Famous Revolution Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Revolution poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous revolution poems. These examples illustrate what a famous revolution poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...youth, thy fruit must be,
Or gather'd ripe, or rot upon the tree.
Heav'n has to all allotted, soon or late,
Some lucky revolution of their fate:
Whose motions if we watch and guide with skill,
(For human good depends on human will,)
Our fortune rolls, as from a smooth descent,
And, from the first impression, takes the bent:
But, if unseiz'd, she glides away like wind;
And leaves repenting folly far behind.
Now, now she meets you, with a glorious prize,
And spreads her locks ...Read more of this...
by
Dryden, John
...your bicycle glasses!
I myself will expound
those times
and myself.
I, a latrine cleaner
and water carrier,
by the revolution
mobilized and drafted,
went off to the front
from the aristocratic gardens
of poetry -
the capricious wench
She planted a delicious garden,
the daughter,
cottage,
pond
and meadow.
Myself a garden I did plant,
myself with water sprinkled it.
some pour their verse from water cans;
others spit water
from their mouth -
the curly Macks,
the...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...t
and red ripe tomatoes **** joseph **** mary ****
god jesus and all the disciples **** fanon nixon
and malcom **** the revolution **** freedom ****
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing...Read more of this...
by
Knight, Etheridge
...For Saundrai wanted to write a poem that rhymes but revolution doesn't lend itself to be-bopping then my neighbor who thinks i hate asked – do you ever write tree poems – i like trees so i thought i'll write a beautiful green tree poem peeked from my window to check the image noticed that the school yard was covered with asphalt no green – no trees grow in manhattan then, well, i t...Read more of this...
by
Giovanni, Nikki
...NDING..."
THE END
Nazim Hikmet - 1929
FOOTNOTE:
GIOCONDA AND SI-YA-U: Si-Ya-U, Hsiao San (b. 1896), Chinese
revolutionary and man of letters. Hikmet met him in Moscow in 1922
and believed he had been executed in the bloody 1927 crackdown on
Shanghai radicals after returning to China via Paris in 1924, when the
Mona Lisa did in fact disappear from the Louvre. The two friends were
reunited in Vienna in 1951 and traveled to Peking together in 1952.
Translated into ...Read more of this...
by
Hikmet, Nazim
...cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ain live that day
in the sight of heaven.
II
In the blue, winking light
of the International Institute
of Social Revolution
I fell asleep one afternoon
over a book of memoirs
of a Spanish priest who'd
served his own private faith
in a long forgotten war.
An Anarchist and a Catholic,
his remembrances moved
inexplicably from Castilian
to Catalan, a language I
couldn't follow. That dust,
fine and gray, peculiar
to libraries, slipped
between the glossy pages
...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...dance of life
your dance of death
in the crematorium,
our high-rise dreams,
Valhalla, Utopia,
Xanadu, Shangri-la, world revolution
Time has taken, and soon will be gone
Cambridge, Princeton and M.I.T.,
Nalanda, Athens and Alexandria
all for the holocaust
of civilization —
To whom shall we pray
when our vision has faded
but the world-destroyer,
the liberator, the purifier?
But great is the realm
of the world-creator,
the world-sustainer
from whom we come,
in whom we move
and ...Read more of this...
by
Raine, Kathleen
...it.
The first of the new, in our race's story,
Beats the last of the old; 'tis no idle quiddit.
The worthies began a revolution,
Which if on earth you intend to acknowledge,
Why, honour them now! (ends my allocution)
Nor confer your degree when the folk leave college.
XXI.
There's a fancy some lean to and others hate---
That, when this life is ended, begins
New work for the soul in another state,
Where it strives and gets weary, loses and wins:
Where the strong and the w...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...er bodies to create,
Greater so manifold, to this one use,
For aught appears, and on their orbs impose
Such restless revolution day by day
Repeated; while the sedentary Earth,
That better might with far less compass move,
Served by more noble than herself, attains
Her end without least motion, and receives,
As tribute, such a sumless journey brought
Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light;
Speed, to describe whose swiftness number fails.
So spake our sire, and b...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...el begun
Both in me, and without me; and so last
To perpetuity;--Ay me!that fear
Comes thundering back with dreadful revolution
On my defenceless head; both Death and I
Am found eternal, and incorporate both;
Nor I on my part single; in me all
Posterity stands cursed: Fair patrimony
That I must leave ye, Sons! O, were I able
To waste it all myself, and leave ye none!
So disinherited, how would you bless
Me, now your curse! Ah, why should all mankind,
For one man's...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.
In a while I wil...Read more of this...
by
Collins, Billy
...might deplore some of
their results. During the past few years Ireland had been going
through what was tantamount to a revolution. -- EARL SPENCER)
Red Earl, and will ye take for guide
The silly camel-birds,
That ye bury your head in an Irish thorn,
On a desert of drifting words?
Ye have followed a man for a God, Red Earl,
As the Lod o' Wrong and Right;
But the day is done with the setting sun
Will ye follow into the night?
He gave you your own old words, Red Earl,
...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
..., 1793.
Long wintry months are past; the Moon that now
Lights her pale crescent even at noon, has made
Four times her revolution; since with step,
Mournful and slow, along the wave-worn cliff,
Pensive I took my solitary way,
Lost in despondence, while contemplating
Not my own wayward destiny alone,
(Hard as it is, and difficult to bear!)
But in beholding the unhappy lot
Of the lorn Exiles; who, amid the storms
Of wild disastrous Anarchy, are thrown,
Like shipwreck'd suffere...Read more of this...
by
Turner Smith, Charlotte
...ssessing day,
And sunrise of all-renovating right;
And thou, whose trackless foot
Mocks hope's or fear's pursuit,
Swift Revolution, changing depth with height;
And thou, whose mouth makes one
All songs that seek the sun,
Serene Republic of a world made white;
Thou, Freedom, whence the soul's springs ran;
Praise earth for man's sake living, and for earth's sake man.
Make yourselves wings, O tarrying feet of fate,
And hidden hour that hast our hope to bear,
A child-god, thro...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...pit like that worth any number of words.
But that's all them bastards have left us: words.
I no longer believed in the revolution.
I was losing faith in the love of my woman.
I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok
crystallize in The Twelve. Was between
the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana
one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their
noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.
The...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...nocked at the door
of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole:
"Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution.
I am the darker, the older America."
She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.
She was a black umbrella blown inside out
by the wi...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...
One morning in August I went over to his house. He was
still in bed. He looked up at me from underneath a tattered
revolution of old blankets. He had never slept under a sheet
in his life.
"Did you bring the nickel you promised?" he asked.
"Yeah, " I said. "It's here in my pocket. "
"Good. "
He hopped out of bed and he was already dressed. He had
told me once that he never took off his clothes when he went
to bed.
"Why bother?" he had said. "You're only going t...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...gold
so much the worse
for you.
Feathers, shells
and sea-shaped stones
are all as rare.
This could be our revolution:
to love what is plentiful
as much as
what's scarce. ...Read more of this...
by
Walker, Alice
...ce companies.
Scholars show their discoveries and hide their decorations.
Farmers deliver potatoes to the barracks.
The revolution has won its first battle:
That's what has happened....Read more of this...
by
Brecht, Bertolt
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