Violence poems
/ page 11 of 20 /
Morning of Drunkenness
© Arthur Rimbaud
O my good! O my beautiful! Atrocious fanfare where I won’t stumble! enchanted rack whereon I am stretched! Hurrah for the amazing work and the marvelous body, for the first time! It began amid the laughter of children, it will end with it. This poison will remain in all our veins even when, as the trumpets turn back, we’ll be restored to the old discord. O let us now, we who are so deserving of these torments! let us fervently gather up that superhuman promise made to our created body and soul: that promise, that madness! Elegance, knowledge, violence! They promised us to bury the tree of good and evil in the shade, to banish tyrannical honesties, so that we might bring forth our very pure love. It began with a certain disgust and ended—since we weren’t able to grasp this eternity all at once—in a panicked rout of perfumes.
Laughter of children, discretion of slaves, austerity of virgins, horror in the faces and objects of today, may you be consecrated by the memory of that wake. It began in all loutishness, now it’s ending among angels of flame and ice.
Little eve of drunkenness, holy! were it only for the mask with which you gratified us. We affirm you, method! We don’t forget that yesterday you glorified each one of our ages. We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole lives every day.
Behold the time of the Assassins.
North
© Seamus Justin Heaney
I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.
Epistles to Several Persons: Epistle II: To a Lady on the Characters of Women
© Alexander Pope
Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most Women have no Characters at all."
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.
Hyacinth
© Louise Gluck
2
There were no flowers in antiquity
but boys’ bodies, pale, perfectly imagined.
So the gods sank to human shape with longing.
In the field, in the willow grove,
Apollo sent the courtiers away.
The Purgatory Of St. Patrick - Act I
© Denis Florence MacCarthy
KING. Yes, from this rocky height,
Nigh to the sun, that with one starry light
Its rugged brow doth crown,
Headlong among the salt waves leaping down
Let him descend who so much pain perceives;
There let him raging die who raging lives.
from The Task, Book VI: The Winter Walk at Noon
© William Cowper
(excerpt)
Thus heav’n-ward all things tend. For all were once
Domestic Violence
© Eavan Boland
It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk
Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans.
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.
The Reef
© Aldous Huxley
My green aquarium of phantom fish,
Goggling in on me through the misty panes;
My rotting leaves and fields spongy with rains;
My few clear quiet autumn days--I wish
Paradise Lost : Book X.
© John Milton
Mean while the heinous and despiteful act
Of Satan, done in Paradise; and how
Paradise Lost: Book I (1674)
© Patrick Kavanagh
So spake th' Apostate Angel, though in pain,
Vaunting aloud, but rackt with deep despare:
And him thus answer'd soon his bold Compeer.
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
© Patrick Kavanagh
Fairfax, whose name in arms through Europe rings
Filling each mouth with envy, or with praise,
The Bloody Sire
© Robinson Jeffers
It is not bad. Let them play.
Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane
Speak his prodigious blasphemies.
It is not bad, it is high time,
Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.
Naucratia; Or Naval Dominion. Part III.
© Henry James Pye
Arm'd in her cause, on Chalgrave's fatal plain,
Where sorrowing Freedom mourns her Hambden slain,
Say, shall the moralizing bard presume
From his proud hearse to tear one warlike plume,
Because a Cæsar or a Cromwell wore
An impious wreath, wet with their country's gore?
Idylls of the King: The Last Tournament
© Alfred Tennyson
To whom the King, "Peace to thine eagle-borne
Dead nestling, and this honour after death,
Following thy will! but, O my Queen, I muse
Why ye not wear on arm, or neck, or zone
Those diamonds that I rescued from the tarn,
And Lancelot won, methought, for thee to wear."
Hannah
© Thomas Parnell
Then Seek ye Subject & its song be mine
Whose numbers next in Sacred story shine;
Go brightly-working thought, prepard to fly
Above ye page on hov'ring pinnions ly,
& beat with stronger force to make thee rise
Where beautious Hannah meets ye searching eyes.
Look to the Future
© Ruth Stone
To you born into violence,
the wars of the red ant are nothing;
you, in the heart of the eruption.
