Famous Slaughterhouse Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

...not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many sphipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I ...Read more of this...
by Housman, A E


Of Hope and Dinosaurs

...Always, we searched in the stone river,
while the slaughterhouse was waiting for us,
long before we turned the saccharin of words
into inflammable brawls. Full of ancient gluttony,
we have fed our appetites, eating with hasty mouths
what was meant for our own Passover.
It is thus that we shall be remembered:
the curse on the bellwether, crumbled destinies,
although it was possible, once again,
like ...Read more of this...
by Cheney-Coker, Syl

Something For The Touts The Nuns The Grocery Clerks And You . .

...erks and you . . .
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it --
one
two
three
and then you've got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it's always early enough to die and
it's always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker o...Read more of this...
by Bukowski, Charles

The Child and the Mariner

...
By such wild storms as never leave Cape Horn; 
Happy to hear the tempest grunt and squeal 
Like pigs heard dying in a slaughterhouse. 
A true-born mariner, and this his hope -- 
His coffin would be what his cradle was, 
A boat to drown in and be sunk at sea; 
Salted and iced in Neptune's larder deep. 
This man despised small coasters, fishing-smacks; 
He scorned those sailors who at night and morn 
Can see the coast, when in their little boats 
They go a six days' voyage an...Read more of this...
by Davies, William Henry

The Sharks Parlor

...droom floor. In daylight there was my first brassy taste of beer 
And Payton Ford and I came back from the Glynn County slaughterhouse 
With a bucket of entrails and blood. We tied one end of a hawser 
To a spindling porch-pillar and rowed straight out of the house 
Three hundred yards into the vast front yard of windless blue water 
The rope out slithering its coil the two-gallon jug stoppered and sealed 
With wax and a ten-foot chain leader a drop-forged shark-hook nestling...Read more of this...
by Dickey, James


The Strangest Creature On Earth

...eep, my brother:
 when the cloaked drover raises his stick,
 you quickly join the flock
and run, almost proudly, to the slaughterhouse.
I mean you're strangest creature on earth--
even stranger than the fish
 that couldn't see the ocean for the water.
And the oppression in this world
 is thanks to you.
And if we're hungry, tired, covered with blood,
and still being crushed like grapes for our wine,
 the fault is yours--
I can hardly bring myself to say it,
but most of the fau...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim

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