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Famous Sicken Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...ax to meet the moon. 

As though, when fields lie stricken 
By grey December's breath, 
These lordlier growths that sicken 
And die for fear of death 
Should feel the sense requicken 
That hears what springtide saith 
And thrills for love, spring-stricken 
And pierced with April's breath. 

The keen white-winged north-easter 
That stings and spurs thy sea 
Doth yet but feed and feast her 
With glowing sense of glee: 
Calm chained her, storm released her, 
And storm's ...Read More



by Browning, Robert
...is opened eyes. 
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play, 
Preposterously, at cross purposes. 
Should his child sicken unto death,--why, look 
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, 
Or pretermission of the daily craft! 
While a word, gesture, glance, from that same child 
At play or in the school or laid asleep, 
Will startle him to an agony of fear, 
Exasperation, just as like. Demand 
The reason why--" `tis but a word," object-- 
"A gesture"--he regards thee...Read More

by Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...
Thy blood the priests make poison of,
And in gold shekels coin thy love.

So when our souls look back to thee
They sicken, seeing against thy side,
Too foul to speak of or to see,
The leprous likeness of a bride,
Whose kissing lips through his lips grown
Leave their God rotten to the bone.

When we would see thee man, and know
What heart thou hadst toward men indeed,
Lo, thy blood-blackened altars; lo,
The lips of priests that pray and feed
While their own hell's wor...Read More

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ttees; 
You will be glad of Pilate's casting vote. 

Your truest lovers still the foolish virgins, 
Your heart will sicken at the marriage feasts 
Knowing they watch you from the darkened gardens 
Being polite to your official guests....Read More

by Parker, Dorothy
...e. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds....Read More



by Milton, John
...r if such holy Song 
Enwrap our fancy long, 
 Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, 
And speckl'd vanity 
Will sicken soon and die, 
 And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould, 
And Hell it self will pass away, 
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 

Yea Truth, and Justice then 
Will down return to men, 
 Th'enameld Arras of the Rain-bow wearing, 
And Mercy set between, 
Thron'd in Celestiall sheen, 
 With radiant feet the tissued clouds down st...Read More

by Frost, Robert
...out and making useful farmers.”

“Did they make something lonesome go through you?
It would take more than them to sicken you—
Us of our bargain. But they left us so
As to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.
They almost shook me.”

“It’s all so much
What we have always wanted, I confess
It’s seeming bad for a moment makes it seem
Even worse still, and so on down, down, down.
It’s nothing; it’s their leaving us at dusk.
I never bore it well when ...Read More

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...start again?
How cure, how even moderate this pain
Without you, and you strong?
And if ye sleep, then waken!
And if ye sicken and do plan to die,
Do not that now!

Hear us, in what sharp need we cry!
For we have help nowhere
If not in you!
Pity can much, and so a mighty mind, but cannot all things do!—
By you forsaken,
We shall be scattered, we shall be overtaken!
Oh, come! Renew in us the ancient wonder,
The grace of life, its courage, and its joy!
Weave us those garlands n...Read More

by Carroll, Lewis
...s of gladness,
But tell too surely something hath gone wrong!
"The sight I have come upon
The stoutest heart [10] would sicken,
That nasty hen has been and gone
And killed another chicken!"...Read More

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...tom of his kind
That ever butted his rough brother-brute
For lust or lusty blood or provender.
I hate, abhor, spit, sicken at him; and she
Loathes him as well; such a precipitate heel,
Fledged as it were with Mercury's ankle-wing,
Whirls her to me -- ;but will she fling herself
Shameless upon me? Catch her, goatfoot! nay,
Hide, hide them, million-myrtled wilderness,

And cavern-shadowing laurels, hide! do I wish -- 
What? -- ;that the bush were leafless? or to whelm
All o...Read More

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...MUSIC when soft voices die  
Vibrates in the memory; 
Odours when sweet violets sicken  
Live within the sense they quicken; 

Rose leaves when the rose is dead 5 
Are heap'd for the beloved's bed: 
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone  
Love itself shall slumber on. ...Read More

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...walked therein; and many more than these;
And witnessed the desire and the despair
Of souls that passed reluctantly and sicken for the air;
You, too, have entered Hell,
And issued thence; but thence whereof I speak
None has returned;—for thither fury brings
Only the driven ghosts of them that flee before all things.
Oblivion is the name of this abode: and she is there."

Oh, radiant Song! Oh, gracious Memory!
Be long upon this height
I shall not climb again!
I know th...Read More

by Twain, Mark
...And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear, with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
...Read More

by Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...ve stricken
Anguish, and sweetened the sealed-up springs of tears.

Ah, but the strength of regrets that strain and sicken,
Yearning for love that the veil of death endears,
Slackens not wing for the wings of years that quicken -
Years upon years.

II.

Years upon years, and the flame of love's high altar
Trembles and sinks, and the sense of listening ears
Heeds not the sound that it heard of love's blithe psalter
Years upon years.

Only the sense of a heart t...Read More

by Shakespeare, William
...Like as to make our appetite more keen
With eager compounds we our palate urge,
As to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.
Even so being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love t' anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assured,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
W...Read More

by Service, Robert William
...nd bold on his brow be it stamped, deep in his cheek let it sear,
That every man may look on his shame, and shudder and sicken and fear.
He shall hear their mock in the market-place, their fleering jibe at the feast;
He shall seek the caves and the shroud of night, and the fellowship of the beast.
Outcast forever from homes of men, far and far shall he roam.
Such be the doom, sadder than death, of him who shameth a home."...Read More

by Milton, John
...V

For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long,
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And Hell it self will pass away
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day. 

XV

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th'enameld Arras of the Rain-bow wearing,
And Mercy set between
Thron'd in Celestiall sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,
A...Read More

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...child, whom I shall see no more! 
For now will cruel Ida keep her back; 
And either she will die from want of care, 
Or sicken with ill-usage, when they say 
The child is hers--for every little fault, 
The child is hers; and they will beat my girl 
Remembering her mother: O my flower! 
Or they will take her, they will make her hard, 
And she will pass me by in after-life 
With some cold reverence worse than were she dead. 
Ill mother that I was to leave her there, 
To lag...Read More

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...e and wood, 
On farm and field: but enter also here, 
Diffuse thyself at will thro' all my blood, 
And, tho' thy violet sicken into sere, 
Lodge with me all the year! 

Once more a downy drift against the brakes, 
Self-darken'd in the sky, descending slow! 
But gladly see I thro' the wavering flakes 
Yon blanching apricot like snow in snow. 
These will thine eyes not brook in forest-paths, 
On their perpetual pine, nor round the beech; 
They fuse themselves to little spic...Read More

by Whitman, Walt
...
I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground does not sicken? 
How can you be alive, you growths of spring? 
How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? 
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? 
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses? 
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations; 
Where ...Read More

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