Famous Afoot Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Afoot poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous afoot poems. These examples illustrate what a famous afoot poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Sidney Lanier
I knowed a man, which he lived in Jones,
Which Jones is a county of red hills and stones,
And he lived pretty much by gittin' of loans,
And his mules was nuthin' but skin and bones,
And his hogs was flat as his corn-bread pones,
And he had 'bout a thousand acres o' land.
This man -- which...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Gawaine, Gawaine, what look ye for to see,
So far beyond the faint edge of the world?
D’ye look to see the lady Vivian,
Pursued by divers ominous vile demons
That have another king more fierce than ours?
Or think ye that if ye look far enough
And hard enough into the feathery west
Ye’ll have a glimmer of the...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE working girls in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Each morning as I move through this river of young-
woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all
going, so many with a peach bloom of young years
on them and...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver Henderson, ten years old.
The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in all ages. It shows how the mammoth forces may be either friends or enemies of the struggle for peace. It shows how the dream of peace is unconquerable and eternal.
I
Peace-of-the-Heart, my own for long,
Whose shining...Read more of this...
by
John Drinkwater
Persuasion
I At any moment love unheralded
Comes, and is king. Then as, with a fall
Of frost, the buds upon the hawthorn spread
Are withered in untimely burial,
So love, occasion gone, his crown puts by,
And as a beggar walks unfriended ways,
With but remembered beauty to defy
The frozen sorrows of unsceptred days.
Or in that later travelling he comes
Upon a bleak oblivion, and tells
Himself, again,...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Good Father!… ’Twas an eve in middle June,
And war was waged anew
By great Napoleon, who for years had strewn
Men’s bones all Europe through.
Three nights ere this, with columned corps he’d crossed
The Sambre at Charleroi,
To move on Brussels, where the English host
Dallied in Parc and Bois.
The yestertide we’d heard the gloomy gun
Growl through...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,
its white flag waving over everything,
the landscape vanished,
not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,
and beyond these windows
the government buildings smothered,
schools and libraries buried, the post office lost
under the noiseless drift,
the paths of trains softly blocked,
the world fallen under this falling.
In a while I will put on some boots
and step out...Read more of this...
by
Alan Seeger
There is a power whose inspiration fills
Nature's fair fabric, sun- and star-inwrought,
Like airy dew ere any drop distils,
Like perfume in the laden flower, like aught
Unseen which interfused throughout the whole
Becomes its quickening pulse and principle and soul.
Now when, the drift of old desire renewing,
Warm tides flow northward over valley and field,
When...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The Song of Mowgli -- I, Mowgli, am singing. Let
the jungle listen to the things I have done.
Shere Khan said he would kill -- would kill! At the
gates in the twilight he would kill Mowgli, the
Frog!
He ate and he drank. Drink deep, Shere Khan, for
when wilt thou drink again? Sleep and dream
of the kill.
I...Read more of this...
by
George Meredith
WHEN by Zeus relenting the mandate was revoked,
Sentencing to exile the bright Sun-God,
Mindful were the ploughmen of who the steer had yoked,
Who: and what a track show'd the upturn'd sod!
Mindful were the shepherds, as now the noon severe
Bent a burning eyebrow to brown evetide,
How the rustic flute drew the silver...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we...Read more of this...
by
Constantine P Cavafy
It goes on being Alexandria still. Just walk a bit
along the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome
and you'll see palaces and monuments that will amaze you.
Whatever war-damage it's suffered,
however much smaller it's become,
it's still a wonderful city.
And then, what with excursions and books
and various kinds of study, time does go by.
In the evenings we meet on the sea...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
NAPOLEON shifted,
Restless in the old sarcophagus
And murmured to a watchguard:
"Who goes there?"
"Twenty-one million men,
Soldiers, armies, guns,
Twenty-one million
Afoot, horseback,
In the air,
Under the sea."
And Napoleon turned to his sleep:
"It is not my world answering;
It is some dreamer who knows not
The world I marched in
From Calais to Moscow."
And he slept on
In the old sarcophagus
While the aeroplanes
Droned their motors
Between Napoleon's mausoleum
And the cool...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
A certain poet in outlandish clothes
Gathered a crowd in some Byzantine lane,
Talked1 of his country and its people, sang
To some stringed instrument none there had seen,
A wall behind his back, over his head
A latticed window. His glance went up at time
As though one listened there, and his voice sank
Or let its meaning mix into the strings.
Maeve the great queen...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
I had over prepared the event,
that much was ominous.
With middle-ageing care
I had laid out just the right books.
I had almost turned down the pages.
Beauty is so rare a thing.
So few drink of my fountain.
So much barren regret,
So many hours wasted!
And now I watch, from the window,
the rain, the wandering busses.
"Their little cosmos is shaken" -
the air is alive...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Forty years back, when much had place
That since has perished out of mind,
I heard that voice and saw that face.
He spoke as one afoot will wind
A morning horn ere men awake;
His note was trenchant, turning kind.
He was one of those whose wit can shake
And riddle to the very core
The counterfiets that Time will...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
I like the old house tolerably well,
Where I must dwell
Like a familiar gnome;
And yet I never shall feel quite at home.
I love to roam.
Day after day I loiter and explore
From door to door;
So many treasures lure
The curious mind. What histories obscure
They must immure!
I hardly know which room I care...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the...Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
ACT I. SC. I
Enter Teryth from riding, Winefred following.
T. WHAT is it, Gwen, my girl? why do you hover and haunt me?
W. You came by Caerwys, sir?
T. I came by Caerwys.
W. There
Some messenger there might have met you from my uncle.
T. Your uncle met the messenger—met me; and this the message:
Lord Beuno comes to-night.
W....Read more of this...
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