Famous Tormented Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tormented poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tormented poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tormented poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Federico García Lorca
No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.
A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep
in the plaza with moon of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.
Between plaster and jasmins, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to...Read more of this...
by
Friedrich von Schiller
Name, my Laura, name the whirl-compelling
Bodies to unite in one blest whole--
Name, my Laura, name the wondrous magic
By which soul rejoins its kindred soul!
See! it teaches yonder roving planets
Round the sun to fly in endless race;
And as children play around their mother,
Checkered circles round the orb to trace.
Every rolling star, by thirst tormented,
Drinks with joy its bright and golden...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
We two are last in hell; what may we fear
To be tormented or kept pris'ners here I
Alas! if kissing be of plagues the worst,
We'll wish in hell we had been last and first....Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
The tractor stands frozen - an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.
It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ever since those wondrous days of Creation
our Lord God sleeps: we are His sleep.
And He accepted this in His indulgence,
resigned to rest among the distant stars.
Our actions stopped Him from reacting,
for His fist-tight hand is numbed by sleep,
and the times brought in the age of heroes
during which our dark hearts plundered Him.
Sometimes He appears as if tormented,
and His body...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Remember midsummer: the fragrance of box, of white
roses
And of phlox. And upon a honeysuckle branch
Three snails hanging with infinite delicacy
-- Clinging like tendril, flake and thread, as self-tormented
And self-delighted as any ballerina,
just as in the orchard,
Near the apple trees, in the over-grown grasses
Drunken wasps clung to over-ripe pears
Which had fallen: swollen and disfigured.
For now it is...Read more of this...
by
Ben Jonson
Rhyme, the rack of finest wits,
That expresseth but by fits
True conceit,
Spoiling senses of their treasure,
Cozening judgment with a measure,
But false weight;
Wresting words from their true calling,
Propping verse for fear of falling
To the ground;
Jointing syllabes, drowning letters,
Fast'ning vowels as with fetters
They were bound!
Soon as lazy thou wert known,
All good poetry hence was flown,
And art banish'd.
For a thousand years together
All Parnassus'...Read more of this...
by
Jean Delville
Implacably, dismally, prophetically,
It is raining, interminable tears of rain, it rains
Death upon the dismal city, long bereaved of sun.
It rains annihilation, immensely, upon my sleep
and my tormented dreams and, in the night, it rains
implacably, dismally, prophetically?
Oh! the secret sorrow of the Night weeps
Upon the pale wakefulness of my pensive mind.
Upon the slab of my brow, with funereal sobs,
it is raining...Read more of this...
by
Michael Drayton
I pray thee leave, love me no more,
Call home the heart you gave me.
I but in vain that saint adore
That can, but will not, save me:
These poor half-kisses kill me quite;
Was ever man thus served?
Amidst an ocean of delight
For pleasure to be starved.
Show me no more those snowy breasts
With azure riverets branched,
Where whilst mine eye with plenty feasts,
Yet is...Read more of this...
by
Jonathan Swift
Corinna, Pride of Drury-Lane,
For whom no Shepherd sighs in vain;
Never did Covent Garden boast
So bright a batter'd, strolling Toast;
No drunken Rake to pick her up,
No Cellar where on Tick to sup;
Returning at the Midnight Hour;
Four Stories climbing to her Bow'r;
Then, seated on a three-legg'd Chair,
Takes off her artificial Hair:
Now, picking out a Crystal Eye,
She wipes it clean, and...Read more of this...
by
Edward Field
It sometimes happens
that the woman you meet and fall in love with
is of that strange Transylvanian people
with an affinity for cats.
You take her to a restuarant, say, or a show,
on an ordinary date, being attracted
by the glitter in her slitty eyes and her catlike walk,
and afterwards of course you take her in your arms
and she turns into a black...Read more of this...
by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
The Desert is parched in the burning sun
And the grass is scorched and white.
But the sand is passed, and the march is done,
We are camping here to-night.
I sit in the shade of the Temple walls,
...Read more of this...
by
Claude McKay
I will not reason, wrestle here with you,
Though you pursue and worry me about;
As well put forth my swarthy arm to stop
The wild wind howling, darkly mad without.
The night is yours for revels; day will light.
I will not fight you, bold and tigerish,
For I am weak, while you are gaining strength;
Peace! cease...Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
Wounded I sing, tormented I indite,
Thrown down I fall into a bed, and rest:
Sorrow hath chang'd its note: such is his will
Who changeth all things, as him pleaseth best.
For well he knows, if but one grief and smart
Among my many had his full career,
Sure it would carry with it ev'n my heart,
And...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
CANZONE IV. Si è debile il filo a cui s' attene. HE GRIEVES IN ABSENCE FROM LAURA. The thread on which my weary life dependsSo fragile is and weak,If none kind succour lends,Soon 'neath the painful burden will it break;Since doom'd to take my sad farewell of her,In whom begins...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I. Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the...Read more of this...
by
Anna Akhmatova
Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us.
[1961]
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her...Read more of this...
by
Wilfred Owen
Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but...Read more of this...
by
Anne Killigrew
SEest thou younder craggy Rock,
Whose Head o'er-looks the swelling Main,
Where never Shepherd fed his Flock,
Or careful Peasant sow'd his Grain.
No wholesome Herb grows on the same,
Or Bird of Day will on it rest;
'Tis Barren as the Hopeless Flame,
That scortches my tormented Breast.
Deep underneath a Cave does lie,
...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
VNrighteous Lord of loue what law is this,
That me thou makest thus tormented be:
the whiles she lordeth in licentious blisse
of her freewill, scorning both thee and me.
See how the Tyrannesse doth ioy to see
the huge massacres which her eyes do make:
and humbled harts brings captiues vnto thee,
that thou of them mayst mightie vengeance take.
But her proud hart doe thou...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
She is large and matronly
And rather dirty,
A little sardonic-looking, as if domesticity had driven her to it.
Though what she does, except lay four eggs at random in the garden once a year
And put up with her husband,
I don't know.
She likes to eat.
She hurries up, striding reared on long uncanny legs
When food is going.
Oh yes, she can make haste when...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow
And in parting from you now
Thus much let me avow ---
You are not wrong who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away.
In a night or in a day
In a vision or in none
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[This sweet Ballad, and the one entitled The
Maid of the Mill's Repentance, were written on the occasion of a
visit paid by Goethe to Switzerland. The Maid of the Mill's Treachery,
to which the latter forms the sequel, was not written till the following
year.]
YOUTH.
SAY, sparkling streamlet, whither thou
Art
going!
With joyous mien thy waters now
Are
flowing.
Why seek the...Read more of this...
by
Regina Derieva
Everyone, after all, was killed:
he who was crucified,
he who died without skin,
he who died without a head,
he who was drowned,
he who was thrown down
from the wall of the Temple,
which shortly after that
ceased to exist.
Everyone, after all, was tormented;
he who was put at the mercy
of lions and Neros,
he who was roasted on the bonfire,
he whose eyes were gouged out.
Everything was...Read more of this...
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