Famous Mockery Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Mockery poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous mockery poems. These examples illustrate what a famous mockery poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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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...
by
Henry Lawson
You ask me to be gay and glad
While lurid clouds of danger loom,
And vain and bad and gambling mad,
Australia races to her doom.
You bid me sing the light and fair,
The dance, the glance on pleasure's wings –
While you have wives who will not bear,
And beer to drown the fear of things.
A...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I
I took the clock down from the shelf;
"At eight," said I, "I shoot myself."
It lacked a minute of the hour,
And as I waited all a-cower,
A skinful of black, boding pain,
Bits of my life came back again. . . .
"Mother, there's nothing more to eat --
Why don't you go out on the street?
Always you sit and cry and cry;
Here at...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
First Ghost
To sepulcher my mouldy bones
I bough a pile of noble stones,
And half a year a sculptor spent
To hew my marble monument,
The stateliest to rear its head
In all this city of the dead.
And generations passing through
Will gape, and ask: What did he do
To earn this tomb so rich and rare,
In Attic grace beyond compare?
How was his life in honour...Read more of this...
by
Alexander Pope
What beck'ning ghost, along the moon-light shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!--but why that bleeding bosom gor'd,
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?
Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell,
Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages -
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.
II
Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the...Read more of this...
by
James Tate
Speaking of sunsets,
last night's was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn't natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn't breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
When the caravans of wool-teams climbed the ranges from the West,
On a spur among the mountains stood `The Bullock-drivers' Rest';
It was built of bark and saplings, and was rather rough inside,
But 'twas good enough for bushmen in the careless days that died --
Just a quiet little shanty kept by `Something-in-Disguise',
As the bushmen called the...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
How sweet the music sounded
That summer long ago,
When you were by my side, love,
To list its gentle flow.
I saw your eyes a-shining,
I felt your rippling hair,
I kissed your pearly cheek, love,
And had no thought of care.
And gay or sad the music,
With subtle charm replete;
I found in after years, love
'Twas you that made it sweet.
For standing where we heard it,
I hear...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 124] CANZONE XVI. Italia mia, benchè 'l parlar sia indarno. TO THE PRINCES OF ITALY, EXHORTING THEM TO SET HER FREE. O my own Italy! though words are vainThe mortal wounds to close,Unnumber'd, that thy beauteous bosom stain,Yet may it soothe my painTo sigh forth Tyber's woes,Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I met upon a narrow way,
Dead weary from his toil,
A fellow warped and gnarled and grey,
Who reeked of sweat and soil.
His rags were readyful to rot,
His eyes were dreary dim;
Yet . . . yet I had the humble thought
To raise my hat to him.
For thinks I: It's the likes of him
That makes the likes of me;
With horny hand...Read more of this...
by
Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
A treasured link of shining pearls,
A by-gone melody,
A shower of tears with smiles between—
And this is memory.
A thing so light a breath of air
May waft its life away;
A thing so dark that moments of pain
Seem like some endless day.
A careless word may wound the heart,
And quickly it may die;
Yet in...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers
In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,
Groan against labors, wars...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
All they said was true:
I wrecked my father's bank with my loans
To dabble in wheat; but this was true --
I was buying wheat for him as well,
Who couldn't margin the deal in his name
Because of his church relationship.
And while George Reece was serving his term
I chased the will-o'-the-wisp of women,
And the mockery of wine in New York.
It's deathly to...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Dérision! que cet amour boiteux.")
{HERNANI, Act III.}
O mockery! that this halting love
That fills the heart so full of flame and transport,
Forgets the body while it fires the soul!
If but a youthful shepherd cross my path,
He singing on the way—I sadly musing,
He in his fields,...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Beauty and love let no one separate,
Whom exact Nature did to each other fit,
Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
And to Love beauty as true colour of it.
Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,
But let none love outside the body's thought,
So the seen couple's togetherness shall bear
Truth to the beauty each in the other sought.
I could but...Read more of this...
by
Emily Brontë
On a sunny brae, alone I lay
One summer afternoon;
It was the marriage-time of May
With her young lover, June.
From her mother's heart, seemed loath to part
That queen of bridal charms,
But her father smiled on the fairest child
He ever held in his arms.
The trees did wave their plumy crests,
The glad birds caroled clear;
And I, of all the wedding guests,
Was...Read more of this...
by
Robert Seymour Bridges
Sense with keenest edge unusèd,
Yet unsteel'd by scathing fire;
Lovely feet as yet unbruisèd
On the ways of dark desire;
Sweetest hope that lookest smiling
O'er the wilderness defiling!
Why such beauty, to be blighted
By the swarm of foul destruction?
Why such innocence delighted,
When sin stalks to thy seduction?
All the litanies e'er chaunted
Shall not keep...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Saint, revolutionist,
God and sage know well,
That there is a place
Where that much-rung bell,
The well-beloved body,
And its sensitive face
Must be sacrificed.
There is, it seems, in this
A something meaningless,
Hanging without support
And yet too dear to touch,
That life should seek its end
Where no will can descend,
Facing a gun to see
Long actuality.
What is this that is
The good of nothingness,
The death of Socrates
And that...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
The morning sea of silence broke into ripples of bird songs;
and the flowers were all merry by the roadside;
and the wealth of gold was scattered through the rift of the clouds
while we busily went on our way and paid no heed.
We sang no glad songs nor played;
we went not to the village for barter;...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
The church flings forth a battled shade
Over the moon-blanched sward:
The church; my gift; whereto I paid
My all in hand and hoard;
Lavished my gains
With stintless pains
To glorify the Lord.
I squared the broad foundations in
Of ashlared masonry;
I moulded mullions thick and thin,
Hewed fillet and ogee;
I circleted
Each sculptured head
With...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Six bulls I saw as black as jet,
With crimsoned horns and amber eyes
That chewed their cud without a fret,
And swished to brush away the flies,
Unwitting their soon sacrifice.
It is the Corpus Christi fête;
Processions crowd the bannered ways;
Before the alters women wait,
While men unite in hymns of praise,
And children look with angel gaze.
The bulls know naught of holiness,
To pious pomp...Read more of this...
by
W. E. B. Du Bois
O Silent God, Thou whose voice afar in mist and mystery hath left our ears
an-hungered in these fearful days--
_Hear us, good Lord!_
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt are made a mockery
in Thy sanctuary. With uplifted hands we front Thy heaven, O God, crying:
_We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!_...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
DWELLER in yon dungeon dark,
Hangman of creation! mark,
Who in widow-weeds appears,
Laden with unhonour’d years,
Noosing with care a bursting purse,
Baited with many a deadly curse?
STROPHE View the wither’d Beldam’s face;
Can thy keen inspection trace
Aught of Humanity’s sweet, melting grace?
Note that eye, ’tis rheum o’erflows;
Pity’s flood there never rose,
See these hands ne’er...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
This morning on my pensive walk
I saw a fisher on a rock,
Who watched his ruby float careen
In waters bluely crystalline,
While silver fishes nosed his bait,
Yet hesitated ere they ate.
Nearby I saw a mother mid
Who knitted by her naked child,
And watched him as he romped with glee,
In golden sand, in singing sea,
Her eyes so blissfully love-lit
She gazed and gazed and...Read more of this...
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