Famous Rotted Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Rotted poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous rotted poems. These examples illustrate what a famous rotted poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill ...Read more of this...
by
Heaney, Seamus
...es, of
nations.
a small plane passes overhead.
I look upward as if it made sense to
look upward.
it's true, the sky has rotted:
it won't be long for any of
us.
from The Olympia Review - 1994...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...s Tear, the Chinese Alphabet, the scarce Junonia,
parti-colored pectins and Ladies' Ears,
arranged as on a gray rag of rotted calico,
the buried Indian Princess's skirt;
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.
Thirty or more buzzards are drifting down, down, down,
over something they have spotted in the swamp,
in circles like stirred-up flakes of sediment
sinking through water.
Smoke from woods-fires filters fine blue solvents.
On s...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...hall, a loathed thing,
And seek my chambers for a hiding-place,
And I should find them but a sepulchre,
The very rushes rotted on the floors,
The fire in ashes on the freezing hearth.
I was a queen, and he who loved me best
Made me a woman for a night and day,
And now I go unqueened forevermore.
A queen should never dream on summer eves,
When hovering spells are heavy in the dusk: --
I think no night was ever quite so still,
So smoothly lit with red along the west,
So deeply...Read more of this...
by
Teasdale, Sara
...I have a bone to pick with Fate.
Come here and tell me, girlie,
Do you think my mind is maturing late,
Or simply rotted early?...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have c...Read more of this...
by
Berry, Wendell
...trout figured it
was better to stay where they were.
The mortar and pestle fell off the shelf and broke.
The shack rotted away.
And the weeds grew into the kale.
Twenty years after Mr. Hayman's death, some fish and
game people were planting trout in the streams around there.
"Might as well put some here, " one of the men said.
"Sure, " the other one said.
They dumped a can full of trout in the creek and no sooner
had the trout touched the water, than they turne...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...es.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in...Read more of this...
by
Heaney, Seamus
...t days,
She would weep, and he would craze:
He would swear, for all his oaks,
Fall'n beneath the dockyard strokes,
Have rotted on the briny seas;
She would weep that her wild bees
Sang not to her--strange! that honey
Can't be got without hard money!
So it is: yet let us sing,
Honour to the old bow-string!
Honour to the bugle-horn!
Honour to the woods unshorn!
Honour to the Lincoln green!
Honour to the archer keen!
Honour to tight little John,
And the horse he rode upon!
Hon...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...But Rustum chid him with stern voice, and said:--
"Ruksh, now thou grievest; but, O Ruksh, thy feet
Should first have rotted on their nimble joints,
Or ere they brought thy master to this field!"
But Sohrab look'd upon the horse and said;--
"Is this, then, Ruksh? How often, in past days
My mother told me of thee, thou brave steed,
My terrible father's terrible horse! and said,
That I should one day find thy lord and thee.
Come, let me lay my hand upon thy mane!
O Ruksh, t...Read more of this...
by
Arnold, Matthew
...Someone's Mother trails the street
Wrapt in rotted rags;
Broken slippers on her feet
Drearily she drags;
Drifting in the bitter night,
Gnawing gutter bread,
With a face of tallow white,
Listless as the dead.
Someone's Mother in the dim
Of the grey church wall
Hears within a Christmas hymn,
One she can recall
From the h so long ago,
When divinely far,
in the holy alter glow
She would kneel in prayer.
...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...t the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off
the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach
and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across
my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up
and dance. And I lie still.
7
I awaken I think. Marshlights
reappear, geese
come trailing again up the flyway.
In her ravine under old snow the dam-bear
lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur
and...Read more of this...
by
Kinnell, Galway
...and cinders, nothing more;
And a little cloud of smoke
Floating on a valley floor.
And I peered into the smoke
Till it rotted, like a fog:—
There, encompassed round by fire,
Stood a blue-flag in a bog!
Little flames came wading out,
Straining, straining towards its stem,
But it was so blue and tall
That it scorned to think of them!
Red and thirsty were their tongues,
As the tongues of wolves must be,
But it was so blue and tall—
Oh, I laughed, I cried, to see!
All my hear...Read more of this...
by
St. Vincent Millay, Edna
...flaky
bones remain, lain together so long they fit, although not one bone
is knit
to another. The stake is there too, rotted through, but
upright still,
and still piercing down between ribs and spine in a straight line.
Yellow stillness is on the cross-roads, yellow
stillness is on the trees.
The leaves hang drooping, wan. The four roads point four
yellow ways,
saffron and gamboge ribbons to the gaze. A little swirl
of dust
blows up Tilbury road, the wind which fans it ...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...Sprite,
Till blood for blood atones!
Ay, though he's buried in a cave,
And trodden down with stones,
And years have rotted off his flesh, --
The world shall see his bones!
"Oh God! that horrid, horrid dream
Besets me now awake!
Again--again, with dizzy brain,
The human life I take:
And my red right hand grows raging hot,
Like Cranmer's at the stake.
"And still no peace for the restless clay,
Will wave or mould allow;
The horrid thing pursues my soul --
It stand...Read more of this...
by
Hood, Thomas
...the German kings?
Three times ten million men asking the blood
Of a child born with his head wrong-shaped,
The blood of rotted kings in his veins?
If this were all, O God,
I would go to the far timbers
And look on the gray wolves
Tearing the throats of moose:
I would ask a wilder drunk of blood.
Look! It is four brothers in joined hands together.
The people of bleeding France,
The people of bleeding Russia,
The people of Britain, the people of America—
These are the four ...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...y one I betrayed them unto my manifold dooms.
Drowned them like rats in my rivers, starved them like curs on my plains,
Rotted the flesh that was left them, poisoned the blood in their veins;
Burst with my winter upon them, searing forever their sight,
Lashed them with fungus-white faces, whimpering wild in the night;
"Staggering blind through the storm-whirl, stumbling mad through the snow,
Frozen stiff in the ice-pack, brittle and bent like a bow;
Featureless, formless, fo...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...ar countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve--
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk,
'Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights so many and fair,
That signal made but now?'
'Strange, by my faith!' the Hermit said--
'And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
...Read more of this...
by
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses.
Song of the Dead in the East -- in the heat-rotted jungle-hollows,
Where the dog-ape barks in the kloof -- in the brake of the buffalo-wallows.
Song of the Dead in the West in the Barrens, the pass that betrayed them,
Where the wolverine tumbles their packs from the camp and the grave-rnound they made them;
Hear now the Song of the Dead!
I
We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled tow...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...eople and the armies are no more.
THE SIXTH SPHINX.
Never again Cambyses earth will tread.
He slept, and rotted, for his ghost had fled.
So long as sovereigns live, the subjects kneel,
Crouching like spaniels at their royal heel;
But when their might flies, they are shunned by all,
Save worms, which—human-like—still to them crawl
On Troy or Memphis, on Pyrrhus the Great,
Or on Psammeticus, alike falls fate.
Those who in rightful purple are ...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
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