Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Weakened Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by McKay, Claude
...eath the street, 
Bearing their strangely-ghostly burdens by, 
The women and the men of garish nights, 
Their eyes wine-weakened and their clothes awry, 
Grotesques beneath the strong electric lights. 
The shadows wane. The Dawn comes to New York. 
And I go darkly-rebel to my work....Read more of this...



by Berryman, John
...ugh'
(murmmered they) 'if you will watch Us instead,
yet you may saved be. Yes.'

The weather fleured. They weakened all his eyes,
and burning thumbs into his ears, and shook
his hand like a notch.
They flung long silent speeches. (Off the hook!)
They sandpapered his plumpest hope. (So capsize.)
They took away his crotch....Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...it makes me sick." The tall 
intense one, his ***** wired, 
 was shocked out of 
his senses in three seconds. 
Weakened, he watched them install 

another battery in 
the crude electric device. 
 The genitals 
of a third were beaten with 
a short wooden ruler: "Reach 
 for your black balls. 
I'll show you how to make love." 
When two of the beaten passed 

in the hall they did not know 
each other. "His face had turned 
 into a wound: 
the nose was go...Read more of this...

by Hoagland, Tony
...If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book ope...Read more of this...

by Padel, Ruth
...sed theatre,
hyena, leopard, caracal (that caramel cat
with ear tufts, anxious to feed her cubs)
watching the lame foal weakened by drought.

All you know is, that you don't know,
and are afraid. Moonshadow
where the big rocks laugh apart.
Predator-senses. Cilia. Heat detectors

crowd this long auditorium, segment
after segment of the midnight shuffle-plains.
They radar in on bodies, fluids, molecules
of flesh that do not know they glow, they draw....Read more of this...



by Moore, Marianne
...droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills.
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity,
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun,
compelled when extended, to lie stationary.
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must do as well
 as one can for oneself,
sleep--epitome of what is to him the end of life.
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake.
One need not try to stir him up;...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...Slumber, I 
Sit up, singing at one time and sighing 
At another. I am awake always. 


Alas! Sleeplessness has weakened me! 
But I am a lover, and the truth of love 
Is strong. 
I may be weary, but I shall never die....Read more of this...

by Angelou, Maya
...rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it ...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...he night,
Despair grew with the day.

And when white dawn crawled through the wood,
Like cold foam of a flood,
Then weakened every warrior's mood,
In hope, though not in hardihood;
And each man sorrowed as he stood
In the fashion of his blood.

For the Saxon Franklin sorrowed
For the things that had been fair;
For the dear dead woman, crimson-clad,
And the great feasts and the friends he had;
But the Celtic prince's soul was sad
For the things that never were.

In...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...A young man of strong body, weakened by hunger, sat on the walker's portion of the street stretching his hand toward all who passed, begging and repeating his hand toward all who passed, begging and repeating the sad song of his defeat in life, while suffering from hunger and from humiliation. 

When night came, his lips and tongue were parched, while his hand was still as empty as...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...flew dying and fell dead.

But to Dives came Atlantis and the Captains of the West --
And their hates were nothing weakened nor their angers unrest --
 And they pawned their utmost trade
 For the dry, decreeing blade;
And Dives lent and took of them their best.

Then Satan said to Dives: -- "Declare thou by The Name,
"The secret of thy subtlety that turneth mine to shame.
 "It is knowvn through all the Hells
 "How my peoples mocked my spells,
"And my faithless Ki...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
..., [1] thought it best in the first place to attack Corinth, upon which they made several storms. The garrison being weakened, and the governor seeing it was impossible to hold out against so mighty a force, thought it fit to beat a parley; but while they were treating about the articles, one of the magazines in the Turkish army, wherein they had six hundred barrels of powder, blew up by accident, whereby six or seven hundred men were killed; which so enraged the infidels,...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...k and forth he paced along the streets 
With words of hopeless comfort -- what was this 
That one should weaken now? He weakened not. 
Whate'er was in his heart, he neither dealt 
In pity nor in scorn, but, turning round, 
Met that racked visage with his own unmoved, 
Bent on the sufferer his mild calm eyes, 
And while the pangs smote sharper, in a voice, 
As who would speak not all in gentleness 
Nor all disdain, said: "Yes! And am -I- then 
Upon a bed of roses?" 


Stun...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...r, drearier vision
Passed before me, vague and cloud-like;
I beheld our nation scattered,
All forgetful of my counsels,
Weakened, warring with each other:
Saw the remnants of our people
Sweeping westward, wild and woful,
Like the cloud-rack of a tempest,
Like the withered leaves of Autumn!"...Read more of this...

by Herbert, George
...them all away.

The Pleasure came, who, liking not the fashion,
Began to make balconies, terraces,
Till she had weakened all by alteration;
But reverend laws, and many a proclomation
Reform?d all at length with menaces.

Then entered Sin, and with that sycamore
Whose leaves first sheltered man from drought and dew,
Working and winding slily evermore,
The inward walls and summers cleft and tore;
But Grace shored these, and cut that as it grew.

Then S...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...gury that the link then established finds itself not
wholly severed even now (although its strength may be
immeasurably weakened in the comparison), inasmuch as this page 
brings them once more in contact, the one in the person of his own 
descendant, the other in that of the translator of his Poems.

Believe me, with great truth,
Very faithfully yours,
EDGAR A. BOWRING.
London, April, 1853....Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...the infant on her lap and looked into his face and wept as if she were to baptize him with tears. And with a hunger weakened voice she spoke to the child saying, "Why have you left the spiritual world and come to share with me the bitterness of earthly life? Why have you deserted the angels and the spacious firmament and come to this miserable land of humans, filled with agony, oppression, and heartlessness? I have nothing to give you except tears; will you be nourished o...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...ly, it's time to fly,
Over the field and river.
For you already cannot sing
And wipe a tear from a cheek
With a weakened arm."



x x x

I will quietly in the churchyard
Sleep on wooden boards in the sun,
On the Sunday as guest to mother
You will come, my dear one --
Through the river over the mountain
Can't catch up to grown ones
From afar, the sharp-eyed fellow,
This my cross you'll recognize.
I know, dear one, very little
Can you now recall...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Weakened poems.


Book: Reflection on the Important Things