Famous Pistol Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Pistol poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous pistol poems. These examples illustrate what a famous pistol poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Robert William Service
And is it not a gesture grand
To drink oneself to death?
Oh sure 'tis I can understand,
Being of sober breath.
And so I do not sing success,
But dirge the damned who fall,
And who contempt for life express
Through alcohol.
Of Stephen Foster and of Poe,
Of Burns and Wilde I think;
And weary men who dared to go
The wanton...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I
The Colonel went out sailing,
He spoke with Turk and Jew,
With Christian and with Infidel,
For all tongues he knew.
'O what's a wifeless man?' said he,
And he came sailing home.
He rose the latch and went upstairs
And found an empty room.
The Colonel went out sailing.
II
'I kept her much in the country
And she was much alone,
And though she may be there,' he...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
O God, take the sun from the sky!
It's burning me, scorching me up.
God, can't You hear my cry?
Water! A poor, little cup!
It's laughing, the cursed sun!
See how it swells and swells
Fierce as a hundred hells!
God, will it never have done?
It's searing the flesh on my bones;
It's beating with hammers red
My eyeballs into my head;
...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
PREFACE
If---and the thing is wildly possible---the charge of writing
nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but
instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line
``Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes''
In view of this painful possibility, I will not (as I might) appeal
indignantly to my other writings...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
King Shuac, the Giant of Mizra, war did declare
Against Ulva, King of Shina, telling him to prepare
And be ready for to meet him in the fight,
Which would commence the next morning before daylight.
When King Ulva heard the news, he told his warriors to prepare,
Then suddenly the clatter of arms sounded in the night air;
And the pale beams of...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Panels of claret and blue which shine
Under the moon like lees of wine.
A coronet done in a golden scroll,
And wheels which blunder and creak as they roll
Through the muddy ruts of a moorland track.
They daren't look back!
They are whipping and cursing the horses. Lord!
What brutes men are when they think they're scored.
Behind, my bay gelding gallops with me,
In a...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Laissons le glaive à Rome.")
{Bk. III. xvi., October, 1852.}
Pray Rome put up her poniard!
And Sparta sheathe the sword;
Be none too prompt to punish,
And cast indignant word!
Bear back your spectral Brutus
From robber Bonaparte;
Time rarely will refute us
Who doom the hateful heart....Read more of this...
by
Adam Lindsay Gordon
IN Collins Street standeth a statute tall,
A statue tall, on a pillar of stone,
Telling its story, to great and small,
Of the dust reclaimed from the sand waste lone;
Weary and wasted, and worn and wan,
Feeble and faint, and languid and low,
He lay on the desert a dying man;
Who has gone, my friends, where...Read more of this...
by
Robert Hayden
Steel doors – guillotine gates –
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.
Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall –
splotched green walls, high windows barred –
where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled
clasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea
of...Read more of this...
by
Paul Muldoon
My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford
not to visit some graveyard—one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly—
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.
Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Vincent Benet
Well, I was tired of life; the silly folk,
The tiresome noises, all the common things
I loved once, crushed me with an iron yoke.
I longed for the cool quiet and the dark,
Under the common sod where louts and kings
Lie down, serene, unheeding, careless, stark,
Never to rise or move or feel again,
Filled with the...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
There's never a stone at the sleeper's head,
There's never a fence beside,
And the wandering stock on the grave may tread
Unnoticed and undenied;
But the smallest child on the Watershed
Can tell you how Gilbert died.
For he rode at dusk with his comrade Dunn
To the hut at the Stockman's Ford;
In the waning light of...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
It was also my violent heart that broke,
falling down the front hall stairs.
It was also a message I never spoke,
calling, riser after riser, who cares
about you, who cares, splintering up
the hip that was merely made of crystal,
the post of it and also the cup.
I exploded in the hallway like a pistol.
So I fell apart. So I came all undone.
Yes....Read more of this...
by
Carolyn Forche
What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave:
Yours was not an ill for mending,
'Twas best to take it to the grave.
Oh you had forethought, you could reason,
And saw your road and where it led,
And early wise and brave in season
Put the pistol to your head.
Oh...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
We have no aspiration vain
For paradise Utopian,
And here in our sun-happy Spain,
Though man exploit his fellow man,
To high constraint we humbly yield,
And turn from politics to toil,
Content to till a kindly field
And bring forth bounty from the soil.
They tell us wars will never cease;
They sy the world is out of joint.
How well we Know! But peace is peace
Even imposed...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year of 1746, on a fine summer afternoon,
When trees and flowers were in full bloom,
That widow Riddel sat knitting stockings on a little rustic seat,
Which her only son had made for her, which was very neat.
The cottage she lived in was in the wilds of Nithsdale,
Where many a poor soul had cause to bewail
The loss...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The fear was on the cattle, for the gale was on the sea,
An' the pens broke up on the lower deck an' let the creatures free --
An' the lights went out on the lower deck, an' no one near but me.
I had been singin' to them to keep 'em quiet there,
For the lower deck is the dangerousest, requirin' constant...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
Amy Lowell
The lawyer, are you?
Well! I ain't got nothin' to say.
Nothin'!
I told the perlice I hadn't nothin'.
They know'd real well 'twas me.
Ther warn't no supposin',
Ketchin' me in the woods as they did,
An' me in my house dress.
Folks don't walk miles an' miles
In the drifted snow,
With no hat nor wrap on 'em
Ef everythin's all right, I guess.
All right? Ha! Ha! Ha!
Nothin'...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
YE Irish lords, ye knights an’ squires,
Wha represent our brughs an’ shires,
An’ doucely manage our affairs
In parliament,
To you a simple poet’s pray’rs
Are humbly sent.
Alas! my roupit Muse is hearse!
Your Honours’ hearts wi’ grief ’twad pierce,
To see her sittin on her ****
Low i’ the dust,
And scriechinh out prosaic verse,
An like to brust!
Tell them wha hae the...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Mon pére, ce héros au sourire.")
{Bk. XLIX. iv.}
My sire, the hero with the smile so soft,
And a tall trooper, his companion oft,
Whom he loved greatly for his courage high
And strength and stature, as the night drew nigh
Rode out together. The battle was done;
The dead...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I AM put high over all others in the city today.
I am the killer who kills for those who wish a killing today.
Here is a strong young man who killed.
There was a driving wind of city dust and horse dung blowing and he stood at an intersection of five sewers and there pumped the bullets of an automatic pistol...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Lux
Senator, statesman, speaker of the House,
exceptional dancer, slim,
graceful, ugly. Proclaimed, before most, slavery
an evil, broker
of elections (burned Jackson
for Adams), took a pistol ball in the thigh
in a duel, delayed, by forty years,
with his compromises, the Civil War,
gambler ("I have always
paid peculiar homage to the fickle goddess"),
boozehound, ladies' man -- which leads us
to his mouth, which was huge,
a long slash...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
I was only eight years old;
And before I grew up and knew what it meant
I had no words for it, except
That I was frightened and told my Mother;
And that my Father got a pistol
And would have killed Charlie, who was a big boy,
Fifteen years old, except for his Mother.
Nevertheless the story clung to me.
But the man who married me,...Read more of this...
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