In the dialect Burns uses, “gin” means “if” and “ain” means “own,” but those other words, well, they’ll just have to speak for themselves. While the dirty version of the same stanza reads like this: The traditional verse of one of the stanzas is like this: You may know that we sing the lyrics to his poem Auld Lang Syne every New Year’s Eve, and that his poem, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, is the children’s song misinterpreted by Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye-but you probably didn’t know it has a more explicit version. But Burns is probably best known by students as that poet who wrote in that weird Scots dialect you can’t really understand. This trailblazer of the Romantic Movement is also the national poet of Scotland, and is even known as “The Bard” in his native land (take that Shakespeare!). Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.īefore, behind, between, above, below.

That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.īy this these angels from an evil sprite, Unpin that ‘spangled’ breastplate which you wear, Off with that girdle, like heaven’s come glistering, Is tired with standing though they never fight. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,

Maybe his early experiences helped him when writing these eloquently cheeky lines from To His Mistress Going to Bed:Ĭome, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Paul’s Cathedral in London, he spent much of his early years as an educated womanizer. Though he became an Anglican priest in 1615 and was later appointed Dean of St. John Donneĭonne is considered to be the most prominent member of the Metaphysical poets, a group of seventeenth century British lyricists who used complex metaphors called “conceits” in sonnets and poems about topics like love or religion. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the poem, which was not published during Eliot’s lifetime, as the first use of the word “bullsh*t.” It ends with the following stanza:Īnd when thyself with silver foot shalt passĪmong the Theories scattered on the grassĪnd then for Christ’s sake stick them up your ass. But in his early years he wrote a series of scatological limericks including the racist caricature of a well-endowed ruler named “King Bolo.” One of the stanzas reads:Īnother example of Eliot’s latent dirty verse is in his poem The Triumph of Bullsh*t. Alfred Prufrock being two of his most famous, along with the ending of The Hollow Men, which was influenced by Dante and his Divine Comedy). Eliot had a reputation for being a stodgy poet, but he’s one of the most well-known Modernists and responsible for some of the most widely read poems in the English language ( The Waste Land and The Love Song of J.

The Erotic Poems by Ovid