Famous Wartime Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Wartime poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous wartime poems. These examples illustrate what a famous wartime poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...o every house
Like an underground network of paths,
Arteries and veins of my ten year old heart.
9
The kitchen was wartime brown and green, a
Brick boiler in a corner lit once a week
For washing and once for bathing with the
Scrubbed ribs of the bath top, pot sink and
Cooking with a Yorkist range blackleaded
Every day and blackberrying down Knostrop
With thorns pricking blood from our fingers
Like the wicked witch in the wood and jam
Jar fulls of frogspawn on the...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...roofless,
Open to the enormous skies of our childhood.
The Aire Suspension Bridge, always my bridge,
Has gone from wartime camouflage grey to
Council green with a traffic island in between
The lanes where lorries roar and silent anglers
Stitched along the shore shelter under the
Giant red, green and yellow umbrellas of Monet.
In the Aire’s clear waters salmon dart and
Giant trout are basking in the sun;
There is abundant clay for potters’ wheels
With haptic sto...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...m full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and ros...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...s my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on
Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride....Read more of this...
by
Smith, Stevie
...nylons, Formica table tops and
Fablon shelf-covering in original oak or
Spruce under neon tubes and Dayglo shades.
Wartime brown and green went out, along with
The Yorkist Range, the wire-mesh food safe
In the cellar, the scrubbed board bath lid
And marbled glass bowl over the light bulb
With its hidden hoard of dead flies and
Rusting three-tier chain.
We moved to the new estate, Airey semis
With their pebble-dash prefabricated slats,
Built-in kitchen units and...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...rs in peacetime
With fifty years to live,
Have time to tease and quarrel
And question what to give;
But lovers in wartime
Better understand
The fullness of living,
With death close at hand.
XXIV
My father wrote me a letter—
My father, scholarly, indolent, strong,
Teaching Greek better
Than high-school students repay—
Teaching Greek in the winter, but all summer long
Sailing a yawl in Narragansett Bay;
Happier perhaps when I was away,
Free of an anxious da...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...approval
I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.
No one clamoured in the press for its removal
or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.
These Vs are all the versuses of life
From LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,
Class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM,
Hindu/Sikh, soul/body, heart v. mind,
East/West, mal...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
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