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Famous Slush Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...g, 
poets must tramp for days with callused feet, 
and the sluggish fish of the imagination 
flounders softly in the slush of the heart. 
And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth 
of loves and nightingales, 
the tongueless street merely writhes 
for lack of something to shout or say. 

In our pride, we raise up again 
the cities¡¯ towers of Babel, 
but god, 
confusing tongues, 
grinds 
cities to pasture. 

In silence the street pushed t...Read more of this...



by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...h hands that once would shade an eye
That scanned Euripides and Æschylus
Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop
To slush their first and last of royalties.
Poor devils! and they all play to his hand;
For so it was in Athens and old Rome.
But that's not here or there; I've wandered off.
Greene does it, or I'm careful. Where's that boy?

Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him.
We'll all ...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...the pit's much mire, 
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin. 
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, 
And feels about his spine small eft-things course, 
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: 
And while above his head a pompion-plant, 
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, 
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, 
And now a flower drops with a bee inside, 
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,-- 
He looks out o'er yon sea whi...Read more of this...

by Berryman, John
...ittle Baby
again, while I pursue my path of sorrow
& bodies, bodies, to be carried a mile
& dropt. Maybe

if frozen slush will represent the soul
which is to represented in the hereafter
I ask for a decree
dooming my bitter enemies to laughter
advanced against them. If the dream was small
it was my dream also, Henry's....Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...bay, 
 And scattered monsters, in their stony way, 
 Are growling heard; the rampart lions gnaw 
 The misty air and slush with granite maw, 
 The sleet upon the griffins spits, and all 
 The Saurian monsters, answering to the squall, 
 Flap wings; while through the broken ceiling fall 
 Torrents of rain upon the forms beneath, 
 Dragons and snak'd Medusas gnashing teeth 
 In the dismantled rooms. Like armored knight 
 The granite Castle fights with all its might, 
...Read more of this...



by Bishop, Elizabeth
...another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth 
of February, 1918....Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...trampin', trampin', tra-a-mpin', in flies an' dust an' heat, 
Or it's trampin' trampin' tra-a-a-mpin' 
through mud and slush 'n sleet; 
It's tramp an' tramp for tucker -- one everlastin' strife, 
An' wearin' out yer boots an' heart in the wastin' of yer life. 

They whine o' lost an' wasted lives in idleness and crime -- 
I've wasted mine for twenty years, and grafted all the time 
And never drunk the stuff I earned, nor gambled when I shore -- 
But somehow when yer on t...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...
Waves, air, midnight, their savagest trinity lashing, 
Out in the shadows there milk-white combs careering,
On beachy slush and sand spirts of snow fierce slanting, 
Where through the murk the easterly death-wind breasting, 
Through cutting swirl and spray watchful and firm advancing, 
(That in the distance! is that a wreck? is the red signal flaring?) 
Slush and sand of the beach tireless till daylight wending,
Steadily, slowly, through hoarse roar never remitting, 
Along ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...u -
I'd hate her doing what you do. . . .
No, don't get sloppy, can the mush,
Praying for me - all that slush;
But please don't come again this way,
Ten bucks is all I draw a day."...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...ave where the west was red, 
And on the field, of friend and foe, 
Ten thousand men lay dead. 

Boy Clarence lay in slush and blood 
With his face deathly white; 
Old Withen lay by his left side 
And I knelt at his right. 
And Clarence ever whispered, 
Though with dying eyes serene: 
"I loved her for her girlhood,. 
Will someone tell the Queen?" 

And this old Withen's message, 
When his time shortly came: 
"I loved her for her father's sake 
But I fought for Virl...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...n the air,
And riding like hell on horseback
Ready to kill anybody that gets in his way,
Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men
all over the sweet new grass of the prairie....Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...ecome
  emmired snatch
  hopelessly at fog
  no grip slip further back
  into the sucking fingers of the bog
  into the slush

  squelching and splotch-
  ing the marsh
  gushes and gurgles
  engulfing foot leg
  chuckling suckles
  the heaving thigh
  the plush slugged waist
  sucking still and still flushing
  with suggestive slurp
  plop slap
  sluggishly upwards
  unctuous lugubrious
  soaking and enjoying
  with spongy gestures
  the swallowed wallowing
  body - the succ...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...ke the pork-shop back and the Brixton flat, they are silently mourning there; 
For one lay out ahead of the rest in the slush 'neath a darkening sky, 
With the blood of a hundred earls congealed and his eye-glass to his eye. 

(He gave me a cheque in an envelope on a distant gloomy day; 
He gave me his hand at the mansion door and he said: "Good-luck! Good-bai!")...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...n, 
He wrote to let me know, 
The floods were in the Darling then -- 
It seems so long ago; 
He'd come through miles of slush and mud, 
And it was weary work, 
The creeks were bankers, and the flood 
Was forty miles round Bourke. 

He said the floods had formed a block, 
The plains could not be crossed, 
And there was foot-rot in the flock 
And hundreds had been lost; 
The sheep were falling thick and fast 
A hundred miles from town, 
And when he reached the line at last ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...inds' 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 out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East. 

 III

All you recovered from Poseidon died
With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine
Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,
Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,
Nantucket's westward haven. To Cape ...Read more of this...

by Owen, Wilfred
...l on frantic shell
Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime
Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,
Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men
Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den,
If not their corpses. . . .
 There we herded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our ...Read more of this...

by Carman, Bliss
...town;
You can hear the groping ferries as they hoot each other down;
From the Battery to Harlem there's seven miles of slush,
Through looming granite canyons of glitter, noise, and rush.
Are you sick of phones and tickers and crazing cable gongs,
Of the theatres, the hansoms, and the breathless Broadway throngs,
Of Flouret's and the Waldorf and the chilly, drizzly Park,
When there's hardly any morning and five o'clock is dark?
I know where there's a city, whose streets a...Read more of this...

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