Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Vestry Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Vestry poems, articles about Vestry poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Vestry poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by Robert Frost | Create an image from this poem

Christmas Trees

 (A Christmas Circular Letter)


THE CITY had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.


Written by Richard Wilbur | Create an image from this poem

In a Churchyard

 That flower unseen, that gem of purest ray, 
Bright thoughts uncut by men: 
Strange that you need but speak them, Thomas Gray, 
And the mind skips and dives beyond its ken, 

Finding at once the wild supposed bloom, 
Or in the imagined cave 
Some pulse of crystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave.

Void notions proper to a buried head! 
Beneath these tombstones here 
Unseenness fills the sockets of the dead, 
Whatever to their souls may now appear; 

And who but those unfathomably deaf
Who quiet all this ground
Could catch, within the ear's diminished clef, 
A music innocent of time and sound? 

What do the living hear, then, when the bell
Hangs plumb within the tower
Of the still church, and still their thoughts compel
Pure tollings that intend no mortal hour? 

As when a ferry for the shore of death
Glides looming toward the dock, 
Her engines cut, her spirits bating breath
As the ranked pilings narrow toward the shock, 

So memory and expectation set 
Some pulseless clangor free
Of circumstance, and charm us to forget 
This twilight crumbling in the churchyard tree, 

Those swifts or swallows which do not pertain, 
Scuffed voices in the drive, 
That light flicked on behind the vestry pane, 
Till, unperplexed from all that is alive, 

It shadows all our thought, balked imminence
Of uncommitted sound, 
And still would tower at the sill of sense
Were not, as now, its honeyed abeyance crowned

With a mauled boom of summons far more strange
Than any stroke unheard, 
Which breaks again with unimagined range
Through all reverberations of the word, 

Pooling the mystery of things that are, 
The buzz of prayer said, 
The scent of grass, the earliest-blooming star, 
These unseen gravestones, and the darker dead.
Written by Thomas Hardy | Create an image from this poem

The Inconsistent

 I say, "She was as good as fair," 
 When standing by her mound; 
"Such passing sweetness," I declare, 
 "No longer treads the ground." 
I say, "What living Love can catch 
 Her bloom and bonhomie, 
And what in newer maidens match 
 Her olden warmth to me!" 

- There stands within yon vestry-nook 
 Where bonded lovers sign, 
Her name upon a faded book 
 With one that is not mine. 
To him she breathed the tender vow 
 She once had breathed to me, 
But yet I say, "O love, even now 
 Would I had died for thee!"
Written by Robert Herrick | Create an image from this poem

Upon Julias Unlacing Herself

 Tell, if thou canst, and truly, whence doth come
This camphire, storax, spikenard, galbanum,
These musks, these ambers, and those other smells
Sweet as the Vestry of the Oracles.
I'll tell thee:—while my Julia did unlace
Her silken bodice but a breathing space,
The passive air such odour then assumed
As when to Jove great Juno goes perfumed,
Whose pure immortal body doth transmit
A scent that fills both heaven and earth with it.
Written by Edward Lear | Create an image from this poem

There was an old person of Sestri

There was an old person of Sestri,Who sate himself down in the vestry;When they said, "You are wrong!" he merely said "Bong!"That repulsive old person of Sestri. 



Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry