Famous Ugliness Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Ugliness poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous ugliness poems. These examples illustrate what a famous ugliness poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
William Ernest Henley
If I were king, my pipe should be premier.
The skies of time and chance are seldom clear,
We would inform them all with bland blue weather.
Delight alone would need to shed a tear,
For dream and deed should war no more together.
Art should aspire, yet ugliness be dear;
Beauty, the shaft, should speed with wit for feather;
And love, sweet love, should never...Read more of this...
by
Kahlil Gibran
Part One
The power of charity sows deep in my heart, and I reap and gather the wheat in bundles and give them to the hungry.
My soul gives life to the grapevine and I press its bunches and give the juice to the thirsty.
Heaven fills my lamp with oil and I place it at my window to direct...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.
It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
Snow falls. The sky is grey, and sullenly glares
With purple lights in the canyoned street.
The fiery sign on the dark tower wreathes and flares . . .
The trodden grass in the park is covered with white,
The streets grow silent beneath our feet . . .
The city dreams, it forgets its past to-night.
And one, from his high bright window looking...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Like Oedipus I am losing my sight.
LIke Judas I have done my wrong.
Their punishment is over;
the shame and disgrace of it
are all used up.
But as for me,
look into my face
and you will know that crimes dropped upon me
as from a high building
and although I cannot speak of them
or explain the degrading details
I have remembered much
about Judas -
about Judas, the...Read more of this...
by
Sidney Lanier
Through seas of dreams and seas of phantasies,
Through seas of solitudes and vacancies,
And through my Self, the deepest of the seas,
I strive to thee, Nirvana.
Oh long ago the billow-flow of sense,
Aroused by passion's windy vehemence,
Upbore me out of depths to heights intense,
But not to thee, Nirvana.
By waves swept on, I learned to ride the waves.
I served my masters till...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I'm dead.
Officially I'm dead. Their hope is past.
How long I stood as missing! Now, at last
I'm dead.
Look in my face -- no likeness can you see,
No tiny trace of him they knew as "me".
How terrible the change!
Even my eyes are strange.
So keyed are they to pain,
That if I chanced to meet
My mother in the street
She'd look at me...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
God dwells in you; in pride and shame,
In all you do to blight or bless;
In all you are of praise and blame,
In beauty or in ugliness.
"Divine Creation" - What a fraud!
God did not make you . . . You make God.
God lives in me, in all I feel
Of love and hate, of joy and pain,
Of grace and greed, or...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1.
Mother, my Mary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
I like walking on streets as black and wet as this one
now, at two in the solemnly musical morning, when everyone else
in this town emptied of Lestrygonians and Lotus-eaters
is asleep or trying or worrying why
they aren't asleep, while unknown to them Ulysses walks
into the shabby apartment I live in, humming and feeling
happy with the avant-garde weather we're having,
the winds...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Tall, and stout, and solid-looking,
Yet a wreck;
None would think Death's finger's hooking
Him from deck.
Cause of half the fun that's started --
`Hard-case' Dan --
Isn't like a broken-hearted,
Ruined man.
Walking-coat from tail to throat is
Frayed and greened --
Like a man whose other coat is
Being cleaned;
Gone for ever round the edging...Read more of this...
by
Primo Levi
I am twenty-four
led to slaughter
I survived.
The following are empty synonyms:
man and beast
love and hate
friend and foe
darkness and light.
The way of killing men and beasts is the same
I've seen it:
truckfuls of chopped-up men
who will not be saved.
Ideas are mere words:
virtue and crime
truth and lies
beauty and ugliness
courage and cowardice.
Virtue and crime weigh the same
I've seen it:
in a man who was both
criminal...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
She
I'm waiting for the man I hope to wed.
I've never seen him - that's the funny part.
I promised I would wear a rose of red,
Pinned on my coat above my fluttered heart,
So that he'd know me - a precaution wise,
Because I wrote him I was twenty-three,
And Oh such heaps and heaps of silly lies. . .
So when we meet...Read more of this...
by
Diane Wakoski
Photograph negative
her black arm: a diving porpoise,
sprawled across the ice-banked pillow.
Head: a sheet of falling water.
Her legs: icicle branches breaking into light.
This woman,
photographed sleeping.
The man,
making the photograph in the acid pan of his brain.
Sleep stain them both,
as if cloudy semen
rubbed shiningly over the surface
will be used to develop their images.
on the desert
the porpoises curl up,
their...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
I
=The Town=
Oh you stiff shapes, swift transformation seethes
About you: only last night you were
A Sodom smouldering in the dense, soiled air;
To-day a thicket of sunshine with blue smoke-wreaths.
To-morrow swimming in evening's vague, dim vapour
Like a weeded city in shadow under the sea,
Beneath an ocean of shimmering light you will be:
Then a group of toadstools waiting the moon's white taper.
And when...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
Beauty and love let no one separate,
Whom exact Nature did to each other fit,
Giving to Beauty love as finishing fate
And to Love beauty as true colour of it.
Let he but friend be who the soul finds fair,
But let none love outside the body's thought,
So the seen couple's togetherness shall bear
Truth to the beauty each in the other sought.
I could but...Read more of this...
by
Lascelles Abercrombie
BALKIS was in her marble town,
And shadow over the world came down.
Whiteness of walls, towers and piers,
That all day dazzled eyes to tears,
Turned from being white-golden flame,
And like the deep-sea blue became.
Balkis into her garden went;
Her spirit was in discontent
Like a torch in restless air.
Joylessly she wandered there,
And saw...Read more of this...
by
Kenn Nesbitt
Mister Horrible Head and Miss Ugliness Face
are the ugliest couple alive.
Yes indeed they’re so ugly that people run screaming
whenever they see them arrive.
You might say they’re misshapen, repulsive and vile,
or cadaverous, gruesome and gross.
Maybe hideous, grisly, repellent and shocking,
disgusting, unpleasant, morose.
You can call them unsightly, or horrid or scary,
or monstrous or frightful or bad.
You can call them whatever you like,...Read more of this...
by
Heather McHugh
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.
Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.
The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.
Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
OF the visages of things—And of piercing through to the accepted hells beneath;
Of ugliness—To me there is just as much in it as there is in beauty—And now the
ugliness of human beings is acceptable to me;
Of detected persons—To me, detected persons are not, in any respect, worse than
undetected
persons—and are not in any respect worse...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Ugliness poems.