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Famous Pollution Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Crane, Stephen
...lpitings
Of the familiar false and true?
Is this God?
Where, then, is hell?
Show me some bastard mushroom
Sprung from a pollution of blood.
It is better.

Where is God?...Read more of this...



by Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...s askance,
Fugitives, men that are true!"



This was thy praise or thy blame
From bondsman or freeman--to be
Pure from pollution of slaves,
Clean of their sins, and thy name
Bloodless, innocent, free;
Now if thou be not, thy waves
Wash not from off thee thy shame.



Freeman he is not, but slave,
Whoso in fear for the State
Cries for surety of blood,
Help of gibbet and grave;
Neither is any land great
Whom, in her fear-stricken mood,
These things only can save.



Lo...Read more of this...

by Key, Francis Scott
...the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul foot-steps' pollution,
No refuge could save the hireling and slave,
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave;
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.

O! thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov'd home, and the war's desolation,
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-r...Read more of this...

by Gregory, Rg
...specially if washington lost its temper
and screamed christ lake erie
i don’t even know what to do
with my own garbage

pollution is just one of those things

go on lake erie
do it tonight

(c) drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead

(i)
isn't the next one
easter egg

  i don't want to live any more in an old way

yes it is

  to be a socialist wearing capitalism's cap
  a teacher in the shadow of a dead headmaster
  a tree using somebody else's old sap

  i...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...my lord the King, 
My own true lord! how dare I call him mine? 
The shadow of another cleaves to me, 
And makes me one pollution: he, the King, 
Called me polluted: shall I kill myself? 
What help in that? I cannot kill my sin, 
If soul be soul; nor can I kill my shame; 
No, nor by living can I live it down. 
The days will grow to weeks, the weeks to months 
The months will add themselves and make the years, 
The years will roll into the centuries, 
And mine will ever be...Read more of this...



by Watts, Isaac
...all away,
Though black as hell before;
Our sins shall sink beneath the sea,
And shall be found no more.

And, lest pollution should o'erspread
Our inward powers again,
His Spirit shall bedew our souls,
Like purifying rain.]

Our heart, that flinty, stubborn thing,
That terrors cannot move,
That fears no threat'nings of his wrath,
Shall be dissolved by love.

Or he can take the flint away
That would not be refined;
And from the treasures of his grace
Bestow a soft...Read more of this...

by Southey, Robert
...many a healthful herb
Bends o'er its course and drinks the vital wave:
But passing on amid the haunts of man,
It finds pollution there, and rolls from thence
A tainted tide. Seek'st thou for HAPPINESS?
Go Stranger, sojourn in the woodland cot
Of INNOCENCE, and thou shalt find her there....Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...ivering through aereal gold,
As I now behold them here,
Would imagine not they were
Sepulchres, where human forms,
Like pollution-nourished worms,
To the corpse of greatness cling,
Murdered, and now mouldering:
But if Freedom should awake
In her omnipotence and shake
From the Celtic Anarch's hold
All the keys of dungeons cold,
Where a hundred cities lie
Chained like thee, ingloriously,
Thou and all thy sister band
Might adorn this sunny land,
Twining memories of old time
With...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.

Unbodied presences, the packed
Pollution and remorse of Time,
Slipped from oblivion re-enact
The horrors of unhousehold crime.

Some men would quell the thing with prayer
Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,
Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair
Or burst the locked forbidden door.

Some have seen corpses long interred
Escape from hallowing control,
Pale charnel forms - nay e...Read more of this...

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...at these see:
And, by the moral of his place,
Hint summits of heroic grace;
Man in these crags a fastness find
To fight pollution of the mind;
In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong,
Adhere like this foundation strong,
The insanity of towns to stem
With simpleness for stratagem.
But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in clowns the mountain-folk,
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,—
Sink, O mountain! in the swamp,
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lap!
Perish like leaves the h...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...t first among the priests dissention springs, 
Men who attend the altar, and should most 
Endeavour peace: their strife pollution brings 
Upon the temple itself: at last they seise 
The scepter, and regard not David's sons; 
Then lose it to a stranger, that the true 
Anointed King Messiah might be born 
Barred of his right; yet at his birth a star, 
Unseen before in Heaven, proclaims him come; 
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire 
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...caught in the talons of a bird

or the claws of an animal.

 Yes, it is even all right for a trout to be killed by pollution,

to die in a river of suffocating human excrement.

 There are trout that die of old age and their white beards

flow to the sea.

 All these things are in the natural order of death, but for

a trout to die from a drink of port wine, that is another thing.

 No mention of it in "The treatyse of fysshynge wyth an

angle," in the Boke o...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...

In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion 25 
By guardian angels led  
Safe from temptation safe from sin's pollution  
She lives whom we call dead  

Day after day we think what she is doing 
In those bright realms of air; 30 
Year after year her tender steps pursuing  
Behold her grown more fair. 

Thus do we walk with her and keep unbroken 
The bond which nature gives  
Thinking that our remembrance though unspoken 35 
May reach her where she liv...Read more of this...

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