Famous Raped Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Raped poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous raped poems. These examples illustrate what a famous raped poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Seeger, Alan
...rymen
Have perished somewhere in Darien,
That greasers have taken their innocent lives
And robbed their holdings and raped their wives.
Not by rough tongues and ready fists
Can you hope to jilt in the modern lists.
The armies of a littler folk
Shall pass you under the victor's yoke,
Sobeit a nation that trains her sons
To ride their horses and point their guns --
Sobeit a people that comprehends
The limit where private pleasure ends
And where their publi...Read more of this...
by
Pinsky, Robert
...rning
His wife's honor, while the other cousin sails
In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing
His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths--the Ginza
Samba of breath and b...Read more of this...
by
Atwood, Margaret
...where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...d ****** who runned away
After stickin' his knife into ol' man Shay.
They's a lynched me, for he was white,
But he raped my sister one Sunday night;
So I did what a proper man should do,
And I sunk his body deep in the slough.
Oh, he taunted me to my dark disgrace,
Called me a ******, spat in my face;
So I buried my jack-knife in his heart,
Laughin' to see the hot blood start;
Laughin' still, though it's long ago,
And nobody's ever a-gonna know.
Nobody's ever a-...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...elve months' store of victual lay,
A widow's sons had earned;
Which done, thy floods with winds returned, --
The river raped their little herd away.
What myriad righteous errands high
Thy flames MIGHT run on! In that hour
Thou slewest the child, oh why
Not rather slay Calamity,
Breeder of Pain and Doubt, infernal Power?
Or why not plunge thy blades about
Some maggot politician throng
Swarming to parcel out
The body of a land, and rout
The maw-conventicle, and ungorge W...Read more of this...
by
Rothenberg, Jerome
...tion.
I find myself
forgotten
angry at the thought
of bread. I will not
eat my poem(A. Artaud)
much less be raped
by it. I have a home
but sit with others
shirtless, waiting
for the moon to rise.
I am a warrior
grown old.
The number on my ticket
tells the time.
I seldom wash
& wear a string
around my throat
until it crumbles.
See yourself for love
the fool advises
& the wise man murmurs
Spill it now!
Your glass is never
empty!
I see your arm
...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...d wake to arms,
And every Yankee, full of mettle,
Swarm forth, like bees at sound of kettle.
Not Rome, when Tarquin raped Lucretia,
Saw wilder must'ring of militia.
Through all the woods and plains of fight,
What mortal battles pain'd my sight,
While British corses strew'd the shore,
And Hudson tinged his streams with gore.
What tongue can tell the dismal day,
Or paint the parti-color'd fray,
When yeomen left their fields afar
To plow the crimson plains of war;
Wh...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...ok or crook at thirty-five.
O silent dark and beastly wood
Where with my bloodied hands I stood!
O piteous child I raped and slew!
Had she been yours, would you and you
Have pardoned me and set me free,
Majority of twenty-three?
Yet by your solemn vote you willed
I shall not die though I have killed;
Although I did no mercy show,
In mercy you will let me go. . . .
That he who kills and does not pay
May live to kill another day.
*By a majority of twen...Read more of this...
by
Cheney-Coker, Syl
...f our century's blight.
Throbbing, the sea's breasts will console some orphans,
but Sierra Leone won't be worth a raped woman's cry,
despite her broken back, this shredded garment,
her hands swimming like horrors of red corals.
But do you, O Sea, long-suffering mistress,
have the balm to heal the wound of her children,
hand to foot the axe, alluvial river flowing into you?...Read more of this...
by
Field, Edward
...nster-woman you ever saw
with a body like a pin-up girl
and hardly any stitching at all
where he sewed on the head of a raped and murdered beauty queen.
He sets his liquids burping, and coils blinking and buzzing,
and waits for an electric storm to send through the equipment
the spark vital for life.
The storm breaks over the castle
and the equipment really goes crazy
like a kitchen full of modern appliances
as the lightning juice starts oozing right into that pretty...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...escaped three times
From the worst penitentiary.
They don't know how many he murdered
(Though they say he never raped),
And he wounded two policemen
This last time he escaped.
They said, "He'll go to his auntie,
Who raised him like a son.
She has a little drink shop
On the hill of Babylon."
He did go straight to his auntie,
And he drank a final beer.
He told her, "The soldiers are coming,
And I've got to disappear."
"Ninety years they gave ...Read more of this...
by
Lewis, C S
...Just like that." They were wrong. And he
Knew too much to be clear, could not explain. The words --
Sold, raped flung to the dogs -- now could avail no more;
Hence silence. But the mouldwarps,
With glib confidence, easily
Showed how tricks of the phrase, sheer metaphors could set
Fools concocting a myth, taking the worlds for things.
Do you think this a far-fetched
Picture? Go then about among
Men now famous; attempt speech on the truths that once,
Opa...Read more of this...
by
Killigrew, Anne
...l their Pow'rs confound,
And headlong down the horrid Precipice they fall:
Where storms of Sighs for ever blow,
Where raped streams of Tears do flow,
Which drown them in a Briny Floud.
My Muse pronounce aloud, there's nothing Good,
Nought that the World can show,
Nought that it can bestow.
II.
Not boundless Heaps of its admired Clay,
Ah, too successful to betray,
When spread in our fraile Vertues way:
For few do run with so Resolv'd a Pace,
That for the...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...t your close-packed Praya and beached your best at Kowloon!
"The reeling junks behind me and the racing seas before,
I raped your richest roadstead -- I plundered Singapore!
I set my hand on the Hoogli; as a hooded snake she rose,
And I flung your stoutest steamers to roost with the startled crows.
"Never the lotus closes, never the wild-fowl wake,
But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England's sake --
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid --
B...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...arch of the Place du Carrousel.
Haughty, contemptuous, the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel.
Like a woman raped by force, rising above her fate,
Borne up by the cold rigidity of hate,
Stands the marble arch of the Place du Carrousel.
Tap! Clink-a-tink!
Tap! Rap! Chink!
What falls to the ground like a streak of flame?
Hush! It is only a bit of bronze flashing in the sun.
What are all those soldiers? Those are not the uniforms
of France.
Alas! No! The...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...Judas had a mother.
His mother had a dream.
Because of this dream
he was altogether managed by fate
and thus he raped her.
As a crime we hear little of this.
Also he sold his God....Read more of this...
by
Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...ess and alone,Loitered about that vacancy; a birdFlew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,Were axioms to him, who'd never heardOf any world where promises were kept,Or one could weep because another wept.The thin-lipped armorer,Hephaestos, hobbled away,Thetis of the shining breastsCried out in dismayAt what the god had wroughtTo please her son, the strongIron-hearted m...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...ella blown inside out
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin
transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,
a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue
to the tortures done in the name of the Father,
would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,
the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples
who danced without moving over their graves
with each revolution; her Caesarea...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...im so well
He sailed across the surly sea
To raw and rigid New Rochelle:
With none to say: 'Take him not from us!'
He raped the grave of Thomas.
And in his library he set
These bones so woe-begone;
I have no doubt his eyes were wet
To scan that skeleton.
That grinning skull from which in season
Emerged the Age of Reason.
Then Cobbet in his turn lay dead,
And auctioneering tones
Over his chattels rudely said:
'Who wants them bloody bones?'
None did, so the...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...these peitas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.
note:
12 Ledas: Leda, the maiden who was raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan....Read more of this...
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