Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Bier Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...s renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Season's bier;
The amorous birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard, and the golden snake,
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean
A quickening life from the Earth's heart has burst
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
Fro...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe



...a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play--
...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...pace
And that lost sister clasps, in sorrowing love's embrace.


XLIII.
And men who leaned o'er Hamilton's rude bier
And saw his dead dear face without a tear, 
Strong souls who early learned the manly art
Of keeping from the eye what's in the heart, 
Soldiers who look unmoved on death's pale brow, 
Avert their eyes, to hide their moisture now.
The briny flood forced back from shores of woe, 
Needs but to touch the strands of joy to overflow.



XLIV.
Abou...Read more of this...
by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...ifted up the charm: appealing groans
From their poor breasts went sueing to her ear
In vain; remorseless as an infant's bier
She whisk'd against their eyes the sooty oil.
Whereat was heard a noise of painful toil,
Increasing gradual to a tempest rage,
Shrieks, yells, and groans of torture-pilgrimage;
Until their grieved bodies 'gan to bloat
And puff from the tail's end to stifled throat:
Then was appalling silence: then a sight
More wildering than all that hoarse affright...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...et all is still within and desolate.
Beset with painful gusts, within ye hear
No sound so loud as when on curtain'd bier
The death-watch tick is stifled. Enter none
Who strive therefore: on the sudden it is won.
Just when the sufferer begins to burn,
Then it is free to him; and from an urn,
Still fed by melting ice, he takes a draught--
Young Semele such richness never quaft
In her maternal longing. Happy gloom!
Dark Paradise! where pale becomes the bloom
Of h...Read more of this...
by Keats, John



...r> 

What iron Stoic can suppress the tear; 
What sour reviewer read with vacant eye! 
What bard but decks his literary bier! 
Alas! I cannot sing-- I howl-- I cry--...Read more of this...
by Chatterton, Thomas
...umental bronze unchanged his look;
A soul that pity touch'd but never shook;
Train'd from his tree-rock'd cradle to his bier
The fierce extreme of good and ill to brook
Impassive--fearing but the shame of fear--
A stoic of the woods--a man without a tear.

Yet deem not goodness on the savage stock
Of Outalissi's heart disdain'd to grow;
As lives the oak unwither'd on the rock
By storms above, and barrenness below;
He scorn'd his own, who felt another's wo:
And ere the wol...Read more of this...
by Campbell, Thomas
...ap of snow:
While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe,
And estimating authors by the year,
Bestow a garland only on a bier.

Shakespeare (whom you and ev'ry playhouse bill
Style the divine, the matchless, what you will)
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.
Ben, old and poor, as little seem'd to heed
The life to come, in ev'ry poet's creed.
Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed ...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander
...ile yet thy gladden'd eye may see, 
A morrow comes when they are not for thee; 
And grieve what may above thy senseless bier, 
Nor earth nor sky will yield a single tear; 
Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall, 
Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all; 
But creeping things shall revel in their spoil, 
And fit thy clay to fertilise the soil. 

II. 

'Tis morn — 'tis noon — assembled in the hall, 
The gather'd chieftains come to Otho's call: 
'Tis n...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...l floats on the Stygian river;
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?- weep now or nevermore!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read- the funeral song be sung!-
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young-
A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her- that she died!
How shal...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan
...ency and stead?
Time out of mind this forge of ores,
Quarry of spars in mountain pores,
Old cradle, hunting ground, and bier
Of wolf and otter, bear, and deer;
Well-built abode of many a race;
Tower of observance searching space;
Factory of river, and of rain;
Link in the alps' globe-girding chain;
By million changes skilled to tell
What in the Eternal standeth well,
And what obedient nature can,—
Is this colossal talisman
Kindly to creature, blood, and kind,
And speechless t...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...w faults shut up like dead flowerets! Are balm-seeds not here
``To console us? The land has none left such as he on the bier.
``Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!''---And then, the glad chaunt
Of the marriage,---first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt
As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.---And then, the great march
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch
Nought can break; who shall harm them, our friends?---Then, the chorus i...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...s holy perfume from a 
blessed censer,
And the hum of an organ tone,
And they waved like fans in a hall of stone
Over a bier standing there in the centre, alone.
Each lily bent slowly as it was blown.
Like smoke they rose from the violin --
Then faded as a swifter bowing
Jumbled the notes like wavelets flowing
In a splashing, pashing, rippling motion
Between broad meadows to an ocean
Wide as a day and blue as a flower,
Where every hour
Gulls dipped, and scattered, and...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy
...arm-chair sit,
 And tell me how"--"Good Saints! not here, not here;
Follow me, child, or else these stones will be thy bier."

 He follow'd through a lowly arched way,
 Brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume,
 And as she mutter'd "Well-a--well-a-day!"
 He found him in a little moonlight room,
 Pale, lattic'd, chill, and silent as a tomb.
 "Now tell me where is Madeline," said he,
 "O tell me, Angela, by the holy loom
 Which none but secret sisterhood may see,
When...Read more of this...
by Keats, John
...to mourn,
Such cold request might sound like scorn;
And what than friendship's manly tear
May better grace a brother's bier?
But bear this ring, his own of old,
And tell him - what thou dost behold!
The withered frame, the ruined mind,
The wrack by passion left behind,
A shrivelled scroll, a scattered leaf,
Seared by the autumn blast of grief!

'Tell me no more of fancy's gleam,
No, father, no, 'twas not a dream;
Alas! the dreamer first must sleep.
I only watched, and wi...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...ace!—
     Within the hall, where torch's ray
     Supplies the excluded beams of day,
     Lies Duncan on his lowly bier,
     And o'er him streams his widow's tear.
     His stripling son stands mournful by,
     His youngest weeps, but knows not why;
     The village maids and matrons round
     The dismal coronach resound.
     XVI.

     Coronach.

     He is gone on the mountain,
          He is lost to the forest,
     Like a summer-dried fountain,
    ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter
...as we part, with a Tear.

When my soul wings her flight
To the regions of night,
And my corse shall recline on its bier;
As ye pass by the tomb,
Where my ashes consume,
Oh! moisten their dust with a Tear....Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...
He made one of the multitude, yet so
Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer's bier.--
Old age & youth, manhood & infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared & some
Seeking the object of another's fear,
And others as with steps towards the tomb
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked, and called it death .....Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...sorrow rises as the day returns,
300 A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns.
301 Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier,
302 Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear.
303 Year chases year, decay pursues decay,
304 Still drops some joy from with'ring life away;
305 New forms arise, and diff'rent views engage,
306 Superfluous lags the vet'ran on the stage,
307 Till pitying Nature signs the last release,
308 And bids afflicted worth retire to peace.

309 But few there...Read more of this...
by Johnson, Samuel
...But now, sir, let me see, what shall I sayn?
Aha! by God, I have my tale again.
When that my fourthe husband was on bier,
I wept algate* and made a sorry cheer,** *always **countenance
As wives must, for it is the usage;
And with my kerchief covered my visage;
But, for I was provided with a make,* *mate
I wept but little, that I undertake* *promise
To churche was mine husband borne a-morrow
With neighebours that for him made sorrow,
And Jenkin, oure clerk, was one of tho:...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Bier poems.


Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry