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Famous Screeching Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Screeching poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous screeching poems. These examples illustrate what a famous screeching poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Burns, Robert
...ling throng,
 Your heavy loss deplore;
Now, half extinct your powers of song,
 Sweet Echo is no more.


Ye jarring, screeching things around,
 Scream your discordant joys;
Now, half your din of tuneless sound
 With Echo silent lies....Read more of this...



by Newbolt, Sir Henry
...a sparrow 
To feed my cat with." 
So there was the whole picture, 
The lovely early morning, the occasional shell 
Screeching and scattering past us, the empty landscape, -- 
Empty, except for the young Gunner saluting, 
And the cat, anxiously watching his every movement. 

I may be wrong, or I may have told it badly, 
But it struck me as being extremely ludicrous....Read more of this...

by Hughes, Ted
...chard. 

The serpent tried to explain, crying "Stop"
But drink was splitting his syllable. 
And Eve started screeching: "Rape! Rape!" 
And stamping on his head. 

Now whenever the snake appears she screeches
"Here it comes again! Help! O Help!" 
Then Adam smashes a chair on his head, 
And God says: "I am well pleased"

And everything goes to hell. ...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...The mad girl with the staring eyes and long white fingers
Hooked in the stones of the wall,
The storm-wrack hair and screeching mouth: does it matter, Cassandra,
Whether the people believe
Your bitter fountain? Truly men hate the truth, they'd liefer
Meet a tiger on the road.
Therefore the poets honey their truth with lying; but religion—
Vendors and political men
Pour from the barrel, new lies on the old, and are praised for kind
Wisdom. Poor ***** be wise.
No...Read more of this...

by Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...to hill. 

Soldiers, with guns, 
Making a nuisance of the blessed air, 
Child-crying bellman, children in despair, 
Screeching for buns. 

Storms, thunders, waves! 
Howl, crash, and bellow till ye get your fill; 
Ye sometimes rest; men never can be still 
But in their graves....Read more of this...



by Pushkin, Alexander
...ight.
Swarms of devils come to rally,
Hurtle in the boundless height;
Howling fills the whitening valley,
Plaintive screeching rends my heart...


Translated by Genia Gurarie July 29, 1995.
Copyright retained by Genia Gurarie.
email: egurarie@princeton.edu
http://www.princeton.edu/~egurarie/
For permission to reproduce, write personally to the translator....Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...dismal blacks hung round the universe, 
And stars (like tapers) burned upon his hearse: 
And owls and ravens with their screeching noise 
Did make the funerals sadder by their joys. 
His weeping eyes the doleful vigils keep, 
Not knowing yet the night was made for sleep; 
Still to the west, where he him lost, he turned, 
And with such accents as despairing mourned: 
`Why did mine eyes once see so bright a ray; 
Or why day last no longer than a day?' 
When straight the sun...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...assed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desolate it mocked destinations.

Who is that dark child on the parapets
of ...Read more of this...

by Milosz, Czeslaw
...e, I walked through oak forests
Amazed that my Muse, Mnemosyne,
Has in no way diminished my amazement.
A magpie was screeching and I said: Magpiety?
What is magpiety? I shall never achieve
A magpie heart, a hairy nostril over the beak, a flight
That always renews just when coming down,
And so I shall never comprehend magpiety.
If however magpiety does not exist
My nature does not exist either.
Who would have guessed that, centuries later,
I would invent the questi...Read more of this...

by Fu, Du
...The new ghosts are angered by injustice, the old ghosts weep, Moistening rain falls from dark heaven on the voices' screeching."...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...First Movement
Thin-voiced, nasal pipes
Drawing sound out and out
Until it is a screeching thread,
Sharp and cutting, sharp and cutting,
It hurts.
Whee-e-e!
Bump! Bump! Tong-ti-bump!
There are drums here,
Banging,
And wooden shoes beating the round, grey stones
Of the market-place.
Whee-e-e!
Sabots slapping the worn, old stones,
And a shaking and cracking of dancing bones;
Clumsy and hard they are,
And uneven,
Losing half a beat...Read more of this...

by Verhaeren, Emile
...and lofty stage
Where, swinging in light, the bell bounds with rage.
The daws and the owls, with wild, long cry
Pass screeching by;
On the fast-closed casements their heads they smite,
Burn in the smoke-drifts their pinions light,
Then, broken with terror and bruised with flight.
Suddenly, 'mid the surging crowd.
Fall dead outright.


The old man sees toward his brandished bells
The climbing fire
With hands of boiling gold stretch nigher.


The steeple
Looks ...Read more of this...

by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...e'll come when she hears it crying,
In the shape of an owl or bat,
And she'll bring us our darling Anna
In place of her screeching brat."

Then the goodman, Ezra Dalton,
Laid his hand upon her head:
Thy sorrow is great, O woman!
I sorrow with thee," he said.

"The paths to trouble are many
And never but one sure way
Leads out to the light beyond it:
My poor wife, let us pray."

Then he said to the great All-Father,
"Thy daughter is weak and blind;
Let her sight co...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...talk). 
Young Joe the ostler come in sad, 
He said th'old mare had bit his dad. 
He said there'd come a blazing screeching 
Daft Bible-prophet chap a-preaching, 
Had put th'old mare in such a taking 
she'd thought the bloody earth was quaking. 
And others come and spread a tale 
Of cut-throats out of Gloucester jail, 
And how we needed extra cops 
With all them Welsh come picking hops: 
With drunken Welsh in all our sheds 
We might be murdered in our beds.

By...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...le dismal blacks hung round the Universe,
And Stars (like Tapers) burn'd upon his Herse:
And Owls and Ravens with their screeching noyse
Did make the Fun'rals sadder by their Joyes.
His weeping Eyes the doleful Vigils keep,
Not knowing yet the Night was made for sleep:
Still to the West, where he him lost, he turn'd,
And with such accents, as Despairing, mourn'd:
Why did mine Eyes once see so bright a Ray;
Or why Day last no longer than a Day?
When streight the Sun behind...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
..., 
And herd and ruminate,
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas, 
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees 
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision 
Of man’s immortal vision. 
Shall we, because Eternity records
Too vast an answer for the time-born words 
We spell, whereof so many are dead that once 
In our capricious lexicons 
Were so alive and final, hear no more 
The Word itself, the living word
That none alive has ever heard 
Or ever spelt, 
And few have ever f...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...Atlantic wall
Off 'Sconset, where the yawing S-boats splash
The bellbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers,
As the entangled, screeching mainsheet clears
The blocks: off Madaket, where lubbers lash
The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids
For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids
Seaward. The winds' wings beat upon the stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush
At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...und and lifted the child in the air,

And sprang with the child in his arms from the horrible height in the sea,
Shrill screeching, "Revenge!" in the wind-rush; and pallid Maclean,
Age-feeble with anger and impotent pain,
Crawled up on the crag, and lay flat, and locked hold of dead roots
of a tree --

And gazed hungrily o'er, and the blood from his back drip-dripped
in the brine,
And a sea-hawk flung down a skeleton fish as he flew,
And the mother stared white on the waste o...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...friend,
but none of them go **** with my poetry again.


9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams

The jet that was screeching over the Flight
was opening a curtain into the past.
"Dominica ahead!"
 "It still have Caribs there."
"One day go be planes only, no more boat."
"Vince, God ain't made ****** to fly through the air."
"Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about.
Progress leaving all we small islands behind."
I was at the wheel, Vince sitt...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...The parrot, screeching, flew out into the darkness, 
Circled three times above the upturned faces 
With a great whir of brilliant outspread wings, 
And then returned to stagger on her finger. 
She bowed and smiled, eliciting applause. . . 
The property man hated her dirty birds. 
But it had taken years—yes, years—to train them, 
To shoulder flags, st...Read more of this...

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