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Famous Rancid Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Murray, Les
...hed the sky's fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid
saline midnights of orifice weather,
to damp grittiness and wiping off the air. 

Metaphors slump irritably together in
the muggy weeks. Shark and jellyfish shallows
become suburbs where you breathe a fat towel;
babies burst like tomatoes with discomfort
in the cotton-wrapped pointing street markets;
the Lycra-bulging surf drips from non-swimm...Read more of this...



by Nash, Ogden
...ch like a fungus patch,
And revealed the thirteenth floor.

It was cheap cigars like lurid scars
That glowed in the rancid gloom,
The murk was a-boil with fusel oil
And the reek of stale perfume.
And round and round there dragged and wound
A loathsome conga chain,
The square and the hep in slow lock step,
The slayer and the slain.
(For the souls of the victims ascend on high,
But their bodies below remain.)

The clean souls fly to their home in the sky,
But th...Read more of this...

by Matthews, William
...y wife food from the takeout joints
that ring a hospital as surely as
brothels surround a gold strike. I drove home
rancid with anger at her luck and mine --
anger that filled me the same way nature
hates a vacuum. "This must be hell for you,"
some said. Hell's not other people: Sartre
was wrong about that, too. L'enfer, c'est moi?
I've not got the ego for it. There'd be
no hell if Dante hadn't built a model
of his rage so well, and he contrived to
get exi...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...Past ash cans and alley cats,
Fetid. overflowing gutters,
Leprous lines of rancid flats
Where the frowsy linen flutters;
With a rattle and a jar,
hark! I sing a happy ditty,
As I speed my Master far
From the poison of the City.

Speed him to the sportive sea,
Watch him walloping the briny,
Light his pipe and brew his tea
In a little wood that's piny;
Haven him to peace of mind.
Drowsy dreams in pleasant places,
Where the wo...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...and jibe as we play,
And you'd never know that the cursed foe was less than a mile away.
As we con our cards in the rancid gloom, oppressed by that snoring breath,
You'd never dream that our broad roof-beam was swept by the broom of death.

Heigh-ho! My turn for the dummy hand; I rise and I stretch a bit;
The fetid air is making me yawn, and my cigarette's unlit,
So I go to the nearest candle flame, and the man we brought is there,
And his face is white in the shabby ...Read more of this...



by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I hel...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...sed the Tomb, and then they threw it open as before.
And there was Lenin, stiff and still, a symbol and a sign,
And rancid races come to thrill and wonder at his Shrine;
And hold the thought: if Lenin rot the Soviets will decay;
And there he sleeps and calm he keeps his watch and ward for aye.
Yet if you pass that frame of glass, peer closely at his phiz,
So stern and firm it mocks the worm, it looks like wax . . . and is.
They tell you he's a mummy - ...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...ought 
261 A sinewy nakedness. A river bore 
262 The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose, 
263 He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells 
264 Of dampened lumber, emanations blown 
265 From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, 
266 Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks 
267 That helped him round his rude aesthetic out. 
268 He savored rankness like a sensualist. 
269 He marked the marshy ground around the dock, 
270 The crawling railroad spur,...Read more of this...

by Crowley, Aleister
...r>

XXIV

More; in this journey I had clean forgotten
The quest, my lover. But the tomb 
Of all these thoughts, the rancid and the rotten,
Proved in the end to be my womb
Wherein my Lord and lover had begotten
A little child
To drive me, laughing lion, into the wanton wild!

XXV

This child hath not one hair upon his head,
But he hath wings instead of ears.
No eyes hath he, but all his light is shed
Within him on the ordered sphere
Of nature that he hideth; and in ste...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...Said Lenin's ghost to Stalin's ghost:
 "Mate with me in the Tomb;
Then day by day the rancid host
 May gaze upon our doom.
A crystal casket we will share;
 Come, crusty Comrade come,
And we will bear the public stare,
 Ad nauseum."
Said Stalin's spook to Lenin's spook:
 "Long have you held your place.
The masses must be bored to look
 Upon your chemic face.
A change might be a good idear,
 And though I pity you,
There is withi...Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...ve) as they subscribe their wit
to the culture of the stately tree (and to pilfering its plums)

they've got there by a rancid myth - that a nation's wisdom blows
from the arseholes of the clever (the odiferously fit)
as they guzzle in their spotlit windows tossing off the crumbs

65
far deeper than the wounds on egdon heath
its proud moroseness scales across the time
tinting all after-thought - where hardy gloomed
(wringing ironic bloodtones from sublime)
a host of worms hav...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...cat's eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant's rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters ----
Sir So-and-so's gin.

This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects ----
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neithe...Read more of this...

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