Famous Sponge Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Before A Crucifix

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Here, down between the dusty trees,
At this lank edge of haggard wood,
Women with labour-loosened knees,
With gaunt backs bowed by servitude,
Stop, shift their loads, and pray, and fare
Forth with souls easier for the prayer.

The suns have branded black, the rains
Striped grey this piteous God of theirs;
The face is full of prayers and pains,
To which they bring their pains and prayers;
Lean...Read more of this...

When Once The Twilight Locks No Longer

by Dylan Thomas
 When once the twilight locks no longer
Locked in the long worm of my finger
Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
That globe...Read more of this...

Five Bells

by Kenneth Slessor
 Time that is moved by little fidget wheels 
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. 
Between the double and the single bell 
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells 
From the dark warship riding there below, 
I have lived many lives, and this one life 
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells....Read more of this...

Five Ways To Kill A Man

by Andre Breton
 There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a...Read more of this...

The Bight

by Elizabeth Bishop
 [On my birthday]


At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn't wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one...Read more of this...

Lo Now My Guest

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 LO, now, my guest, if aught amiss were said,
Forgive it and dismiss it from your head.
For me, for you, for all, to close the date,
Pass now the ev'ning sponge across the slate;
And to that spirit of forgiveness keep
Which is the parent and the child of sleep....Read more of this...

Phallus

by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
 This was the gods' god, 
The leashed divinity, 
Divine divining rod 
And Me within the me. 

By mindlight tower and tree 
Its shadow on the ground 
Throw, and in darkness she 
Whose weapon is her wound 

Fends off the knife, the sword, 
The Tiger and the Snake; 
It stalks the virgin's bed 
And bites her wide awake. 

Her Bab-el-Mandeb...Read more of this...

The Doctor Of The Heart

by Anne Sexton
 Take away your knowledge, Doktor.
It doesn't butter me up.

You say my heart is sick unto.
You ought to have more respect!

you with the goo on the suction cup.
You with your wires and electrodes

fastened at my ankle and wrist,
sucking up the biological breast.

You with your zigzag machine
playing like the stock market up and down.

Give me the Phi Beta key you always...Read more of this...

The Lobster

by Carl Rakosi
 Eastern Sea, 100 fathoms, 
green sand, pebbles, 
broken shells.

Off Suno Saki, 60 fathoms, 
gray sand, pebbles, 
bubbles rising.

Plasma-bearer
and slow-
motion benthos!

The fishery vessel Ion 
drops anchor here
 collecting 
plankton smears and fauna.

Plasma-bearer, visible
sea purge,
 sponge and kelpleaf.
Halicystus the Sea Bottle

resembles emeralds 
and is the largest 
cell in the world.

Young sea horse
Hippocampus twenty
minutes old,

nobody has ever 
seen this marine 
freak blink.

It...Read more of this...

Mammy

by Robert William Service
 I often wonder how
 Life clicks because
They don't make women now
 Like Mammy was.
When broods of two or three
 Content most men,
How wonderful was she
 With children ten!

Though sixty years have gone,
 As I look back,
I see her rise at dawn,
 Our boots to black;
Pull us from drowsy bed,
 Wet sponge to pass,
And speed us porridge fed
 To morning...Read more of this...

The Twelve Dancing Princesses

by Anne Sexton
 If you danced from midnight
to six A.M. who would understand?

The runaway boy
who chucks it all
to live on the Boston Common
on speed and saltines,
pissing in the duck pond,
rapping with the street priest,
trading talk like blows,
another missing person,
would understand.

The paralytic's wife
who takes her love to town,
sitting on the bar stool,
downing stingers and peanuts,
singing "That ole Ace down in the hole,"
would understand.

The...Read more of this...

The Absinthe Drinkers

by Robert William Service
 He's yonder, on the terrace of the Cafe de la Paix,
The little wizened Spanish man, I see him every day.
He's sitting with his Pernod on his customary chair;
He's staring at the passers with his customary stare.
He never takes his piercing eyes from off that moving throng,
That current cosmopolitan meandering along:
Dark diplomats from Martinique, pale Rastas from Peru,
An Englishman from...Read more of this...

The Travail Of Passion

by William Butler Yeats
 When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies...Read more of this...

Gloire de Dijon

by D. H. Lawrence
 When she rises in the morning 
I linger to watch her; 
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window 
And the sunbeams catch her 
Glistening white on the shoulders, 
While down her sides the mellow 
Golden shadow glows as 
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts 
Sway like full-blown yellow 
Gloire de Dijon roses. 

She drips herself with...Read more of this...

Dresser The

by Walt Whitman
 1
AN old man bending, I come, among new faces, 
Years looking backward, resuming, in answer to children, 
Come tell us, old man, as from young men and maidens that love me; 
Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances, 
Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;)
Now be witness again—paint the...Read more of this...

Five Ways To Kill A Man

by Edwin Brock
 There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator

by Anne Sexton
 The end of the affair is always death. 
She's my workshop. Slippery eye, 
out of the tribe of myself my breath 
finds you gone. I horrify 
those who stand by. I am fed. 
At night, alone, I marry the bed. 
Finger to finger, now she's mine. 
She's not too far. She's my encounter. 
I beat her like a bell....Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Sponge poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace