princess (part 6)

...mankind, 
Ill nurses; but descend, and proffer these 
The brethren of our blood and cause, that there 
Lie bruised and maimed, the tender ministries 
Of female hands and hospitality.' 

She spoke, and with the babe yet in her arms, 
Descending, burst the great bronze valves, and led 
A hundred maids in train across the Park. 
Some cowled, and some bare-headed, on they came, 
Their feet in flowers, her loveliest: by them went 
The enamoured air sighing, and on their curls 
Fr...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Valley of the Shadow

...:
There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow, 
And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed....Read more of this...
by Robinson, Edwin Arlington

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