Famous Scarred Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Scarred poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous scarred poems. These examples illustrate what a famous scarred poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Rg Gregory
heeley (sheffield) autumn 1988
dodging the broken bottles
dog-**** the pavement spew
i wheel my young son matthew
through the heeley streets
shop to shop this early
morning (short of milk)
unsettled day - the sun
comes through the clouds in
ragged strips where windy
rain has had the night
to puff and piddle
puddles idle in
the dips of surfaces
neglected for decades
another place where caring's
lost a public vision
only detritus of hope
dares...Read more of this...
by
Raymond Carver
These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.
But there's one that comes--
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,
closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current....Read more of this...
by
Badger Clark
Lay on the iron! the tie holds fast
And my wild record closes.
This maverick is down at last
Just roped and tied with roses.
And one small girl's to blame for it,
Yet I don't fight with shame for it--
Lay on the iron; I'm game for...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
(The French "Tommy").
Oh, some of us lolled in the chateau,
And some of us slinked in the slum;
But now we are here with a song and a cheer
To serve at the sign of the drum.
They put us in trousers of scarlet,
In big sloppy ulsters of blue;
In boots that are flat, a box of a hat,
And they...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
And the young...Read more of this...
by
Joyce Kilmer
The boom and blare of the big brass band is cheering
to my heart
And I like the smell of the trampled grass and elephants and hay.
I take off my hat to the acrobat with his delicate, strong art,
And the motley mirth of the chalk-faced clown drives all my care
away.
I wish I could feel as they must feel, these...Read more of this...
by
Robert Hayden
Steel doors – guillotine gates –
of the doorless house closed massively.
We were locked in with loss.
Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,
then let us into the drab Rec Hall –
splotched green walls, high windows barred –
where the dispossessed awaited us.
Hands intimate with knife and pistol,
hands that had cruelly grasped and throttled
clasped ours in welcome. I sensed the plea
of...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
I
Said the Watcher by the Way
To the young and the unladen,
To the boy and to the maiden,
"God be with you both to-day.
First your song came ringing,
Now you come, you two--
Knowing naught of what you do,
Or of what your dreams are bringing.
"O you children who go singing
To the Town down the River,...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
By parents I would not be pinned,
Nor in my home abide,
For I was wanton as the wind
And tameless as the tide;
So scornful of domestic hearth,
And bordered garden path,
I sought the wilder ways of earth,
The roads of wrath.
It scares me now to think of how
Foolhardily I fared;
Though mighty scarred of pelt and pow
A dozen...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I watched one day a parrot grey - 'twas in a barber shop.
"Cuckold!" he cried, until I sighed: "You feathered devil, stop!"
Then balefully he looked at me, and slid along his perch,
With sneering eye that seemed to pry me very soul to search.
So fierce, so bold, so grim, so cold, so agate was his stare:
And then that bird I...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
King Solomon drew merchantmen,
Because of his desire
For peacocks, apes, and ivory,
From Tarshish unto Tyre,
With cedars out of Lebanon
Which Hiram rafted down;
But we be only sailormen
That use in London town.
Coastwise -- cross-seas -- round the world and back again --
Where the paw shall head us or the full Trade suits --
Plain-sail --...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Here is a wound that never will heal, I know,
Being wrought not of a dearness and a death,
But of a love turned ashes and the breath
Gone out of beauty; never again will grow
The grass on that scarred acre, though I sow
Young seed there yearly and the sky bequeath
Its friendly weathers down, far Underneath
Shall be such bitterness of an old...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
What have we done, Oh Lord, that we
Are evil starred?
How have we erred and sinned to be
So scourged and scarred?
Lash us, Oh Lord, with scorpion whips,
We can but run;
But harken to our piteous lips:
What have we done?
How have we sinned to rouse your wrath,
To earn your scorn?
Stony and steep has been our path
Since...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night
Over the hill between the town below
And the forsaken upland hermitage
That held as much as he should ever know
On earth again of home, paused warily.
The road was his with not a native near;
And Eben, having leisure, said aloud,
For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear:
"Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon
Again,...Read more of this...
by
John Clare
Huge elm, with rifted trunk all notched and scarred,
Like to a warrior's destiny! I love
To stretch me often on thy shadowed sward,
And hear the laugh of summer leaves above;
Or on thy buttressed roots to sit, and lean
In careless attitude, and there reflect
On times and deeds and darings that have been—
Old castaways, now swallowed in neglect,—
While thou art towering in...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
Deep in the sloping forest that surrounds
The head of a green valley that I know,
Spread the fair gardens and ancestral grounds
Of Bellinglise, the beautiful chateau.
Through shady groves and fields of unmown grass,
It was my joy to come at dusk and see,
Filling a little pond's untroubled glass,
Its antique towers and mouldering masonry.
Oh,...Read more of this...
by
Lucille Clifton
1
the legend is whispered
in the women's tent
how the moon when she rises
full
follows some men into themselves
and changes them there
the season is short
but dreadful shapeshifters
they wear strange hands
they walk through the houses
at night their daughters
do not know them
2
who is there to protect her
from the hands of the father
not the windows which see and
say nothing not the moon
that awful eye not...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in a certain regiment of French Grenadiers,
A touching and beautiful custom was observed many years;
Which was meant to commemorate the heroism of a departed comrade,
And when the companies assembled for parade,
There was one name at roll call to which no answer was made
It was that of the noble La Tour d'Auvergne,
The first Grenadier of France, heroic and...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry -- over headland, ness, and voe --
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!
Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest when...Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
When Crow cried his mother's ear
Scorched to a stump.
When he laughed she wept
Blood her breasts her palms her brow all wept blood.
He tried a step, then a step, and again a step -
Every one scarred her face for ever.
When he burst out in rage
She fell back with an awful gash and a fearful...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
We boast no more of our bloodless flag, that rose from a nation's slime;
Better a shred of a deep-dyed rag from the storms of the olden time.
From grander clouds in our `peaceful skies' than ever were there before
I tell you the Star of the South shall rise -- in the lurid clouds of war.
It ever...Read more of this...
by
William Morris
Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.
Yet...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1891
There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.
They felt that life was fleeting; they kuew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of...Read more of this...
by
C S Lewis
1
You said 'The world is going back to Paganism'.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Scarred poems.