Famous Razor Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Razor poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous razor poems. These examples illustrate what a famous razor poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Yeats, William Butler
...arkness from the soul
My Self. The consecretes blade upon my knees
Is Sato's ancient blade, still as it was,
Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass
Unspotted by the centuries;
That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wodden scabbard bound and wound
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn
My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think ...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father -- your hound-*****, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death....Read more of this...
by
Brodsky, Joseph
...
to its birds that have learned their unfolding of wings
from a subtle
lift of a surprised eyebrow or perhaps from a razor blade
- wings now the shade of early twilight now of state
bad blood.
Now the place is abuzz with trading
in your ankles's remanants bronzes
of sunburnt breastplates dying laughter bruises
rumors of fresh reserves memories of high treason
laundered banners with imprints of the many
who since have risen.
All's overgrown with peopl...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...ebbed fly, and his eyes are red-suckled with anger-fear.
He feels hatred and discard of the world, sharper than
his razor, and his gut-feel hangs like a wet polyp; and he
self-decisions himself defeated trying to shake his
hung beard from razor in water (like life), not warm enough.
Daumier. Rue Transonian, le 15 Avril, 1843. (lithograph.)
Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale.
"She has a face unlike that of any woman I have ever known."
"What is it? A lo...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...
you hungry mother,
you spleen baby!
Them angels gonna be cut down like wheat.
Them songs gonna be sliced with a razor.
Them kitchens gonna get a boulder in the belly.
Them phones gonna be torn out at the root.
There's power in the Lord, baby,
and he's gonna turn off the moon.
He's gonna nail you up in a closet
and there'll be no more Atlantic,
no more dreams, no more seeds.
One noon as you walk out to the mailbox
He'll snatch you up --
a ...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...ejoice with Orchis. Blessed be the name of the Lord Jesus for my seed in eternity.
Let Siaha rejoice with the Razor-Fish. God be gracious to John Bird and his wife.
Let Artaxerxes rejoice with Vanelloes. Palm Sunday 1761. The Lord Strengthen me.
Let Bishlam rejoice with the Cotton-bush.
Let Mithridath rejoice with Balsam of Tolu.
Let Tabeel rejoice with the Carob-Tree.
Let Ariel rejoice with Balsam of Peru, which sweats from...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...eavy and hard and slow;
They're trying to kill me, kill me, the night that's black overhead,
The wind that cuts like a razor, the whipcord lash of the snow.
Keep a-moving, a-moving; don't, don't stumble, you fool!
Curse this snow that's a-piling a-purpose to block my way.
It's heavy as gold in the rocker, it's white and fleecy as wool;
It's soft as a bed of feathers, it's warm as a stack of hay.
Curse on my feet that slip so, my poor tired, stumbling feet;
I g...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...could only imagine,
over the dark tenements of the city.
All I had wished to say
was that art was also short,
as a razor can teach with a slash or two,
that it only seems long compared to life,
but that night, I drove home alone
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart
except the faint hope that I might
catch a glimpse of the thing
in the fan of my headlights,
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp,
poor unwritten bird, its wings folded,
staring down at me wi...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...ery official gentlemen
take
that red-skinned passport
of mine.
Take-
like a bomb
take - like a hedgehog,
like a razor
double-edge stropped,
take -
like a rattlesnake huge and long
with at least
20 fangs
poison-tipped.
The porter's eyes
give a significant flick
(I'll carry your baggage
for nix,
mon ami...)
The gendarmes enquiringly
look at the tec,
the tec, -
at the gendarmerie.
With what delight
that gendarme caste
would have me
strung-u...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...s on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes,
a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes a
locked razor and lovely young student nurses.
Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No
winter spent there could be a total loss.
TOM MARTIN CREEK
I walked down one morning from Steelhead, following the
Klamath River that was high and murky and had the intelligence
of a dinosaur. Tom Martin Creek was a small creek wit...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ker hats, looking under the dust.
Nobody ever found out.
0, now he's the Mayor of the Twentieth Century ! A razor,
a knife and a ukelele are his favorite instruments.
Of course, it would have to be a ukelele. Nobody else
would have thought of it, pulled like a plow through the intest-
ines.
ON PARADISE
"Speaking of evacuations, your missive, while complete in
other regards, skirted the subject, though you did deal brief-
ly with ru...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...s, no worthy match
For valour to assail, nor by the sword
Of noble Warriour, so to stain his honour,
But by the Barbers razor best subdu'd.
Sam: All these indignities, for such they are
From thine, these evils I deserve and more,
Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me
Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon
Whose ear is ever open; and his eye
Gracious to re-admit the suppliant;
In confidence whereof I once again
Defie thee to the trial of mortal fight,
By combat ...Read more of this...
by
Duhamel, Denise
...e yellow dots,
multiplying like pins in a pin cushion. Soon came
the greasy hair. The Queen gave her daughter a razor
for her legs and a stick of underarm deodorant.
Snow
doodled through her teenage years—"Snow + ?" in Magic
Markered hearts all over her notebooks. She was an average
student, a daydreamer who might have been a scholar
if she'd only applied herself. She liked sappy music
and romance novels. She liked pies and cake
instead of fruit.
...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...them?)
I am not the poet of goodness only—I do not decline to be the poet of
wickedness also.
Washes and razors for foofoos—for me freckles and a bristling beard.
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me, and reform of evil propels me—I stand indifferent;
My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait;
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
Did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
Did you gue...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on it...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...e to a proportioned,
subtle form. Last year I knew a student,
a half mad boy who finally opened his arms
with a razor, not because he wanted to die
but because he wanted to design something grand
on his own body. Once he said, When a child
realizes his parents aren't enough,
he turns to architecture.
I think I know what he meant.
Imagine the Masons parading,
one of them, in his splendid get-up,
striding forward with the golden staff,
above his hea...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...ppy place, more for Cass than the sisters. The girls were jealous of Cass and
Cass fought most of them. She had razor marks all along her left arm from defending
herself in two fights. There was also a permanent scar along the left cheek but the scar
rather than lessening her beauty only seemed to highlight it. I met her at the West End
Bar several nights after her release from the convent. Being youngest, she was the last of
the sisters to be released.Read more of this...
by
Troupe, Quincy
...umbra
slanting ace-deuce, cocked, carrying the perforated legacy of bebop
these bold, peccadillo, pirouetting pellagras
razor-sharp clean, they cut into our rip-tiding dreams carrying
their whirlpooling imaginations, their rivers of schemes
assaulted by pellets of raindrops
these broken mirrors catching fragments
of sonorous words, entrapping us between parentheses
two bat wings curved, imprisoning the world...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor....Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...Innuits called them--
which by great labor were sharpened, on both sides,
to the sharpness like the edge of a barber's razor,
and approached our dogs
and plunged both knives
into the body of our youngest dog
who had limped all day.
I remember that I consider turning my rifle on Kantiuk
as he approached, then passed me,
carrying knives red with the gore of our dog--
who had yowled, moaned, and now lay
expired, surrounded
by curious cousins and uncles, possibly
hungry--an...Read more of this...
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