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Famous Sinister Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Gregory, Rg
...
there's something there
swallowing up words
absorbing them into air
heavy waiting alert

(daddy-longlegs pitch on skin
sinister fingers whisper
through the roots of our hair....)

....we're not afraid of you
nothing nobody
we know you're there

what is it at the end of the passage
in the gloom by the still door
eyeing without eyes everything we do
sucking us in with its black stare

you think it's funny don't you
trying to frighten us keeping ...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...here must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back 
 it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical 
 joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday 
 somebody goes on trial for murder. 
America I feel s...Read more of this...

by Moody, William Vaughn
...et believe! 
Though furtively the sunlight seems to grieve, 
And the spring-laden breeze 
Out of the gladdening west is sinister 
With sounds of nameless battle overseas; 
Though when we turn and question in suspense 
If these things be indeed after these ways, 
And what things are to follow after these, 
Our fluent men of place and consequence 
Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase, 
Or for the end-all of deep arguments 
Intone their dull commercial liturgies -- 
I...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...t in the porch's sagging floor,
leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God....Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...lous sea-surge:
No tears of relatives, nor fears of wives, 
Nor reefs dimly reflected in the waters,
Nor importunity of sinister birds....Read more of this...



by Dryden, John
..., nor truce with sense.
The king himself the sacred unction made,
As king by office, and as priest by trade:
In his sinister hand, instead of ball,
He plac'd a mighty mug of potent ale;
Love's kingdom to his right he did convey,
At once his sceptre and his rule of sway;
Whose righteous lore the prince had practis'd young,
And from whose loins recorded Psyche sprung,
His temples last with poppies were o'er spread,
That nodding seem'd to consecrate his head:
Just at that po...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...ll was but a show, 
Rather than solid virtue; all but a rib 
Crooked by nature, bent, as now appears, 
More to the part sinister, from me drawn; 
Well if thrown out, as supernumerary 
To my just number found. O! why did God, 
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven 
With Spirits masculine, create at last 
This novelty on earth, this fair defect 
Of nature, and not fill the world at once 
With Men, as Angels, without feminine; 
Or find some other way to generate 
Mankind...Read more of this...

by Desnos, Robert
...the sky and the stars the song of a rooster
from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and kisses.
Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads.
No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know.
But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
You who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion
but who ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...r>
So we made snug, chummed up with all the band:
Sudden the Winter swooped on Husky Land.

V

What was that ill so sinister and dread,
Smiting the tribe with sickness to the bone?
So that we waked one morn to find them fled;
So that we stood and stared, alone, alone.
Bravely she smiled and looked into my eyes;
Laughed at their troubled, stern, foreboding pain;
Gaily she mocked the menace of the skies,
Turned to our cheery cabin once again,
Saying: "'Twill soon be ove...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...ing and silent, born of the dark and dirt;
Dazed by the glare and the glitter, it wavered a moment or two -
Then like a sinister shadow, it vanished... 'neath Millie's skirt.

I stared. had my eyes deceived me? I shivered. I held my breath.
Surly I must have dreamed it. I quivered. I made to rise...
Then - my God! it was real. Millie grew pale as death;
And oh, such a look of terror woke in her lovely eyes.

Did her scre...Read more of this...

by Swift, Jonathan
...ten practis'd to their shame.

The statesman tells you with a sneer,
His fault is to be too sincere;
And, having no sinister ends,
Is apt to disoblige his friends.
The nation's good, his master's glory,
Without regard to Whig or Tory,
Were all the schemes he had in view;
Yet he was seconded by few:
Though some had spread a hundred lies,
'Twas he defeated the Excise.
'Twas known, though he had borne aspersion,
That standing troops were his aversion:
His practice wa...Read more of this...

by Lindsay, Vachel
...
To walk for a cake that was tall as a man
To the tune of "Boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,"
While the witch-men laughed, with a sinister air,
With a touch of ***** dialect, and as rapidly as possible toward the end.
And sang with the scalawags prancing there: --
"Walk with care, walk with care,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all the other 
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.
Beware, beware, walk with care,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. 
Boomlay, boo...Read more of this...

by Baudelaire, Charles
...ges' burning stream, 
The mortal troupes dance onward in a dream; 
They do not see, within the opened sky, 
The Angel's sinister trumpet raised on high. 

In every clime and under every sun, 
Death laughs at ye, mad mortals, as ye run; 
And oft perfumes herself with myrrh, like ye 
And mingles with your madness, irony!"...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...ary days;
But now how sweet, how doubly sweet to hold
All gay and gleamy to the campfire blaze.
The evening sky was sinister and cold;
The willows shivered, wanly lay the snow;
The uncommiserating land, so old,
So worn, so grey, so niggard in its woe,
Peered through its ragged shroud. The lone man sighed,
Poured back the gaudy dust into its poke,
Gazed at the seething river listless-eyed,
Loaded his corn-cob pipe as if to smoke;
Then crushed with weariness and hardshi...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...he ghost of a music we have somewhere heard;
We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
W...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;
And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
Down the hill-side and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.

Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril; she was the daintiest doe;
In the print of her velvet flank on the velvet fern
She reared, and rounded her ears in turn.
Then the buck leapt up, and his head as a king's to a ...Read more of this...

by Baudelaire, Charles
...lot was I then exposed? 
Humiliated by what evil chance? 
For as the minutes one by one went by 
Seven times I saw this sinister old man 
Repeat his image there before my eyes! 

Let him who smiles at my inquietude, 
Who never trembled at a fear like mine, 
Know that in their decrepitude's despite 
These seven old hideous monsters had the mien 
Of beings immortal. 

Then, I thought, must I, 
Undying, contemplate the awful eighth; 
Inexorable, fatal, and ironic double; 
Di...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...turning a crank 
That increases the balance in somebody's bank; 
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free 
From the sinister task of attending to me. 

They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool, 
With diagrams used in the Idiot School, 
And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see; 
But mother is happy, for mother is free. 
For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors, 
For love of the Leeds International Stores, 
And the flame of that faith mig...Read more of this...

by Petrarch, Francesco
...SPAN>Of pride, as knowledge grew, with equal speed increased.Then Epicurus, of sinister fame,Rebellious to the lord of nature, came;Who studied to deprive the soaring soulOf her bright world of hope beyond the pole;A mole-ey'd race their hapless guide pursued,And blindly still the vain assault renew'd.Read more of this...

by Leopardi, Giacomo
...>
Rest now. Despair
For the last time. To our kind, Fate
Gives but death. Now despise
Yourself, nature, the sinister
Power that secretly commands our
common ruin,
And the infinite vanity of
everything....Read more of this...

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