Famous Spilled Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Spilled poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous spilled poems. These examples illustrate what a famous spilled poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Rudyard Kipling
"The House Surgeon"--Actions and Reactions 2 Samuel XIV. 14.
If Thought can reach to Heaven,
On Heaven let it dwell,
For fear the Thought be given
Like power to reach to Hell.
For fear the desolation
And darkness of thy mind
Perplex an habitation
Which thou hast left behind.
Let nothing linger after--
No whimpering gost remain,
In wall, or beam, or rafter,
Of...Read more of this...
by
J R R Tolkien
O Orofarne, Lassemista, Carnimirie!
O rowan fair, upon your hair how white the blossom lay!
O rowan mine, I saw you shine upon a summer's day,
Your rind so bright, your leaves so light, your voice so cool and soft!
Upon your head how golden-red the crown you bare aloft!
O rowan dead, upon your head your haif is dry and grey;
Your crown is...Read more of this...
by
Federico García Lorca
1. Cogida and death
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready prepared
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone.
The wind carried away the cottonwool
at five in the afternoon.
And the oxide...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Dear love, if you and I could sail away,
With snowy pennons to the wind unfurled,
Across the waters of some unknown bay,
And find some island far from all the world;
If we could dwell there, ever more alone,
While unrecorded years slip by apace,
Forgetting and forgotten and unknown
By aught save native song-birds of the place;
If Winter...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Cain and Abel were brothers born.
(Koop-la! Come along, cows!)
One raised cattle and one raised corn.
(Koop-la! Come along! Co-hoe!)
And Cain he farmed by the river-side,
So he did not care how much it dried.
For he banked, and he sluiced, and he ditched and he led
(And the Corn don't care for the Horn)--
A-half Euphrates out of her bed
To...Read more of this...
by
Carolyn Forche
What you have heard is true. I was in his house.
His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His
daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the
night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol
on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on
its black cord over the house. On the television...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
By Corporal Tullidge. See "The Trumpet-Major"
In Memory of S. C. (Pensioner). Died 184-
WE trenched, we trumpeted and drummed,
And from our mortars tons of iron hummed
Ath'art the ditch, the month we bombed
The Town o' Valencie?n.
'Twas in the June o' Ninety-dree
(The Duke o' Yark our then Commander be?n)
The German Legion, Guards, and we
Laid siege to Valencie?n.
This was the first time in...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
You happened to me. I was happened to
like an abandoned building by a bull-
dozer, like the van that missed my skull
happened a two-inch gash across my chin.
You were as deep down as I've ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse. A new-
born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through
the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone,
swaddled in strange...Read more of this...
by
R S Thomas
To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Elisabeth imagines I've
A yellow streak
She deems I have no dash and drive,
Jest dogoned weak.
'A man should be a man,' says Liz
'Trade blow for blow.'
Poor kid! What my position is
She jest don't know.
She jest don't know my old man killed,
Yea, slew and slew.
As steamy blood he sweetly spilled,
So could I too.
And though no wrath...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
For thee, that which is best is to flee from the seeking
of knowledge and devotion; to finger the tresses of
thy ravishing friend; to pour into the cup the blood
of the vine ere time has spilled thine own....Read more of this...
by
Michael Ondaatje
All night long the hockey pictures
gaze down at you
sleeping in your tracksuit.
Belligerent goalies are your ideal.
Threats of being traded
cuts and wounds
--all this pleases you.
O my god! you say at breakfast
reading the sports page over the Alpen
as another player breaks his ankle
or assaults the coach.
When I thought of daughters
I wasn't expecting this
but I like this more.
I like all your faults
even...Read more of this...
by
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
I imagine them walking down rocky paths
toward me, strong, Italian women returning
at dusk from fields where they worked all day
on farms built like steps up the sides
of steep mountains, graceful women carrying water
in terra cotta jugs on their heads.
What I know of these women, whom I never met,
I know from my mother, a few pictures
of my grandmother, standing at...Read more of this...
by
Margaret Atwood
Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.
But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its...Read more of this...
by
John Crowe Ransom
The friar had said his paternosters duly
And scourged his limbs, and afterwards would have slept;
But with much riddling his head became unruly,
He arose, from the quiet monastery he crept.
Dawn lightened the place where the battle had been won.
The people were dead -- it is easy he thought to die --
These dead remained, but...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
You have the grit and the guts, I know;
You are ready to answer blow for blow
You are virile, combative, stubborn, hard,
But your honor ends with your own back-yard;
Each man intent on his private goal,
You have no feeling for the whole;
What singly none would tolerate
You let unpunished hit the state,
Unmindful that each...Read more of this...
by
Russell Edson
A man is bringing a cup of coffee to his face,
tilting it to his mouth. It's historical, he thinks.
He scratches his head: another historical event.
He really ought to rest, he's making an awful lot of
history this morning.
Oh my, now he's buttering toast, another piece of
history is being made.
He wonders why it should...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
(A. D. 1200)
Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!
Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever AEneas began.
Ash...Read more of this...
by
Laurence Binyon
The rain was ending, and light
Lifting the leaden skies.
It shone upon ceiling and floor
And dazzled a child's eyes.
Pale after fever, a captive
Apart from his schoolfellows,
He stood at the high room's window
With face to the pane pressed close,
And beheld an immense glory
Flooding with fire the drops
Spilled on miraculous leaves
Of the fresh green lime-tree tops.
Washed gravel glittered red
To a wall, and...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
From afar has appeared a filthy shape. It is said that
its body was covered with a shirt made of the smoke
of Hell. It was neither a man nor a woman. It has
broken our flask and spilled upon the earth the ruby wine
it contained, glorifying itself at having done a deed worthy
of a man....Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the
city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping
and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit
of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.
It is their care...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Patchen
As we are so wonderfully done with each other
We can walk into our separate sleep
on floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood
lies
oh my love, my golden lark, my soft long doll
Your lips have splashed my dull house with print of flowers
My hands are crooked where they spilled over your dear
curving...Read more of this...
by
Gregory Corso
Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
Ah and the sad desparate gun...Read more of this...
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