Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Borders Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Whitman, Walt
...Carolinas,
Clip the wool of California or Pennsylvania, 
Cut the flax in the Middle States, or hemp, or tobacco in the Borders, 
Pick the pea and the bean, or pull apples from the trees, or bunches of grapes from the
 vines, 
Or aught that ripens in all These States, or North or South, 
Under the beaming sun, and under Thee....Read more of this...



by Kipling, Rudyard
...ngs;
Bearing gifts to divers Kings--
 Gifts of case and shrapnel.

This we learned from famous men
 Teaching in our borders,
Who declared it was best,
Safest, easiest, and best--
Expeditious, wise, and best--
 To obey your orders.

Some beneath the further stars
 Bear the greater burden:
Set to serve the lands they rule,
(Save he serve no man may rule ),
Serve and love the lands they rule;
 Seeking praise nor guerdon.

This we learned from famous men,
 Knowing not...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ust of a wheel-worn road,
Slashed sod under the iron-shining plow,
These of service in him, these and many cities, many borders, many wrangles between Alaska and the Isthmus, between the Isthmus and the Horn, and east and west of Omaha, and east and west of Paris, Berlin, Petrograd.
The blood in his right wrist and the blood in his left wrist run with the right wrist wisdom of the many and the left wrist wisdom of the many.
It is the many he knows, the gaunt strong hu...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ee you,
Rise up from your bed in silence,
Lay aside your garments wholly,
Walk around the fields you planted,
Round the borders of the cornfields,
Covered by your tresses only,
Robed with darkness as a garment.
"Thus the fields shall be more fruitful,
And the passing of your footsteps
Draw a magic circle round them,
So that neither blight nor mildew,
Neither burrowing worm nor insect,
Shall pass o'er the magic circle;
Not the dragon-fly, Kwo-ne-she,
Nor the spider, Subbek...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...orests,
Day after day they glided adown the turbulent river;
Night after night, by their blazing fires, encamped on its borders.
Now through rushing chutes, among green islands, where plumelike
Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with the current,
Then emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars
Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of their margin,
Shining with snow-white plumes, large flocks of pelicans waded.
Level the landscape g...Read more of this...



by Kramberger, Taja
...lator and an activist
and a university teacher.
Unbearable - all these things -
all trespasses of the old parcel borders
that were drawn by the dirty
fingers of fraternities.

I air all the rooms,
I ignore all the ratings,
I open all the valvelets.

And they have put me out in the cold –
like the dead.
But every dead one has a name.

© Taja Kramberger, Z roba klifa / From the Edge of a Cliff, CSK, Ljubljana, 2011
© Translation by Špela Drno...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...ord of the land!)
Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand
On the firm-packed sand,
Free
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea.

Sinuous southward and sinuous northward the shimmering band
Of the sand-beach fastens the fringe of the marsh to the folds of the land.
Inward and outward to northward and southward the beach-lines linger and curl
As a silver-wrought garment that clings to and follows
the firm sweet limbs of a girl.
Vanishing, swerving, e...Read more of this...

by Collins, Billy
...Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thum...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...frequent, and his eye with choice regard 
From Paneas, the fount of Jordan's flood, 
To Beersaba, where the Holy Land 
Borders on Egypt and the Arabian shore; 
So wide the opening seemed, where bounds were set 
To darkness, such as bound the ocean wave. 
Satan from hence, now on the lower stair, 
That scaled by steps of gold to Heaven-gate, 
Looks down with wonder at the sudden view 
Of all this world at once. As when a scout, 
Through dark?;nd desart ways with?oeril...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...gemmed 
Their blossoms: With high woods the hills were crowned; 
With tufts the valleys, and each fountain side; 
With borders long the rivers: that Earth now 
Seemed like to Heaven, a seat where Gods might dwell, 
Or wander with delight, and love to haunt 
Her sacred shades: though God had yet not rained 
Upon the Earth, and man to till the ground 
None was; but from the Earth a dewy mist 
Went up, and watered all the ground, and each 
Plant of the field; which, ere it was ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...and satisfying all their needs?

VI
She picked a stone up with a little pout, Stones 
looked so ill in well-kept flower-borders.
Where should she put it? All the paths about Were 
strewn with fair, red gravel by her orders.
No stone could mar their sifted smoothness. So She 
hurried to the river. At the edge
She stood a moment charmed by the swift blue Beyond 
the river sedge.
She watched it curdling, crinkling, and the snow
Purfled upon its wave-tops....Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...
The track, the stream-bed descends
In the place where the wayfarer once
Planted his footstep--the spray
Boils o'er its borders! aloft
The unseen snow-beds dislodge
Their hanging ruin; alas,
Havoc is made in our train!
Friends, who set forth at our side,
Falter, are lost in the storm.
We, we only are left!
With frowning foreheads, with lips
Sternly compress'd, we strain on,
On--and at nightfall at last
Come to the end of our way,
To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks;
Where th...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...ead declin'd
Like a fair flower surcharg'd with dew, she weeps
And words addrest seem into tears dissolv'd,
Wetting the borders of her silk'n veil: 
But now again she makes address to speak.

Dal: With doubtful feet and wavering resolution
I came, still dreading thy displeasure, Samson,
Which to have merited, without excuse,
I cannot but acknowledge; yet if tears
May expiate (though the fact more evil drew
In the perverse event then I foresaw)
My penance hath not slack'n'...Read more of this...

by Bible, The
...hy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with
           chains of gold.

22:001:011 We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

22:001:012 While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth
           forth the smell thereof.

22:001:013 A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all
           night betwixt my breasts.

22:001:014 My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the
           vineya...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...those of the white potato and sweet potato; 
Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies; 
Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands, openings; 
Welcome the measureless grazing-lands—welcome the teeming soil of orchards, flax, honey,
 hemp;

Welcome just as much the other more hard-faced lands;
Lands rich as lands of gold, or wheat and fruit lands; 
Lands of mines, lands of the manly and rugged ores; 
Lands of coal, copper, lead, tin, zinc; 
LANDS OF IRON! l...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...ust, that velvet sleep, then were you served even beyond 
your need; and desire in sate was properly spilling from its 
borders, said the father. 
 Then his son became the corner of a room.
 Don't don't, cried the father.
 And then his son became a floorboard.
 Don't don't, the moon falls there and curdles your wits into 
the grain of the wood, cried the father.
 What shall I do? screamed his son.
 Sit until time embraces you into the bosom of its velv...Read more of this...

by Atwood, Margaret
...from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;


guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air


tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...lue hare-bells hide,
And myrtle plots with dew-fall ever wet,
Gay tiger-lilies flammulate and pied,
Sometime on pathway borders neatly set,
Now blossom through the brake on either side,
Where heliotrope and weedy mignonette,
With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees,
Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze,

That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave
In some blue rampart of the curving West,
Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave,
Ravels the cloud ...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...d suffer any taint 
In nature: wherefore going to the King, 
He made this pretext, that his princedom lay 
Close on the borders of a territory, 
Wherein were bandit earls, and caitiff knights, 
Assassins, and all flyers from the hand 
Of Justice, and whatever loathes a law: 
And therefore, till the King himself should please 
To cleanse this common sewer of all his realm, 
He craved a fair permission to depart, 
And there defend his marches; and the King 
Mused for a little o...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...everything was right— 
Germany, a kindly, much ill-treated nation—
Russia was working out her own salvation
Within her borders. As for Spain, ah, Spain
Would buy from England when peace came again!
I listened and believed— believed through sheer
Terror. I could not look whither my fear
Pointed— that agony that I had known.
I closed my eyes, and was not alone.


Later than many, earlier than some,
I knew the die was cast— that war must come;
That war must come...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Borders poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs