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Famous Wife Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Crowley, Aleister
...Of ardour, but by image of my brow
Stronger than sense, you are even here and now
Miner, utterly mine, my sister and my wife,
Mother of my children, mistress of my life!

O wild swan winging through the morning mist!
The thousand thousand kisses that we kissed, 
The infinite device our love devised
If by some chance its truth might be surprised,
Are these all past? Are these to come? Believe me,
There is no parting; they can never leave me.
I have built you up into my hea...Read more of this...



by Dickinson, Emily
...>

732

She rose to His Requirement—dropt
The Playthings of Her Life
To take the honorable Work
Of Woman, and of Wife—

If ought She missed in Her new Day,
Of Amplitude, or Awe—
Or first Prospective—Or the Gold
In using, wear away,

It lay unmentioned—as the Sea
Develop Pearl, and Weed,
But only to Himself—be known
The Fathoms they abide—

754

My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
In Corners—till a Day
The Owner passed—identified—
And carried Me away—

An...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...t else would be.   Dread not their taunts, my little life!  I am thy father's wedded wife;  And underneath the spreading tree  We two will live in honesty.  If his sweet boy he could forsake,  With me he never would have stay'd:  From him no harm my babe can take,  But he, poor man! is wretched made,  And every day we two will pray &nbs...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...more; 
Or this, or worse, leave not the faithful side 
That gave thee being, still shades thee, and protects. 
The wife, where danger or dishonour lurks, 
Safest and seemliest by her husband stays, 
Who guards her, or with her the worst endures. 
To whom the virgin majesty of Eve, 
As one who loves, and some unkindness meets, 
With sweet austere composure thus replied. 
Offspring of Heaven and Earth, and all Earth's Lord! 
That such an enemy we have, who seeks 
O...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...s of the thought of Death—the great spheres Time and Space? 
Prophetic joys of better, loftier love’s ideals—the Divine Wife—the sweet,
 eternal, perfect Comrade? 
Joys all thine own, undying one—joys worthy thee, O Soul.

16
O, while I live, to be the ruler of life—not a slave, 
To meet life as a powerful conqueror, 
No fumes—no ennui—no more complaints, or scornful criticisms. 

O me repellent and ugly! 
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, pro...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...A city clerk, but gently born and bred;
His wife, an unknown artist's orphan child--
One babe was theirs, a Margaret, three years old:
They, thinking that her clear germander eye
Droopt in the giant-factoried city-gloom,
Came, with a month's leave given them, to the sea:
For which his gains were dock'd, however small:
Small were his gains, and hard his work; besides,
Their slender household fortunes (...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...ing a great scroll upward toward the sky,
Long enough for recording all our names on.—
I think I’ll just call up my wife and tell her
I’m here—so far—and starting on again.
I’ll call her softly so that if she’s wise
And gone to sleep, she needn’t wake to answer.”
Three times he barely stirred the bell, then listened.
“Why, Lett, still up? Lett, I’m at Cole’s. I’m late.
I called you up to say Good-night from here
Before I went to say Good-morning there....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ds out the skein, while the elder sister winds it off in a
 ball, and stops now and then for the knots; 
The one-year wife is recovering and happy, having a week ago borne her first
 child;
The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine, or in the
 factory or mill; 
The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and
 pains are advancing; 
The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer—the reporter’s lead
 flies swiftly over the note-boo...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ornaments, inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces, 
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair. 

No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession; 
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes, 
Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors,
In the cars of rail-roads, in steamboats, in the public assembly, 
Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in the bed-room, everywhere, 
Sm...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...man to her shame,
And once I looked on a sworn maid
That was wed to the Holy Name.

"And once I took my neighbour's wife,
That was bound to an eastland man,
In the starkness of my evil youth,
Before my griefs began.

"People, if you have any prayers,
Say prayers for me:
And lay me under a Christian stone
In that lost land I thought my own,
To wait till the holy horn is blown,
And all poor men are free."

Then Eldred of the idle farm
Leaned on his ancient sword,
As...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...all necromancy, and Moses a prophet inferior only to Christ and Mohammed. Zuleika is the Persian name of Potiphar's wife; and her amour with Joseph constitutes one of the finest poems in their language. It is, therefore, no violation of costume to put the names of Cain, or Noah, into the mouth of a Moslem. 

(31) Paswan Oglou, the rebel of Widdin; who, for the last years of his life, set the whole power of the Porte at defiance. 

(32) "Horse-tail," the standa...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...feats have left  To poor old Simon Lee!  He has no son, he has no child,  His wife, an aged woman,  Lives with him, near the waterfall,  Upon the village common.   And he is lean and he is sick,  His dwindled body's half awry,  His ancles they are swoln and thick;  His legs are thin and dry.  When he was young he little knew&nb...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...where duty lies,
Most loved and loving: and they quickly tire
Of Florence, that she one day more denies
The embrace of wife and son, of sister or sire. 

18
Where San Miniato's convent from the sun
At forenoon overlooks the city of flowers
I sat, and gazing on her domes and towers
Call'd up her famous children one by one:
And three who all the rest had far outdone,
Mild Giotto first, who stole the morning hours,
I saw, and god-like Buonarroti's powers,
And Dante, gravest...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ortenight:
Now help us, lord, since it lies in thy might.

"I, wretched wight, that weep and waile thus,
Was whilom wife to king Capaneus,
That starf* at Thebes, cursed be that day: *died 
And alle we that be in this array,
And maken all this lamentatioun,
We losten all our husbands at that town,
While that the siege thereabouten lay.
And yet the olde Creon, wellaway!
That lord is now of Thebes the city,
Fulfilled of ire and of iniquity,
He for despite, and for his...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...s shade in danger part
     The lineage of the Bleeding Heart!
     Hear my blunt speech: grant me this maid
     To wife, thy counsel to mine aid;
     To Douglas, leagued with Roderick Dhu,
     Will friends and allies flock enow;
     Like cause of doubt, distrust, and grief,
     Will bind to us each Western Chief
     When the loud pipes my bridal tell,
     The Links of Forth shall hear the knell,
     The guards shall start in Stirling's porch;
     And when...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...all a summer's day 
Gave his broad lawns until the set of sun 
Up to the people: thither flocked at noon 
His tenants, wife and child, and thither half 
The neighbouring borough with their Institute 
Of which he was the patron. I was there 
From college, visiting the son,--the son 
A Walter too,--with others of our set, 
Five others: we were seven at Vivian-place. 

And me that morning Walter showed the house, 
Greek, set with busts: from vases in the hall 
Flowers o...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...vine,' but like the unscholarlike Mr. Southey. The whole action passes on the outside of heaven; and Chaucer's 'Wife of Bath,' Pulci's 'Morgante Maggiore,' Swift's 'Tale of a Tub,' and the other
works above referred to, are cases in point of the freedom with which saints, &c. may be permitted to converse in works not intended to be serious. 

Q.R. 

*** Mr. Southey being, as he says, a good Christian and vindictive, threatens, I understand, a reply...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...hem on the wall 
Hung other English faces-all 
Part of the pattern of English life—
General Sir Charles, and his pretty wife, 
Admirals, Lords-Lieutenant of Shires, 
Men who were served by these footmen's sires 
At their great parties-none of them knowing 
How soon or late they would all be going 
In plainer dress to a sterner strife- 
Another pattern of English life.

I went up the stairs between them all,
Strange and frightened and shy and small,
And as I entered the ba...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
..., as for a fall.
I find myself again. I am no shadow
Though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife.
The city waits and aches. The little grasses
Crack through stone, and they are green with life....Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...
Why don't you come to lull into quiet
This wounded conscience of mine?

You possess other worries
You have another wife
And, looking into my dry eyes,
St. Petersburg spring has arrived.

With harsh cough and with evening fever
She will punish and she will kill.
Under the smoke on the river
Nieva's ice is no longer still.



x x x

God is unkind to gardeners and reapers.
Slanted rain coils and falls from up high
And the wide raincoats ...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things