Famous Bees Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Bees poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous bees poems. These examples illustrate what a famous bees poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
It's all I have to bring today --
This, and my heart beside --
This, and my heart, and all the fields --
And all the meadows wide --
Be sure you count -- should I forget
Some one the sum could tell --
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell....Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
LEGEND
Long ago Apollo called to Aristæus,
youngest of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees."
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees.
Happy Aristæus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free;
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
A swarm of bees in May
Is worth a load of hay;
A swarm of bees in June
Is worth a silver spoon;
A swarm of bees in July
Is not worth a fly....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The murmuring of Bees, has ceased
But murmuring of some
Posterior, prophetic,
Has simultaneous come.
The lower metres of the Year
When Nature's laugh is done
The Revelations of the Book
Whose Genesis was June.
Appropriate Creatures to her change
The Typic Mother sends
As Accent fades to interval
With separating Friends
Till what we speculate, has been
And thoughts we will not show
More intimate with us become
Than Persons, that we know....Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
(As Distinguished by an Italian Person of Quality)
I
Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare,
The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city-square;
Ah, such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!
II
Something to see, by Bacchus, something to hear, at least!
There, the whole day long, one's life is a...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Because I was content with these poor fields,
Low open meads, slender and sluggish streams,
And found a home in haunts which others scorned,
The partial wood-gods overpaid my love,
And granted me the freedom of their state,
And in their secret senate have prevailed
With the dear dangerous lords that rule our life,
Made moon and planets parties to their bond,
And pitying through my solitary...Read more of this...
by
Martin Armstrong
Late in March, when the days are growing longer
And sight of early green
Tells of the coming spring and suns grow stronger,
Round the pale willow-catkins there are seen
The year's first honey-bees
Stealing the nectar: and bee-masters know
This for the first sign of the honey-flow.
Then in the dark hillsides the Cherry-trees
Gleam white with loads of blossom where the gleams
Of piled snow lately hung,...Read more of this...
by
Helen Hunt Jackson
"O bees, sweet bees!" I said, "that nearest field
Is shining white with fragrant immortelles.
Fly swiftly there and drain those honey wells."
Then, spicy pines the sunny hive to shield,
I set, and patient for the autumn's yield
Of sweet I waited.
When the village bells
Rang frosty clear, and from their satin cells
The chestnuts leaped, rejoicing,...Read more of this...
by
Charles Simic
A New Version: 1980
What is that little black thing I see there
in the white?
Walt Whitman
One
Out of poverty
To begin again:
With the color of the bride
And that of blindness,
Touch what I can
Of the quick,
Speak and then wait,
As if this light
Will continue to linger
On the threshold.
All that is near,
I no longer give it a name.
Once a stone hard...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I. Ancestral Houses
Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.
Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
There is a flower that Bees prefer --
And Butterflies -- desire --
To gain the Purple Democrat
The Humming Bird -- aspire --
And Whatsoever Insect pass --
A Honey bear away
Proportioned to his several dearth
And her -- capacity --
Her face be rounder than the Moon
And ruddier than the Gown
Or Orchis in the Pasture --
Or Rhododendron -- worn --
She doth not wait for...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
WARBLE me now, for joy of Lilac-time,
Sort me, O tongue and lips, for Nature’s sake, and sweet life’s sake—and
death’s the same as life’s,
Souvenirs of earliest summer—birds’ eggs, and the first berries;
Gather the welcome signs, (as children, with pebbles, or stringing shells;)
Put in April and May—the hylas croaking in the ponds—the elastic air,
Bees, butterflies, the...Read more of this...
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
Here is the place; right over the hill
Runs the path I took;
You can see the gap in the old wall still,
And the stepping-stones in the shallow brook.
There is the house, with the gate red-barred,
And the poplars tall;
And the barn's brown length, and the cattle-yard,
And the white horns tossing above the wall.
There...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
"The Mother Hive"-- Actions and Reactions
A Farmer of the Augustan Age
Perused in Virgil's golden page
The story of the secret won
From Proteus by Cyrene's son--
How the dank sea-god showed the swain
Means to restore his hives again.
More briefly, how a slaughtered bull
Breeds honey by the bellyful.
The egregious rustic put to death
A bull by stopping of its breath,
Disposed the carcass in a...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
This Bauble was preferred of Bees --
By Butterflies admired
At Heavenly -- Hopeless Distances --
Was justified of Bird --
Did Noon -- enamel -- in Herself
Was Summer to a Score
Who only knew of Universe --
It had created Her....Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
In a dream I returned to the river of bees
Five orange trees by the bridge and
Beside two mills my house
Into whose courtyard a blind man followed
The goats and stood singing
Of what was older
Soon it will be fifteen years
He was old he will have fallen into his eyes
I took my eyes
A long way to the calenders
Room after room asking how...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Of Nature I shall have enough
When I have entered these
Entitled to a Bumble bee's
Familiarities....Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
v.6-15
C. M.
Deliverance from a tumult.
The Lord appears my helper now,
Nor is my faith afraid
What all the sons of earth can do,
Since heav'n affords its aid.
'Tis safer, Lord, to hope in thee,
And have my God my friend,
Than trust in men of high degree,
And on their truth depend.
Like bees, my foes beset me round,
A large and angry swarm;
But I shall...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Bees are Black, with Gilt Surcingles --
Buccaneers of Buzz.
Ride abroad in ostentation
And subsist on Fuzz.
Fuzz ordained -- not Fuzz contingent --
Marrows of the Hill.
Jugs -- a Universe's fracture
Could not jar or spill....Read more of this...
by
Elinor Wylie
Here's a wonderful thing,
A humming-bird's wing
In hammered gold,
And store well chosen
Of snowflakes frozen
In crystal cold.
Black onyx cherries
And mistletoe berries
Of chrysoprase,
Jade buds, tight shut,
All carven and cut
In intricate ways.
Here, if you please
Are little gilt bees
In amber drops
Which look like honey,
Translucent and sunny,
From clover-tops.
Here's an elfin...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
I
The dawn laughs out on orient hills
And dances with the diamond rills;
The ambrosial wind but faintly stirs
The silken, beaded gossamers;
In the wide valleys, lone and fair,
Lyrics are piped from limpid air,
And, far above, the pine trees free
Voice ancient lore of sky and sea.
Come, let us fill our hearts straightway
With...Read more of this...
by
Jean Ingelow
.
An empty sky, a world of heather,
Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom;
We two among them wading together,
Shaking out honey, treading perfume.
Crowds of bees are giddy with clover,
Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,
Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,
Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.
Flusheth the rise with her purple...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling;
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard;
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows;
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape;
Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;
Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
The young maricones and the horny muchachas,
The big fat widows delirious from insomnia,
The young wives thirty hours' pregnant,
And the hoarse tomcats that cross my garden at night,
Like a collar of palpitating sexual oysters
Surround my solitary home,
Enemies of my soul,
Conspirators in pajamas
Who exchange deep kisses for passwords.
Radiant summer brings out the lovers
In melancholy regiments,
Fat and thin and happy and sad...Read more of this...
by
Craig Raine
(for Rona, Jeremy, Sam & Grace)
All the lizards are asleep--
perched pagodas with tiny triangular tiles,
each milky lid a steamed-up window.
Inside, the heart repeats itself like a sleepy gong,
summoning nothing to nothing.
In winter time, the zoo reverts to metaphor,
God's poetry of boredom:
the cobra knits her Fair-Isle skin,
rattlers titter over the same joke.
All of them endlessly finish spaghetti.
The python runs down...Read more of this...
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