Famous Stoned Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Colloquy in Black Rock

by Robert Lowell
Here the jack-hammer jabs into the ocean;
My heart, you race and stagger and demand
More blood-gangs for your ******-brass percussions,
Till I, the stunned machine of your devotion,
Clanging upon this cymbal of a hand,
Am rattled screw and footloose. All discussions

End in the mud-flat detritus of death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Hungarian workmen give their blood
For the martyrs Stephen who was...Read more of this...

Once It Was The Colour Of Saying

by Dylan Thomas
 Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo
That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
Where at night...Read more of this...

The Prophet

by Alexander Pushkin
 Longing for spiritual springs,
I dragged myself through desert sands ...
An angel with three pairs of wings
Arrived to me at cross of lands;
With fingers so light and slim
He touched my eyes as in a dream:
And opened my prophetic eyes 
Like eyes of eagle in surprise.
He touched my ears in movement, single,
And they were filled with noise and jingle:
I heard a...Read more of this...

Her Death And After

by Thomas Hardy
 'TWAS a death-bed summons, and forth I went
By the way of the Western Wall, so drear
On that winter night, and sought a gate--
The home, by Fate,
Of one I had long held dear.

And there, as I paused by her tenement,
And the trees shed on me their rime and hoar,
I thought of the man who had left her lone--
Him who made...Read more of this...

ducks and wisdom

by Rg Gregory
 [from a motif by Jean Dunand (1877-1942)]

seven lacqueur ducks on a silver pond
their rippling held in a moveless frieze
nothing now can help them swim beyond
the stoned edges (invent a new-age breeze)
eternity is water starved of trees
their fixture is our own - for all we fidget
history puts us down as one dead digit

silver-ponded we can't stop being stirred
to leap behind...Read more of this...

Dream Song 20: The Secret of the Wisdom

by John Berryman
 When worst got things, how was you? Steady on?
Wheedling, or shockt her &
you have been bad to your friend,
whom not you writing to. You have not listened.
A pelican of lies
you loosed: where are you?

Down weeks of evenings of longing
by hours, NOW, a stoned bell,
you did somebody: others you hurt short:
anyone ever did you do good?
You licking your own old...Read more of this...

The Dumb Soldier

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 When the grass was closely mown,
Walking on the lawn alone,
In the turf a hole I found
And hid a soldier underground. 

Spring and daisies came apace;
Grasses hid my hiding-place;
Grasses run like a green sea
O'er the lawn up to my knee. 

Under grass alone he lies,
Looking up with leaden eyes,
Scarlet coat and pointed gun,
To the stars and to the sun. 

When...Read more of this...

The Ballad of the Kings Mercy

by Rudyard Kipling
 Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told.
 His mercy fills the Khyber hills -- his grace is manifold;
 He has taken toll of the North and the South -- his glory reacheth far,
 And they tell the tale of his charity from Balkh to Kandahar.

Before the old Peshawur Gate, where Kurd and Kaffir meet,
The Governor...Read more of this...

Apollo Musagete Poetry And The Leader Of The Muses

by Delmore Schwartz
 Nothing is given which is not taken.

Little or nothing is taken which is not freely desired,
 freely, truly and fully.

"You would not seek me if you had not found me": this is
 true of all that is supremely desired and admired...

"An enigma is an animal," said the hurried, harried 
 schoolboy:

And a horse divided against itself cannot stand;

And a...Read more of this...

Midsummer Tobago

by Derek Walcott
 Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.
A green river.

A bridge,
scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house
drowsing through August.

Days I have held,
days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,
my harbouring arms....Read more of this...

Cholera Camp

by Rudyard Kipling
 We've got the cholerer in camp -- it's worse than forty fights;
 We're dyin' in the wilderness the same as Isrulites;
It's before us, an' be'ind us, an' we cannot get away,
 An' the doctor's just reported we've ten more to-day!

Oh, strike your camp an' go, the Bugle's callin',
 The Rains are fallin' --
The dead are bushed an' stoned to...Read more of this...

A Memory At Sixty

by Barry Tebb
 They have vanished, the pop men with their varnished crates

Of Tizer and dandy, American ice-cream soda and one percent shandy.

The clunk of frothy quarts dumped on donkey-stoned doorsteps

Is heard no more, nor the neighs of restless mares between the shafts.

The shining brass of harness hangs in bar-rooms or droops

From imitation beams.



Gelded stallions no longer chomp and champ

In stalls beneath...Read more of this...

Jacob Godbey

by Edgar Lee Masters
 How did you feel, you libertarians,
Who spent your talents rallying noble reasons
Around the saloon, as if Liberty
Was not to be found anywhere except at the bar
Or at a table, guzzling?
How did you feel, Ben Pantier, and the rest of you,
Who almost stoned me for a tyrant,
Garbed as a moralist,
And as a wry-faced ascetic frowning upon Yorkshire pudding,
Roast beef and...Read more of this...

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