Let Us Have Madness Poem by Kenneth Patchen

Let Us Have Madness

Rating: 3.2


Let us have madness openly.
O men Of my generation.
Let us follow
The footsteps of this slaughtered age:
See it trail across Time's dim land
Into the closed house of eternity
With the noise that dying has,
With the face that dead things wear--
nor ever say
We wanted more; we looked to find
An open door, an utter deed of love,
Transforming day's evil darkness;
but We found extended hell and fog Upon the earth,
and within the head
A rotting bog of lean huge graves.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Terry Craddock 12 December 2016

too many listened, too many made madness openly, time to stop the rot, the wars, the slaughter; time to make time for peace and love to sow restoration and regeneration

4 2 Reply
Dedrick Estiltaph 08 September 2007

it seems my head explodes. private sledgehammer, you haven't a bash in you. heavy and loaded with grief, good, the way angels breathe. the way it ought to be. illegible, scrawled with disbelief. in come the detectives. fit with bow-tie. they use the school, search for clues. this could be the work madmen... this could be the work of genius, this could be no work at all. Simple faucet drip to someone inside. In shirt-sleeve, pant-suit tieing his life around her finger. Slowly, the way the noose does.

2 3 Reply
Daniel Brick 12 December 2016

Since our societies are greedy and justify ambition, since our governments see war as a simple solution to complex problems, since our morality accept human sacrifice to our secular gods in the form of massive battlefield losses, we are living in a comprehensive madness. So why continue to extol our civilization as one of reason and our behavior as rational? Let us have madness and stop deceiving ourselves. Three images conclude the poem: Hell is the suffering we have unleashed on everyone, Fog is our intellectual and moral confusion, and Graves symbolize our collective Death Wish. Poetry, in its highest manifestation, is truth-telling. Will this truth free us?

2 1 Reply
Brian Jani 05 May 2014

Bravo, nice poem

2 0 Reply
Brian Jani 05 May 2014

Nice poem.well written

2 0 Reply
Ray Burleigh 26 October 2020

Let us be honest. A new voice, a distinct voice is very hard to find. We start to sound like each other after a while. Patchen did not. Nobody sounded like patchen. He was Whitman. He was Blake. He was John Donne.

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Deepak Kumar Pattanayak 06 September 2020

The truth of today's generation spelt out here very candidly for how we are sacrificing love and peace for the sake of violence, very well scripted 10+++++

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Khairul Ahsan 05 September 2020

'We wanted more; we looked to find An open door, an utter deed of love' - that's of course, no madness! The poem's selection as the 'Modern Poem of the Day' is a well deserved honour.

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Mahtab Bangalee 05 September 2020

We wanted more; we looked to find An open door, an utter deed of love, Transforming day's evIl darkness; .....our excess demands bring to us ultra destruction; we all shall be uprooted one day for our greed; human indomitable greed will destroy this beautiful universe; Let us have madness- I think, actually this is an ironical poem; the poet, so perfectly crafted this poem

0 0 Reply
M Asim Nehal 05 September 2020

As we grow we feel the same way, fantastic imageries and fine flow.,

0 0 Reply
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