Famous Atmosphere Poems by Famous Poets

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

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In Memoriam Mae Noblitt

by A R Ammons
 This is just a place:
we go around, distanced, 
yearly in a star's

atmosphere, turning 
daily into and out of 
direct light and

slanting through the 
quadrant seasons: deep 
space begins at our

heels, nearly rousing 
us loose: we look up 
or out so high, sight's

silk almost draws us away:
this is just a place:
currents worry themselves

coiled and free in airs 
and oceans: water...Read more of this...

Commandeering

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 Our hero was a Tommy with a conscience free from care, 
And such an open countenance that when he breathed the air 
He mopped up all the atmosphere -- so little went to spare 
You could hardly say he breathed, he "commandeered" it. 
For nowadays you'll notice when a man is "on the make", 
And other people's property is...Read more of this...

We Two—How Long We were Fool'd

by Walt Whitman
 WE two—how long we were fool’d! 
Now transmuted, we swiftly escape, as Nature escapes; 
We are Nature—long have we been absent, but now we return; 
We become plants, leaves, foliage, roots, bark; 
We are bedded in the ground—we are rocks;
We are oaks—we grow in the openings side by side; 
We browse—we are two among the wild herds, spontaneous as...Read more of this...

Scented Herbage of My Breast

by Walt Whitman
 SCENTED herbage of my breast, 
Leaves from you I yield, I write, to be perused best afterwards, 
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves, growing up above me, above death, 
Perennial roots, tall leaves—O the winter shall not freeze you, delicate leaves, 
Every year shall you bloom again—out from where you retired, you shall emerge again;
O I do not know whether many, passing by,...Read more of this...

224. Epistle to Hugh Parker

by Robert Burns
 IN this strange land, this uncouth clime,
A land unknown to prose or rhyme;
Where words ne’er cross’t the Muse’s heckles,
Nor limpit in poetic shackles:
A land that Prose did never view it,
Except when drunk he stacher’t thro’ it;
Here, ambush’d by the chimla cheek,
Hid in an atmosphere of reek,
I hear a wheel thrum i’ the neuk,
I hear it—for in vain I leuk.
The...Read more of this...

Evening in a Sugar Orchard

by Robert Frost
 From where I lingered in a lull in march
outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
I called the fireman with a careful voice
And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:
'O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.'
I thought a few might tangle, as they did,
Among bare maple boughs, and in the...Read more of this...

Borderland

by Henry Lawson
 I am back from up the country -- very sorry that I went -- 
Seeking for the Southern poets' land whereon to pitch my tent; 
I have lost a lot of idols, which were broken on the track -- 
Burnt a lot of fancy verses, and I'm glad that I am back. 
Further out may be the pleasant scenes...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

The Humble-Bee

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
BURLY dozing humble-bee  
Where thou art is clime for me. 
Let them sail for Porto Rique  
Far-off heats through seas to seek; 
I will follow thee alone 5 
Thou animated torrid-zone! 
Zigzag steerer desert cheerer  
Let me chase thy waving lines; 
Keep me nearer me thy hearer  
Singing over shrubs and vines. 10 

Insect lover of...Read more of this...

Mystic Trumpeter The

by Walt Whitman
 1
HARK! some wild trumpeter—some strange musician, 
Hovering unseen in air, vibrates capricious tunes to-night. 

I hear thee, trumpeter—listening, alert, I catch thy notes, 
Now pouring, whirling like a tempest round me, 
Now low, subdued—now in the distance lost.

2
Come nearer, bodiless one—haply, in thee resounds 
Some dead composer—haply thy pensive life 
Was fill’d with aspirations high—unform’d ideals, 
Waves, oceans musical,...Read more of this...

Lyonnesse

by Sylvia Plath
 No use whistling for Lyonnesse! 
Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. 
Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- 

There's where it sunk. 
The blue, green, 
Gray, indeterminate gilt 

Sea of his eyes washing over it 
And a round bubble 
Popping upward from the mouths of bells 

People and cows. 
The Lyonians had always thought 
Heaven would...Read more of this...

The Fitful Alternations Of The Rain

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 The fitful alternations of the rain,
When the chill wind, languid as with pain
Of its own heavy moisture, here and there
Drives through the gray and beamless atmosphere...Read more of this...

The Three Kings

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Three Kings came riding from far away,
Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar;
Three Wise Men out of the East were they,
And they travelled by night and they slept by day,
For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star. 

The star was so beautiful, large, and clear,
That all the other stars of the sky
Became a white mist in the atmosphere,
And by this they...Read more of this...

Sonnet XIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XIII. Io mi rivolgo indietro a ciascun passo. ON QUITTING LAURA.  With weary frame which painfully I bear,I look behind me at each onward pace,And then take comfort from your native air,Which following fans my melancholy face;[Pg 13]The far way, my frail life, the cherish'd fairWhom...Read more of this...

Laughter and Tears IX

by Kahlil Gibran
 As the Sun withdrew his rays from the garden, and the moon threw cushioned beams upon the flowers, I sat under the trees pondering upon the phenomena of the atmosphere, looking through the branches at the strewn stars which glittered like chips of silver upon a blue carpet; and I could hear from a distance the agitated murmur of...Read more of this...

Sadness

by Donald Justice
 1
Dear ghosts, dear presences, O my dear parents,
Why were you so sad on porches, whispering?
What great melancholies were loosed among our swings!
As before a storm one hears the leaves whispering
And marks each small change in the atmosphere,
So was it then to overhear and to fear.

2
But all things then were oracle and secret.
Remember the night when, lost, returning, we turned...Read more of this...

Speakin' O' Christmas

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Breezes blowin' middlin' brisk,
Snow-flakes thro' the air a-whisk,
Fallin' kind o' soft an' light,
Not enough to make things white,
But jest sorter siftin' down
So 's to cover up the brown
Of the dark world's rugged ways
'N' make things look like holidays.
Not smoothed over, but jest specked,
Sorter strainin' fur effect,
An' not quite a-gittin' through
What it started in to do.
Mercy sakes! it does seem *****
Christmas...Read more of this...

The Recollection

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
NOW the last day of many days, 
All beautiful and bright as thou, 
The loveliest and the last, is dead: 
Rise, Memory, and write its praise! 
Up¡ªto thy wonted work! come, trace 5 
The epitaph of glory fled, 
For now the earth has changed its face, 
A frown is on the heaven's brow. 

We wander'd to the Pine Forest 
That...Read more of this...

Bohemia

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Bohemia, o'er thy unatlassed borders 
How many cross, with half-reluctant feet, 
And unformed fears of dangers and disorders, 
To find delights, more wholesome and more sweet 
Than ever yet were known to the "elite."

Herein can dwell no pretence and no seeming; 
No stilted pride thrives in this atmosphere, 
Which stimulates a tendency to dreaming. 
The shores of the ideal...Read more of this...

Atmosphere

by Robert Frost
 Inscription for a Garden Wall

Winds blow the open grassy places bleak;
But where this old wall burns a sunny cheek,
They eddy over it too toppling weak
To blow the earth or anything self-clear;
Moisture and color and odor thicken here.
The hours of daylight gather atmosphere....Read more of this...

To interrupt His Yellow Plan

by Emily Dickinson
 To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
Caprices of the Atmosphere --
And even when the Snow

Heaves Balls of Specks, like Vicious Boy
Directly in His Eye --
Does not so much as turn His Head
Busy with Majesty --

'Tis His to stimulate the Earth --
And magnetize the Sea --
And bind Astronomy, in place,
Yet Any passing by

Would deem Ourselves -- the busier
As...Read more of this...

A Song of the Republic

by Henry Lawson
 Sons of the South, awake! arise! 
Sons of the South, and do. 
Banish from under your bonny skies 
Those old-world errors and wrongs and lies. 
Making a hell in a Paradise 
That belongs to your sons and you. 


Sons of the South, make choice between 
(Sons of the South, choose true), 
The Land of Morn and the Land of...Read more of this...

The City Bushman

by Henry Lawson
 It was pleasant up the country, City Bushman, where you went, 
For you sought the greener patches and you travelled like a gent; 
And you curse the trams and buses and the turmoil and the push, 
Though you know the squalid city needn't keep you from the bush; 
But we lately heard you singing of the `plains where shade...Read more of this...

Rose Pogonias

by Robert Frost
 A SATURATED meadow,
Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
Than the trees around were tall;
Where winds were quite excluded,
And the air was stifling sweet
With the breath of many flowers, --
A temple of the hear.

There we bowed us in the burning,
As the sun's right worship is,
To pick where none could miss them
A thousand orchises;
For though the grass was scattered,
yet every second spear
Seemed...Read more of this...

Dream Song 81: Op. posth. no. 4

by John Berryman
 He loom' so cagey he say 'Leema beans'
and measured his intake to the atmosphere
of that fairly stable country.
His ear hurt. Left. The rock-cliffs, a mite sheer
at his age, in these places.
Scrubbing out his fear,-”

the knowledge that they will take off your hands,
both hands; as well as your both feet, & likewise
both eyes,
might be discouraging to a bloddy hero
Also you...Read more of this...

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