Famous Thud Poems by Famous Poets

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

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(Inner Tube)

...ul between my teeth

a blue heron
with its awkward
broken backed flap
upside down

one of us is wrong

he
his blue grey thud
thinking he knows
the blue way
out of here

or me...Read more of this...
by Ondaatje, Michael


A Case Of Murder

...hut, 
But the boy, quick too, slammed fast the door: 
The cat, half-through, was cracked like a nut 
And the soft black thud was dumped on the floor. 
Then the boy was suddenly terrified 
And he bit his knuckles and cried and cried; 
But he had to do something with the dead thing there. 
His eyes squeezed beads of salty prayer 
But the wound of fear gaped wide and raw; 
He dared not touch the thing with his hands 
So he fetched a spade and shovelled it 
And dumped the load of...Read more of this...
by Scannell, Vernon

Balin and Balan

...t chained rage, which ever yelpt within, 
Past eastward from the falling sun. At once 
He felt the hollow-beaten mosses thud 
And tremble, and then the shadow of a spear, 
Shot from behind him, ran along the ground. 
Sideways he started from the path, and saw, 
With pointed lance as if to pierce, a shape, 
A light of armour by him flash, and pass 
And vanish in the woods; and followed this, 
But all so blind in rage that unawares 
He burst his lance against a forest bough, 
D...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Before I Knocked

...aughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotte...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

Blinks through Blood-shot Walks

...arning so hard and late
No time to scratch the bald pate.
        At five-thirty-one
        A minute just gone
The thud is on, the sledge-hammer yawns
And in the back of ears, strange noises
As from afar and a million feet tramp.
One infinitesimal particle knocks another
And the whirl begins in a silent rage
And the human heart beats harder
While in and around, this London
This atomic mammoth roams
In the wastes of wars and tumbling empires.
...Read more of this...
by Wignesan, T


Church Going

...Once i am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting seats and stone 
and little books; sprawlings of flowers cut
For Sunday brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense musty unignorable silence 
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless I take off
My cylce-clips in awkward revrence 

Move forward run my hand around the font.
Fr...Read more of this...
by Larkin, Philip

Colloquy in Black Rock

...melons gutted to the crust,
Mud for the mole-tide harbor, mud for mouse,
Mud for teh armored Diesel fishing tubs that thud
A year and a day to wind and tide; the dust
Is on this skipping heart that shakes my house,

House of our Savior who was hanged till death.
My heart, beat faster, faster. In Black Mud
Stephen the martyre was broken down to blood:
Our ransom is the rubble of his death.

Christ walks on the black water. In Black Mud
Darts the kingfisher. On Corp...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert

Falling Asleep

...Voices moving about in the quiet house: 
Thud of feet and a muffled shutting of doors: 
Everyone yawning. Only the clocks are alert. 

Out in the night there’s autumn-smelling gloom 
Crowded with whispering trees; across the park
A hollow cry of hounds like lonely bells: 
And I know that the clouds are moving across the moon; 
The low, red, rising moon. Now herons call 
And wrangle by their pool; a...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried

Franklin Hyde

...lin Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He Shook him hard from Side to Side
And Hit him till it Hurt,

Exclaiming, with a Final Thud,
"Take that! Abandoned boy!
For Playing with Disgusting Mud
As though it were a Toy!"

Moral:
From Franklin Hyde's adventure, learn
To pass your Leisure Time
In Cleanly Merriment, and turn
From Mud and Ooze and Slime
And every form of Nastiness-
But, on the other Hand,
Children in ordinary Dress
May always play with Sand....Read more of this...
by Belloc, Hilaire

Gioconda And Si-Ya-U

...catch him!"

Just three steps away from Gioconda's arms
Chiang Kai-shek's executioner caught up.
His sword
 flashed...
Thud of cut flesh and bone.
Like a yellow sun drenched in blood
SI-YA-U's head
 rolled at her feet...
And this on a death day
Gioconda of Florence lost in Shanghai
her smile more famous than Florence.


FROM THE AUTHOR'S NOTEBOOK


A Chinese bamboo frame.
In the frame is a painting.
Under the painting, a name:
 "La Gioconda"...
In the frame is a painting:
 t...Read more of this...
by Hikmet, Nazim

Requiem

...a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.
[1939. Spring]

VII
THE VERDICT

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .

But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.
[...Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna

Roads

...ing, trembling to tone,
The land of desire, my soul's delight.
And always it beats in my listening ears
With the gentle thud of a horse's stride,
With the swift-falling steps of many dogs,
Following, following at my side.
O Roads that journey to fairyland!
Radiant highways whose vistas gleam,
Leading me on, under crimson leaves,
To the opaline gates of the Castles of Dream....Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

Song of the Exposition

...ble,) 
Making directly for this rendezvous—vigorously clearing a path for herself—striding
 through
 the confusion, 
By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,
Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers, 
Smiling and pleased, with palpable intent to stay, 
She ’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware! 

4
But hold—don’t I forget my manners? 
To introduce the Stranger (what else indeed have I come for?) to thee, Columbia:
In Liberty’s na...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

Sword Blades and Poppy Seed

...dizzy, I seemed to hear
A battle-cry from somewhere near,
The clash of arms, and the squeal of balls,
And the echoless thud when a dead man falls.
A smoky cloud had veiled the room,
Shot through with lurid glares; the gloom
Pounded with shouts and dying groans,
With the drip of blood on cold, hard stones.
Sabres and lances in streaks of light
Gleamed through the smoke, and at my right
A creese, like a licking serpent's tongue,
Glittered an instant, while it stung.
Streams, a...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy

The Ballad Of Touch-The-Button Nell

...l;
It played and pawed him in the air, before it let him fall.
Then just to show what it could do, with savage rend and thud,
It ripped the entrails from his spine, and dropped him in the mud.

They gathered up the broken bones, and sadly in a sack,
They bore to town the last remains of Lew Lamore, the macque.
And would you hear the full details of how it all befell,
Ask Missis Riley Dooleyvitch (late Touch-the-Button Nell)....Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William

The Intruder

...pallid, yellow,
Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed,
The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,
Swiftly, the cat with a clean careful mouth
Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor
Remained, of all my my mother's tender, wounding passion
For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life
Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,
Whose denizens can turn upon the wo...Read more of this...
by Kizer, Carolyn

The Present

...of a dog 
possessed of no inner fire, the brown 
and greasy pointer who raises his muzzle 
a moment and sighing lets it thud 
down on the loading dock. In no time 
the day has crossed two sets of tracks, 
a semi-trailer with no tractor, and crawled 
down three stories of the bottling plant 
at the end of the alley. It is now 
less than five hours until mid-day 
when nothing will be left in doubt, 
each scrap of news, each banished carton, 
each forgotten letter, its ink bled ...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

The Sentry

...ded from the blast
Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.
Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.
And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping
And splashing in the flood, deluging muck --
The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles
Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.
We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined
"O sir, my eyes -- I'm blind -- I'm blind, I'm blind!"
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the l...Read more of this...
by Owen, Wilfred

To A Daughter Leaving Home

...heels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye....Read more of this...
by Pastan, Linda

Wildpeace

...se its eyes and say Mama.
A peace
without the big noise of beating swords into ploughshares,
without words, without
the thud of the heavy rubber stamp: let it be
light, floating, like lazy white foam.
A little rest for the wounds - who speaks of healing?
(And the howl of the orphans is passed from one generation
to the next, as in a relay race:
the baton never falls.)

Let it come
like wildflowers,
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace....Read more of this...
by Amichai, Yehuda

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