Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Prehistoric Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Kipling, Rudyard
...We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
 India's Prehistoric clay;
He that drew the longest bow
Ran his brother down, you know,
 As we run men down to-tday.

"Dowb," the first of all his race,
Met the Mammoth face to face
 On the lake or in the cave:
Stole the steadiest canoe,
Ate the quarry others slew,
 Died -- and took the finest grave.

When they scratched the reindeer-bone,
Some one made the s...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...search for truth and light –
These paths at one great Junction meet.

Before the oldest book was writ,
Full many a prehistoric soul
Arrived at this unchanging goal,
Through changeless Love, that leads to it.

What matters that one found his Christ
In rising sun, or burning fire?
In faith within him did not tire,
His longing for the Truth sufficed.

Before our modern hell was brought
To edify the modern world,
Full many a hate-filled soul was hurled
In lakes of fi...Read more of this...

by McGonagall, William Topaz
...to see,
Also handsome villas suitable for visitors of high and low degree. 

Then there's St. Fillan's Hill, a prehistoric fort,
And visitors while there to it should resort;
And to the tourist the best approach is from the west,
Because in climbing the hill his strength it will test. 

And descending the hill as best one may,
The scene makes the tourist's heart feel gay;
And by the west side is reached a wooded deli,
And about two hundred yards from that there's...Read more of this...

by Rilke, Rainer Maria
...her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly....Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.

Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
th...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...stupendous herd
A hundred thousand buffaloes. Oh great
Unwieldy proof of Nature's cruder state, 
Rough remnant of a prehistoric day, 
Thou, with the red man, too, must shortly pass away.



LII.
Upon those spreading plains is there not room
For man and bison, that he seals its doom? 
What pleasure lies and what seductive charm
In slaying with no purpose but to harm? 
Alas, that man, unable to create, 
Should thirst forever to exterminate, 
And in destruction find ...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...badly-bitted tongue,
With a thirst for information, and a greater thirst for praise,
And a little house in Simla in the Prehistoric Days.

By reason of her marriage to a gentleman in power,
Delilah was acquainted with the gossip of the hour;
And many little secrets, of the half-official kind,
Were whispered to Delilah, and she bore them all in mind.

She patronized extensively a man, Ulysses Gunne,
Whose mode of earning money was a low and shameful one.
He wrote f...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...
And there ain't no flies on me"...
And that was how it all began,
Through horror of muck and mess,
Even in prehistoric Man,
LAW, ORDER and CLEANLINESS'.

And that is why I never kill
A fly, no matter how obscene;
For I believe in God's good will:
He gave us vermin to make us clean....Read more of this...

by Hughes, Ted
...tle
Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse
is the pond-bed's matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragoned times
Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,
Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour—
Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root....Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...n that dim, red Dawn of Man,
 And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
 Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and
 Berg
 Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutre, told the tribe my style was outre--
 'Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged below the heart
 Of a mammothi...Read more of this...

by Kay, Jackie
...her first words

She is six years old today
I am twenty-five; we are only

That distance apart yet
Time has fossilised

Prehistoric time is easier
I can imagine dinosaurs

More vivid than my daughter
Dinosaurs do not hurt my eyes

Nor make me old so terribly old
We are land sliced and torn....Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...see . . .

Of course
the New Testament is very small.
Its mouth opens four times -
as out-of-date as a prehistoric monster,
yet somehow man-made
held together by pullies
like the stone jaw of a back-hoe.
It gouges out the Judaic ground,
taking its own backyard
like a virgin daughter.

And furthermore how did Judas come into it -
that Judas Iscariot,
belonging to the tribe of Reuben?
He should have tried to lift him up there!
His neck like an iron pole...Read more of this...

by Raine, Craig
...old ground together
in bright blue uncomplicated weather.
We laugh and pause
to hack to bits these tiny dinosaurs,
prehistoric, crenelated, cast
between the tractor ruts in mud.

On the green, a junior Douglas Fairbanks,
swinging on the chestnut's unlit chandelier,
defies the corporation spears--
a single rank around the bole,
rusty with blood.
Green, tacky phalluses curve up, romance
A gust--the old flag blazes on its pole.

In the village bakery
the pastry ...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
that roamed the Paleozoic earth, rising up
on its hind legs to show off its large vocabulary,
or some lover in a myth who is metamorphosed into a book.

It means treasury, but it is just a place
where words congregate with their relatives,
a big park where hundreds of family reunions
are always being held,
house, home, abode, dwelling, ...Read more of this...

by Doty, Mark
...the center

of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet.
His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out
of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell.
We'd have lifted him from the road
but thought he might bend his long neck back
to snap. I tried herding him; he rushed,

though we didn't think those blocky legs
could hurry-- then ambled back
to the center of the road, a target
for kids who'd delight in the crush
of something slow with the look
of primeval invulnerabilit...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Prehistoric poems.


Book: Reflection on the Important Things