Poetry & Analysis
Selected Poems
Featured PoemsCaptives
Some came in chains
Unrepentent but tired.
Too tired but to stumble.
Thinking and hating were finished
Thinking and fighting were finished
Retreating and hoping were finished.
Cures thus a long campaign,
Making death easy.
Summary
Captives is a war poem about exhaustion. The prisoners are not described with drama. They are simply worn out beyond anger, hope, or resistance.
Tone and Mood
The tone is cold and stripped down. The mood is bleak because the poem presents defeat as a place where even strong emotions have been used up.
Source
Rights
Rights: Public domain in the U.S.; published in 1923.
Champs d’Honneur
Soldiers never do die well;
Crosses mark the places—
Wooden crosses where they fell,
Stuck above their faces.
Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—
All the world roars red and black;
Soldiers smother in a ditch,
Choking through the whole attack.
Summary
This is one of Hemingway’s most direct war poems. It refuses the polished idea of heroic death and gives the reader a painful physical picture instead.
Meaning
Champs d’Honneur means “fields of honor,” but the poem turns that phrase against itself. The battlefield is not noble here. It is wooden crosses, choking bodies, and violent color.
Why It Still Matters
For readers searching for famous Ernest Hemingway poems with meaning, this poem is essential because it shows Hemingway’s anti-romantic view of war in only a few lines.
Source
Rights
Rights: Public domain in the U.S.; published in 1923.
Riparto d’Assalto
Drummed their boots on the camion floor,
Hob-nailed boots on the camion floor.
Sergeants stiff,
Corporals sore.
Lieutenant thought of a Mestre whore—
Warm and soft and sleepy whore,
Cozy, warm and lovely whore;
Damned cold, bitter, rotten ride,
Winding road up the Grappa side.
Arditi on benches stiff and cold,
Pride of their country stiff and cold,
Bristly faces, dirty hides—
Infantry marches, Arditi rides.
Grey, cold, bitter, sullen ride—
To splintered pines on the Grappa side
At Asalone, where the truck-load died.
Summary
This poem follows soldiers in a cold military truck ride toward death. The repeated sounds make the movement feel heavy and unavoidable.
Meaning
Riparto d’Assalto is rough, bitter, and deliberately unsentimental. It contrasts ordinary physical desire with the cold machinery of war. The final line turns the ride into a remembered disaster.
Source
Rights
Rights: Public domain in the U.S.; published in 1923.
Montparnasse
There are never any suicides in the quarter among people one knows
No successful suicides.
A Chinese boy kills himself and is dead.
(they continue to place his mail in the letter rack at the Dome)
A Norwegian boy kills himself and is dead.
(no one knows where the other Norwegian boy has gone)
They find a model dead
alone in bed and very dead.
(it made almost unbearable trouble for the concierge)
Sweet oil, the white of eggs, mustard and water, soap suds
and stomach pumps rescue the people one knows.
Every afternoon the people one knows can be found at the café.
Summary
Montparnasse looks at café society, death, and emotional distance. It draws a cold line between “people one knows” and people who are treated almost like background details.
Meaning
The poem is not sentimental. Its power comes from the flatness of the voice. Hemingway shows how social circles can protect themselves from real grief by turning other people’s deaths into inconvenience or gossip.
Source
Rights
Rights: Public domain in the U.S.; published in 1923.
Along With Youth
A porcupine skin,
Stiff with bad tanning,
It must have ended somewhere.
Stuffed horned owl
Pompous
Yellow eyed;
Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig
Sooted with dust.
Piles of old magazines,
Drawers of boy’s letters
And the line of love
They must have ended somewhere.
Yesterday’s Tribune is gone
Along with youth
And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach
The year of the big storm
When the hotel burned down
At Seney, Michigan.
Summary
This poem moves through old objects, letters, newspapers, and memories. Everything points toward time passing and youth disappearing quietly.
Meaning
Along With Youth is one of the most reflective Ernest Hemingway poems. It does not explain loss directly. Instead, it lets objects carry the feeling: old magazines, a canoe, a burned hotel, and a vanished time.
Main Themes
Youth, memory, time, loss, personal history, and the emotional weight of ordinary objects.
Source
Rights
Rights: Public domain in the U.S.; published in 1923.