Famous Swamped Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Song of Brave Men

...ching, to the spray that froze as it flew, 
Twenty-six hours in midwinter! That was the lifeboat's crew. 
Twice she was swamped, and she righted, in the rush of the heavy seas, 
And her tug was mostly buried; but these were common things, these. 
And the luggers go out whenever there's a hope to get them afloat, 
And these things they do for nothing, and those fishermen say, "Oh! it's nowt!" 

(Enemy, Friend or Stranger! In every sea or land, 
And across the lives of most men...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry


A Spring Piece Left In The Middle

...on my face,
seventy-five cents in my pocket,
 SPRING IN THE AIR...

 *

The piece got left in the middle.
It rained and swamped the lines.
But oh! what I would have written...
The starving writer sitting on his three-thousand-page
 three-volume manuscript
wouldn't stare at the window of the kebab joint
but with his shining eyes would take
the Armenian bookseller's dark plump daughter by storm...
The sea would start smelling sweet.
Spring would rear up
 like a sweating red mar...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim

Georgic on Memory

...oose sutures. Lacking
imagination, you'll take the pledge

to remember - not the sexy, new
idea of history, each moment
swamped in legend, liable to judgment
and erosion; still, an appealing view,

to draft our lives, a series of vignettes
where endings could be substituted -
your father, unconvoluted
by desire, not grown bonsai in regret,

the bedroom of blue flowers left intact.
The room was nearly dark, the streetlight
a sentinel at the white curtain, its night
face implic...Read more of this...
by Belieu, Erin

Leaving Early

...vase.
We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold swamped by flowers?...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia

The Ballad of the Calliope

...its prey should steal away, 
On the rocks, all smashed and strown, 
Were the German vessels thrown, 
While the Yankees, swamped and helpless, drifted shorewards down the bay. 

Then at last spoke Captain Kane, 
"All our anchors are in vain, 
And the Germans and the Yankees they have drifted to the lee! 
Cut the cables at the bow! 
We must trust the engines now! 
Give her steam, and let her have it, lads! we'll fight her out to sea!" 

And the answer came with cheers 
From the...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton


The Galley-Slave

...l for service. Would that service still were mine!

f times and seasons and of woe the years bring forth,
Of our galley swamped and shattered in the rollers of the North.
When the niggers break the hatches and the decks are gay with gore,
And a craven-hearted pilot crams her crashing on the shore,

She will need no half-mast signal, minute-gun, or rocket-flare,
When the cry for help goes seaward, she will find her servants there.
Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled dr...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Princess (part 5)

...though yourself 
Be dazzled by the wildfire Love to sloughs 
That swallow common sense, the spindling king, 
This Gama swamped in lazy tolerance. 
When the man wants weight, the woman takes it up, 
And topples down the scales; but this is fixt 
As are the roots of earth and base of all; 
Man for the field and woman for the hearth: 
Man for the sword and for the needle she: 
Man with the head and woman with the heart: 
Man to command and woman to obey; 
All else confusion. Lo...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

The Storm

...lease take care of me!"
But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon
me.
Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.
A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was
drowning
In a bubbling cavern of space. I alone--
Smaller than the smallest fly--was alive and terrified.
Then for what reason I know not, I became trium-
phant
"Well, kill me!" I cried and ran out into the open.
But the storm ceased: the sun spread his wings
And floated serene in th...Read more of this...
by Mansfield, Katherine

The Wreck of the Steamer Mohegan

...roar,
When he saw the boats filled with passengers going towards the shore. 

One of the boats, alas! unfortunately was swamped,
Which caused the officers and seamens' courage to be a little damped;
But they were thankful the other boats got safely away,
And tried hard to save the passengers without dismay. 

Then a shriek of despair arose as the ship is sinking beneath the wave,
While some of the passengers cried to God their lives to save;
But the angry waves buffetted the ...Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz

uganda cry

...ts dreams

uganda (victim to a white
man's piece of chalk) now victim to
a gloated bitterness in black
your griefs have swamped the nile

and i lounge here (a long way home)
disturbed and pillowed by these words...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg

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