10 Best Famous Cinquain Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Cinquain poems. This is a select list of the best famous Cinquain poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Cinquain poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of cinquain poems.

• All Famous Cinquain Poems

A fool I was to sleep at noon,
  And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
  A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
  Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
  It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
  And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
  I sit alone with sorrow.

Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall. 

 CHILDREN, ye have not lived, to you it seems 
Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams, 
Or carnival of careless joys that leap 
About your hearts like billows on the deep 
In flames of amber and of amethyst. 


Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist 
Till some resistless hour shall rise and move 
Your hearts to wake and hunger after love, 
And thirst with passionate longing for the things 
That burn your brows with blood-red sufferings. 


Till ye have battled with great grief and fears, 
And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years, 
Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife, 
Children, ye have not lived: for this is life.

Sun and wind and beat of sea,
Great lands stretching endlessly…
Where be bonds to bind the free?
All the world was made for me! 

 "I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


Then from each black accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!


And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"


Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: 
"God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men!"

With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life. 

Helen thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore 
That gently o'er a perfumed sea 
The weary wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam 
Thy hyacinth hair thy classic face 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand 
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah Psyche from the regions which
Are Holy Land!

Look up…
From bleakening hills
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind…look up, and scent
The snow!

 WHO is Silvia? What is she? 
 That all our swains commend her? 
Holy, fair, and wise is she; 
 The heaven such grace did lend her, 
That she might admired be. 

Is she kind as she is fair? 
 For beauty lives with kindness: 
Love doth to her eyes repair, 
 To help him of his blindness; 
And, being help'd, inhabits there. 

Then to Silvia let us sing, 
 That Silvia is excelling; 
She excels each mortal thing 
 Upon the dull earth dwelling: 
To her let us garlands bring.

 Why does the sea moan evermore?
Shut out from heaven it makes its moan,
It frets against the boundary shore;
All earth's full rivers cannot fill
The sea, that drinking thirsteth still.

Sheer miracles of loveliness
Lie hid in its unlooked-on bed:
Anemones, salt, passionless,
Blow flower-like; just enough alive
To blow and multiply and thrive.

Shells quaint with curve, or spot, or spike,
Encrusted live things argus-eyed,
All fair alike, yet all unlike,
Are born without a pang, and die
Without a pang, and so pass by.