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).
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by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...soiled and scarred and pale
Are pierced with falsehood for a nail.
And priests against the mouth divine
Push their sponge full of poison yet
And bitter blood for myrrh and wine,
And on the same reed is it set
Wherewith before they buffeted
The people's disanointed head.
O sacred head, O desecrate,
O labour-wounded feet and hands,
O blood poured forth in pledge to fate
Of nameless lives in divers lands,
O slain and spent and sacrificed
People, the grey-grown speechle...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...u up
there,
Whoever you are, follow me without noise, and be of strong heart.)
3
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,
Straight and swift to my wounded I go,
Where they lie on the ground, after the battle brought in;
Where their priceless blood reddens the grass, the ground;
Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital;
To the long rows of cots, up and down, each side, I return;
To each and all, one after another, I draw near—not one do I mi...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...r'd aloft
Its hungry hugeness, seeming ready ripe
To burst with hoarsest thunderings, and wipe
My life away like a vast sponge of fate,
Some friendly monster, pitying my sad state,
Has dived to its foundations, gulph'd it down,
And left me tossing safely. But the crown
Of all my life was utmost quietude:
More did I love to lie in cavern rude,
Keeping in wait whole days for Neptune's voice,
And if it came at last, hark, and rejoice!
There blush'd no summer eve but I would ...Read more of this...
by
Slessor, Kenneth
...rne, your appetite had gone,
Your angers too; they had been leeched away
By the soft archery of summer rains
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind,
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage,
The sodden ectasies of rectitude.
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink,
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind
With other things you left, all without use,
All without meaning now, ...Read more of this...
by
Brock, Edwin
...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 length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobi...Read more of this...
by
Breton, Andre
...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 length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobi...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
...tch 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 water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it g...Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
...e 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...
by
Service, Robert William
...ough 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 class.
Our duds to make and mend,
Far into night,
O'er needle she would spend
By bleary light.
Yet as her head drooped low,
With withered hair,
It seemed the candle glow
Made halo there.
And so with silvered pow
I sigh because
They don't make women now
Like Mammy was....Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...ep-versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Or, if I would delight my private hours
With music or with poem, where so soon
As in our native language can I find
That solace? All our Law and Story strewed
With hymns, our Psalms with artful terms inscribed,
Our Hebrew songs and harps, in Babylon
That pleased so well our victor's ear, declare
That r...Read more of this...
by
Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...stalks the virgin's bed
And bites her wide awake.
Her Bab-el-Mandeb waits
Her Red Sea gate of tears:
The blood-sponge god dilates,
His rigid pomp appears;
Sets in the toothless mouth
A tongue of prophecy.
It speaks in naked Truth
Indifference for me
Love, a romantic slime
That lubricates his way
Against the stream of Time.
And though I win the day
His garrisons deep down
Ignore my victory,
Abandon this doomed town,
Crawl through a sewer and fl...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...r> ."
"That's where you've got it wrong," he snarled; "the fool she took was me.
My rival sneaked, threw up the sponge, betrayed himself a churl:
'Twas he who got the happiness, I only got -- the girl."
With that he looked so devil-like he made me creep and shrink,
And there was nothing else to do but buy another drink.
Now yonder like a blot of ink he sits across the way,
Upon the smiling terrace of the Cafe de la Paix;
That little wizened Spanish man, his f...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.
The grey cock crew, the red cock crew,
But never came the day:
And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,
In the corners where we lay:
And each evil sprite that walks by night
Before us seemed to play.
They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate tu...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Then my black-eyed rival came.
The lad...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...ch a device for my heart?
I have only a gimmick called magic fingers.
Let me dilate like a bad debt.
Here is a sponge. I can squeeze it myself.
O heart, tobacco red heart,
beat like a rock guitar.
I am at the ship's prow.
I am no longer the suicide
with her raft and paddle.
Herr Doktor! I'll no longer die
to spite you, you wallowing
seasick grounded man....Read more of this...
by
Rakosi, Carl
...e 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 radiates on
terminal vertebra
a comb of twenty
upright spines
and curls
its rocky tail.
Saltflush lobster
bull encrusted swims
ba...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...dure 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 of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream....Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...right time came.
And thus he sat outside the dorm.
The oldest princess brought him some wine
but he fastened a sponge beneath his chin,
looking the opposite of Andy Gump.
The sponge soaked up the wine,
and thus he stayed awake.
He feigned sleep however
and the princesses sprang out of their beds
and fussed around like a Miss America Contest.
Then the eldest went to her bed
and knocked upon it and it sank into the earth.
They descended down the openin...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...onger
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 itself of hair and bone
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.
My fuses are timed to charge his heart,
He b...Read more of this...
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