10 Best Famous Gleeful Poems

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

• All Famous Gleeful Poems

 When the buds began to burst,
Long ago, with Rose the First
I was walking; joyous then
Far above all other men,
Till before us up there stood
Britonferry's oaken wood,
Whispering, "Happy as thou art,
Happiness and thou must part."
Many summers have gone by
Since a Second Rose and I
(Rose from the same stem) have told
This and other tales of old.
She upon her wedding day
Carried home my tenderest lay:
From her lap I now have heard
Gleeful, chirping, Rose the Third.
Not for her this hand of mine
Rhyme with nuptial wreath shall twine;
Cold and torpid it must lie,
Mute the tongue, and closed the eye.

 Wisteria, hysteria is as obvious a rhyme
as Viagra and Niagara there must be a reason
honeymooners traditionally went to the Falls
which were, said the divine Oscar,
an American bride's second biggest disappointment
tell me which do you like better,
the American Falls or the Horseshoe Falls,
I say the Horseshoe Falls, Joe says,
because its magnificence surpasses the American Falls
thank you, Joe, and did you know
when Casey Stengel managed the Yankees
he sat next to Bob Cerv on the bench one day,
put his arm around the big outfielder, and said,
"One of us has just been traded to Kansas City"
I don't know what put that in my mind
except that it backs up Michael Malinowitz's line
about John Ashbery being the Casey Stengel of poetry
meanwhile the Yankees are playing like the Bronx Bombers of old
and though I used to hate the Yankees I'm just enough
of a New York chauvinist to feel gleeful about it
wait a minute I'll be right back I am back that's
another line I've always wanted to put in a poem
what it will say on Johnny Carson's gravestone
"I'll be right back"

 The Greatest Writer of to-day
(With Maupassant I almost set him)
Said to me in a weary way,
The last occasion that I met him:
"Old chap, this world is more and more
Becoming bourgeois, blasé, blousy:
Thank God I've lived so long before
It got so definitely lousy."

Said I: "Old chap, I don't agree.
Why should one so dispraise the present?
For gainful guys like you and me,
It still can be extremely pleasant.
Have we not Women, Wine and Song -
A gleeful trio to my thinking;
So blithely we can get along
With laughing, loving, eating, drinking."

Said he: "Dear Boy, it may be so,
But I'm fed up with war and worry;
I would escape this world of woe,
Of wrath and wrong, of hate and hurry.
I fain would gain the peace of mind
Of Lamas on Thibetan highlands,
Or maybe sanctuary find
With beach-combers on coral islands."

Said I: "Dear Boy, don't go so far:
Just live a life of simple being;
Forgetting all the ills that are,
Be satisfied with hearing, seeing.
The sense of smell and taste and touch
Can bring you bliss in ample measure:
If only you don't think too much,
Your programme can be packed with pleasure.

"But do not try to probe below
This fairy film of Nature's screening;
Look on it as a surface show,
Without a purpose of a meaning.
Take no account of social strife,
And dread no coming cataclysm:
Let your philosophy of life
Be what I call: EXTERNALISM.

The moon shines down with borrowed light,
So savants say - I do not doubt it.
Suffice its silver trance my sight,
That's all I want to know about it.
A fig for science - 'how' and 'why'
Distract me in my happy dreaming:
Through line and form and colour I
Am all content with outward seeming. . . ."

The Greatest Writer of to-day
(I would have loved to call him Willie),
looked wry at me and went his way -
I think he thought me rather silly.
Maybe I am, but I insist
My point of view will take some beating:
Don't mock this old Externalist -
The pudding's proof is in the eating.

Heart of the Southland, heed me pleading now,
Who bearest, unashamed, upon my brow
The long kiss of the loving tropic sun,
And yet, whose veins with thy red current run.
Borne on the bitter winds from every hand,
Strange tales are flying over all the land,
And Condemnation, with his pinions foul,
Glooms in the place where broods the midnight owl.
What art thou, that the world should point at thee,
And vaunt and chide the weakness that they see?
There was a time they were not wont to chide;
Where is thy old, uncompromising pride?
Blood-washed, thou shouldst lift up thine honored head,
White with the sorrow for thy loyal dead[Pg 217]
Who lie on every plain, on every hill,
And whose high spirit walks the Southland still:
Whose infancy our mother's hands have nursed.
Thy manhood, gone to battle unaccursed,
Our fathers left to till th' reluctant field,
To rape the soil for what she would not yield;
Wooing for aye, the cold unam'rous sod,
Whose growth for them still meant a master's rod;
Tearing her bosom for the wealth that gave
The strength that made the toiler still a slave.
Too long we hear the deep impassioned cry
That echoes vainly to the heedless sky;
Too long, too long, the Macedonian call
Falls fainting far beyond the outward wall,
Within whose sweep, beneath the shadowing trees,
A slumbering nation takes its dangerous ease;
Too long the rumors of thy hatred go
For those who loved thee and thy children so.
Thou must arise forthwith, and strong, thou must
Throw off the smirching of this baser dust,
Lay by the practice of this later creed,
And be thine honest self again indeed.
There was a time when even slavery's chain
Held in some joys to alternate with pain,
Some little light to give the night relief,
Some little smiles to take the place of grief.
There was a time when, jocund as the day,
The toiler hoed his row and sung his lay,
Found something gleeful in the very air,
And solace for his toiling everywhere.
Now all is changed, within the rude stockade,
A bondsman whom the greed of men has made
Almost too brutish to deplore his plight,
Toils hopeless on from joyless morn till night.[Pg 218]
For him no more the cabin's quiet rest,
The homely joys that gave to labor zest;
No more for him the merry banjo's sound,
Nor trip of lightsome dances footing round.
For him no more the lamp shall glow at eve,
Nor chubby children pluck him by the sleeve;
No more for him the master's eyes be bright,—
He has nor freedom's nor a slave's delight.
What, was it all for naught, those awful years
That drenched a groaning land with blood and tears?
Was it to leave this sly convenient hell,
That brother fighting his own brother fell?
When that great struggle held the world in awe,
And all the nations blanched at what they saw,
Did Sanctioned Slavery bow its conquered head
That this unsanctioned crime might rise instead?
Is it for this we all have felt the flame,—
This newer bondage and this deeper shame?
Nay, not for this, a nation's heroes bled,
And North and South with tears beheld their dead.
Oh, Mother South, hast thou forgot thy ways,
Forgot the glory of thine ancient days,
Forgot the honor that once made thee great,
And stooped to this unhallowed estate?
It cannot last, thou wilt come forth in might,
A warrior queen full armored for the fight;
And thou wilt take, e'en with thy spear in rest,
Thy dusky children to thy saving breast.
Till then, no more, no more the gladsome song,
Strike only deeper chords, the notes of wrong;
Till then, the sigh, the tear, the oath, the moan,
Till thou, oh, South, and thine, come to thine own.[Pg 219]

 Down home to-night the moonshine falls
Across a hill with daisies pied,
The pear tree by the garden gate
Beckons with white arms like a bride. 

A savor as of trampled fern
Along the whispering meadow stirs,
And, beacon of immortal love,
A light is shining through the firs. 

To my old gable window creeps
The night wind with a sigh and song,
And, weaving ancient sorceries,
Thereto the gleeful moonbeams throng 

Beside the open kitchen door
My mother stands all lovingly,
And o'er the pathways of the dark
She sends a yearning thought to me. 

It seeks and finds my answering heart
Which shall no more be peace-possessed
Until I reach her empty arms
And lay my head upon her breast.

 I own a gorgeous Cadillac,
 A chauffeur garbed in blue;
And as I sit behind his back
 His beefy neck I view.
Yet let me whisper, though you may
 Think me a ***** old cuss,
From Claude I often sneak away
 To board a bus.

A democrat, I love the crowd,
 The bustle and the din;
The market wives who gab aloud
 As they go out and in.
I chuckle as I pay my dime,
 With mien meticulous:
You can't believe how happy I'm;
 Aboard a bus.

The driver of my Cadillac
 Has such a haughty sneer;
I'm sure he would give me the sack
 If he beheld me here.
His horror all my friends would share
 Could they but see me thus:
A gleeful multi-millionaire
 Aboard a bus.

 This is To-day, a child in white and blue 
Running to meet me out of Night who stilled 
The ghost of Yester-eve; this is fair Morn 
The mother of To-morrow. And these clouds 
That chase the sunshine over gleaming hills
Are thoughts, delighting in the golden change 
And the ceremony of their drifting state. 

This is To-day. To-morrow might bring death,— 
And Life, the gleeful madrigal of birds, 
Be drowned in glimmer of sleep. To-day I know 
How sweet it is to spend these eyes, and boast 
This bubble of vistaed memory and sense 
Blown by my joy aloft the glittering airs 
Of heavenly peace. Oh take me to yourselves, 
Earth, sky, and spirit! Let me stand within
The circle of your transience, that my voice 
May thrill the lonely silences with song.

 The Junior God looked from his place
 In the conning towers of heaven,
And he saw the world through the span of space
 Like a giant golf-ball driven.
And because he was bored, as some gods are,
 With high celestial mirth,
He clutched the reins of a shooting star,
 And he steered it down to earth.

The Junior God, 'mid leaf and bud,
 Passed on with a weary air,
Till lo! he came to a pool of mud,
 And some hogs were rolling there.
Then in he plunged with gleeful cries,
 And down he lay supine;
For they had no mud in paradise,
 And they likewise had no swine.

The Junior God forgot himself;
 He squelched mud through his toes;
With the careless joy of a wanton boy
 His reckless laughter rose.
Till, tired at last, in a brook close by,
 He washed off every stain;
Then softly up to the radiant sky
 He rose, a god again.

The Junior God now heads the roll
 In the list of heaven's peers;
He sits in the House of High Control,
 And he regulates the spheres.
Yet does he wonder, do you suppose,
 If, even in gods divine,
The best and wisest may not be those
 Who have wallowed awhile with the swine?

 CITY of ships! 
(O the black ships! O the fierce ships! 
O the beautiful, sharp-bow’d steam-ships and sail-ships!) 
City of the world! (for all races are here; 
All the lands of the earth make contributions here;)
City of the sea! city of hurried and glittering tides! 
City whose gleeful tides continually rush or recede, whirling in and out, with eddies and
 foam!

City of wharves and stores! city of tall façades of marble and iron! 
Proud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad, extravagant city! 
Spring up, O city! not for peace alone, but be indeed yourself, warlike!
Fear not! submit to no models but your own, O city! 
Behold me! incarnate me, as I have incarnated you! 
I have rejected nothing you offer’d me—whom you adopted, I have adopted; 
Good or bad, I never question you—I love all—I do not condemn anything; 
I chant and celebrate all that is yours—yet peace no more;
In peace I chanted peace, but now the drum of war is mine; 
War, red war, is my song through your streets, O city!

 Over the fields we go, through the sweets of the purple clover,
That letters a message for us as for every vagrant rover;
Before us the dells are abloom, and a leaping brook calls after,
Feeling its kinship with us in lore of dreams and laughter. 

Out of the valleys of moonlight elfin voices are calling;
Down from the misty hills faint, far greetings are falling;
Whisper the grasses to us, murmuring gleeful and airy,
Knowing us pixy-led, seeking the haunts of faery. 

The wind is our joyful comrade wherever our free feet wander,
Over the tawny wolds to the meres and meadows yonder;
The mild-eyed stars go with us, or the rain so swiftly flying,
Racing us over the wastes where the hemlocks and pines are sighing. 

Across the upland dim, down through the beckoning hollow­
Oh, we go too far and fast for the feet of care to follow!
The gypsy fire in our hearts for the wilderness wide and luring;
Other loves may fail but this is great and enduring. 

Other delights may pall, but the joy of the open never;
The charm of the silent places must win and hold us forever;
Bondage of walls we leave with never a glance behind us.
Under the lucent sky the delights of the rover shall find us.