Famous Sacrificial Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sacrificial poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sacrificial poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sacrificial poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...Beside some shipwrecked prow,
I gladly gave my life for yours.
Would I might give it now!
Or on some sacrificial stone
Strange Gods we satisfied,
Perhaps you stooped and left a throne
To kiss me ere I died.
Perhaps, still further back than this,
In times ere men were men,
You granted me a moment's bliss
In some dark desert den,
When, with your amber eyes alight
With iridescent flame,
And fierce desire for ...Read more of this...
by
Nicolson, Adela Florence Cory
...Before the Altar, bowed, he stands
With empty hands;
Upon it perfumed offerings burn
Wreathing with smoke the sacrificial urn.
Not one of all these has he given,
No flame of his has leapt to Heaven
Firesouled, vermilion-hearted,
Forked, and darted,
Consuming what a few spare pence
Have cheaply bought, to fling from hence
In idly-asked petition.
His sole condition
Love and poverty.
And while the moon
Swings slow across the sky,
Athwart a waving pine tree,
And soon
Ti...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ay:
Yet when his baby is concerned
He's quick to pray.
Maybe it's gentle parent-hood
That gives us grace,
And in its sacrificial mood
Uplifts the race.
Of sentiment, all self above,
That goodness sums
I think the saving best is Love
For little ones....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...re from Earth, five-strung, what music springs,
While the glad Spirits chide
The wondering strings!
And how the shining sacrificial Choirs,
Offering for aye their dearest hearts' desires,
Which to their hearts come back beatified,
Hymn, the bright aisles along,
The nuptial song,
Song ever new to us and them, that saith,
'Hail Virgin in Virginity a Spouse!'
Heard first below
Within the little house
At Nazareth;
Heard yet in many a cell where brides of Christ
Lie hid, emparadis...Read more of this...
by
Patmore, Coventry
...gel to consume
The white man's world of wonders utterly:
Let it be swallowed up in earth's vast womb,
Or upward roll as sacrificial smoke
To liberate my people from its yoke!...Read more of this...
by
McKay, Claude
...e:
The Gods have built him on their plan:
Let us reduce him to a man."
And so they seized him in the night,
And on the sacrificial stone
The axe-men of the Tribe did smite,
Until one limb he ceased to own.
There! They had equalized the odds,
Foiling unfairness of the Gods.
So Chow has lost his throwing arm,
And goes around like every one;
No longer does he threaten harm,
And tribal justice has been done.
For men are equal, let us seek
To grade the Strong down to the weak....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...him in their shadow; not again
Could furtive plotting smear another stain
Across his tarnished honour. Smoulderings
Of sacrificial fires burst their rings
And blotted out in smoke his lost domain.
Bereft of courtiers, only with his queen,
From empty palace down to empty quay.
No challenge screamed from hostile carabine.
A single vessel waited, shadowy;
All night she ploughed her solitary way
Beneath the stars, and through a tranquil sea....Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ts crying victim, the clouds
Cover the sun, we learn a new way to lose
What we did not know we had
Until this bleak and sacrificial day,
Until we turned from our bad
Past and knelt and cried out our dismay,
The dice still clicking, the voices dying away....Read more of this...
by
Jennings, Elizabeth
...a recipe torn from Satan’s Cookbook,
a kind of dumb-downed devil’s brew
where evil stirs its wicked spoon
in a swampy sacrificial hue.
Maybe God damned the okra that thickens
your soup, the muddy bones that haunt your stew.
Maybe this is why, when we smell the cayenne,
we’re struck dumb as a moth.
Maybe this is why everything that crawls or flies
seems to find its way into your swampy broth....Read more of this...
by
Tusa, Chris
...rom afar,
I come from temples where her altars are,
From groves that bear her name,
Noisy with stricken victims now and sacrificial flame,
And cymbals struck on high and strident faces
Obstreperous in her praise
They neither love nor know,
A goddess of gone days,
Departed long ago,
Abandoning the invaded shrines and fanes
Of her old sanctuary,
A deity obscure and legendary,
Of whom there now remains,
For sages to decipher and priests to garble,
Only and for a little while her...Read more of this...
by
St. Vincent Millay, Edna
...Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we're furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere 'tis fit to touch our chaps---
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
IV.
_Saint_, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
---Can't I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as 'twere a Barbary cors...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...lways bloody
In the lions, it appears
From contemporary art, made a study
Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
Liturgically sacrificial hue
And if the Christians felt a little blue-
Will people being eaten often do.
Theirs was the death, and there's was a crown undying,
A state of things which must be satisfying.
My point which up to this has been obscured
Is that it was the lions who procured
By chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone
The martyrdoms on which the church has grown...Read more of this...
by
Smith, Stevie
...ust be delivered,
While with the unseen backbone
A wave distracts itself.
Again they've brought the peak of life
Like a sacrificial lamb,
Like a child's supple cartilage—
The age of infant earth.
To free the age from its confinement,
To instigate a brand new world,
The discordant, tangled days
Must be linked, as with a flute.
It's the age that rocks the swells
With humanity's despair,
And in the undergrowth a serpent breathes
The golden measure of the age.
Still the shoots ...Read more of this...
by
Mandelstam, Osip
...od outpoured
To save minkind from the sway of the sword, --
A name that calls on the world to share
In the burden of sacrificial strife
Where the cause at stake is the world's free life
Andthe rule of the people everywhere, --
A name like a vow, a name like a prayer.
I give you France!...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...its colors fast; albeit torn.
My heart will laugh a little yet, if I
May win of Thee this grace, Lord:on this high
And sacrificial hill 'twixt earth and sky,
To dream still pure all that I loved, and die.
There is no other way to keep secure
My wild chimeras, grave-locked against the lure
Of Truth, the small hard teeth of worms, yet less
Envenomed than the mouth of Truth, will bless
Them into dust and happy nothingness.
Lord, Thou art God; and I, Lord, what am I
But dust?Wit...Read more of this...
by
Cullen, Countee
...old slave boys of ours."
Ah, Wagner saw their glory, and Pillow knew their blood,
That poured on a nation's altar, a sacrificial flood.
Port Hudson heard their war-cry that smote its smoke-filled air,
And the old free fires of their savage sires again were kindled there.
They laid them down where the rivers the greening valleys gem.
And the song of the thund'rous cannon was their sole requiem,
And the great smoke wreath that mingled its hue with the dusky cloud,
Was ...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Dunbar, Paul
...nity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?
I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.
THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as i...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...a throne.
Say, what is the use of him if he doesn't turn?
Just put up to glitter there, like a torch to burn,
A sort of sacrificial show in a lofty urn?
But why a little soldier in an obsolete dress?
I'd rather see a Goddess with a spear, I confess.
Something allegorical and fine. Why, yes --
I cannot take my eyes from him. I don't
know why at all.
I've looked so long the whole thing swims. I feel he
ought to fall.
Foreshortened there among the clouds he's pitifully small.
...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...Noisy elm trees, noisy lindens
In the gardens dark,
Raised to God, the needle-bearing
Stars' bright diamond sparks.
Sacrificial and glorious
Way, I am ending here,
With me is but you, my equal,
And my love so dear.
x x x
It seems as though the voice of man
Will never sound in this place,
But only wind from age of stone
Is knocking on black gates.
It seems to me that I alone
Have kept good health under this sky,
Because of this, that first I sought
To...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...y -
That means a lot when all is said,
In this grim treadmill of today.
The price of manhood is too high
When leap the sacrificial flames;
For Justice we refuse to die:
Honour and Pride are empty names.
We will not play the martyr's part,
We will not perish for a Cause;
Leave that to fools - with humble heart
We live according to the Laws.
For see! Comes up the city street,
Communion-clad a shining band
Of timy children, angel-sweet,
Singing and holding hand in hand . . .
S...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
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