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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The Galley-Slave

by Rudyard Kipling
 Oh gallant was our galley from her caren steering-wheel
To her figurehead of silver and her beak of hammered steel;
The leg-bar chafed the ankle and we gasped for cooler air,
But no galley on the waters with our galley could compare!

Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold --
We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the...Read more of this...

uganda cry

by Rg Gregory
 i have lost touch over the years
with the hot africa inside me

illness and all - i spread to root
in the red earth siphoned the sun

loved the black inflections of my eyes
cut callow cords and found new forms

felt free to fashion and freely raised
orchards of feelings where the groves

were rife with desiccated pens
but all the time my ears insistent to

the...Read more of this...

The Ballad of the Calliope

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 By the far Samoan shore, 
Where the league-long rollers pour 
All the wash of the Pacific on the coral-guarded bay, 
Riding lightly at their ease, 
In the calm of tropic seas, 
The three great nations' warships at their anchors proudly lay. 
Riding lightly, head to wind, 
With the coral reefs behind, 
Three German and three Yankee ships were mirrored...Read more of this...

The Wreck of the Steamer Mohegan

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Good people of high and low degree,
I pray ye all to list to me,
And I'll relate a terrible tale of the sea
Concerning the unfortunate steamer, Mohegan,
That against the Manacles Rocks, ran. 

'Twas on Friday, the 14th of October, in the year of ninety-eight,
Which alas! must have been a dreadful sight;
She sailed out of the river Thames on Thursday,
While the...Read more of this...

Georgic on Memory

by Erin Belieu
 Make your daily monument the Ego,
use a masochist's epistemology
of shame and dog-eared certainty
that others less exacting might forgo.

If memory's an elephant, then feed
the animal. Resist revision: the stand
of feral raspberry, contraband
fruit the crows stole, ferrying seed

for miles ... No. It was a broken hedge,
not beautiful, sunlight tacking
its leafy gut in loose sutures. Lacking
imagination, you'll take the pledge

to remember -...Read more of this...

A Spring Piece Left In The Middle

by Nazim Hikmet
 Taut, thick fingers punch
the teeth of my typewriter.
Three words are down on paper
 in capitals:
SPRING
 SPRING
 SPRING...
And me -- poet, proofreader,
the man who's forced to read
two thousand bad lines
 every day
 for two liras--
why,
 since spring
 has come, am I
 still sitting here
 like a ragged 
 black chair?
My head puts on its cap by itself,
 I fly out...Read more of this...

The Storm

by Katherine Mansfield
 I Ran to the forest for shelter,
Breathless, half sobbing;
I put my arms round a tree,
Pillowed my head against the rough bark.
"Protect me," I said. "I am a lost child."
But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.
A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth;
It lashed the forest together.
A huge green wave thundered and burst over...Read more of this...

A Song of Brave Men

by Henry Lawson
 Man, is the Sea your master? Sea, and is man your slave? – 
This is the song of brave men who never know they are brave: 
Ceaselessly watching to save you, stranger from foreign lands, 
Soundly asleep in your state room, full sail for the Goodwin Sands! 
Life is a dream, they tell us, but life seems very real,...Read more of this...

Leaving Early

by Sylvia Plath
 Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.
When you kick me out, that's what I'll remember,
Me, sitting here bored as a loepard
In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,
Velvet pillows the color of blood pudding
And the white china flying fish from Italy.
I forget you, hearing the cut flowers
Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,
Pitchers and Coronation goblets
Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries
Bow down,...Read more of this...

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