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Famous Cambridge Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Lowell, Amy
...glass.
The red city, and the blue, bright water,
And puffs of smoke which you made.
Twenty miles away,
Round by Cambridge, or over the Neck,
But the smoke was white -- white!
To-day the trumpet-flowers are red -- red --
And I cannot see you fighting,
But old Mr. Dimond has fled to Canada,
And Myra sings "Yankee Doodle" at her milking.
The red throats of the trumpets bray and clang in the sunshine,
And the smoke-tree puffs dun blossoms into the blue air.

I...Read more of this...



by Bidart, Frank
..."bought on a trip to Europe,"
Puritan crosshatch green-yellow wallpaper,
frilly shades, cowhide 
booths--

I thought of Cambridge:

 the lovely congruent elegance
 of Revolutionary architecture, even of

ersatz thirties Georgian

seemed alien, a threat, sign
of all I was not--

to bode order and lucidity

as an ideal, if not reality--

not this California plush, which

 also

I was not.

And so I made myself an Easterner,
finding it, after all, more like me
than I had let...Read more of this...

by Levy, Amy
...Where drowsy sound of college-chimes
Across the air is blown,
And drowsy fragrance of the limes,
I lie and dream alone.

A dazzling radiance reigns o'er all--
O'er gardens densely green,
O'er old grey bridges and the small,
Slow flood which slides between.

This is the place; it is not strange,
But known of old and dear.--
What went I forth to ...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...At last the air fragrant, the bird's bubbling whistle
Succinct in the unknown unsettled trees:
O little Charles, beside the Georgian colleges
And milltown New England; at last the wind soft,
The sky unmoving, and the dead look
Of factory windows separate, at last,
From windows gray and wet:
 for now the sunlight
Thrashes its wet shellac on brickwalk and gu...Read more of this...

by Smart, Christopher
...aise the name of the Lord. 

Let Arodi rejoice with the Royston Crow, there is a society of them at Trumpington and Cambridge. 

Let Areli rejoice with the Criel, who is a dwarf that towereth above others. 

Let Phuvah rejoice with Platycerotes, whose weapons of defence keep them innocent. 

Let Shimron rejoice with the Kite, who is of more value than many sparrows. 

Let Sered rejoice with the Wittal -- a silly bird is wise unto his own preservation. ...Read more of this...



by Smart, Christopher
...wood. 

For all Foundation is from God depending. 

For the two Universities are the Eyes of England. 

For Cambridge is the right and the brightest. 

For Pembroke Hall was founded more in the Lord than any College in Cambridge. 

For mustard is the proper food of birds and men are bound to cultivate it for their use. 

For they that study the works of God are peculiarly assisted by his Spirit. 

For all the creatures mentiond by Pliny are somewhe...Read more of this...

by Smart, Christopher
...isher rejoice with Sandastros kind of burning stone with gold drops in the body of it. God be gracious to Fisher of Cambridge and to all of his name and kindred. 

Let Fuller, house of Fuller rejoice with Perileucos a precious stone with a white thread descending from its face to the bottom. 

Let Thorpe, house of Thorpe rejoice with Xystios an ordinary stone of the Jasper-kind. 

Let Alban, house of Alban rejoice with Scorpites a precious stone in some degree...Read more of this...

by Raine, Kathleen
...ium,
our high-rise dreams,
Valhalla, Utopia,
Xanadu, Shangri-la, world revolution
Time has taken, and soon will be gone
Cambridge, Princeton and M.I.T.,
Nalanda, Athens and Alexandria
all for the holocaust
of civilization —
To whom shall we pray
when our vision has faded
but the world-destroyer,
the liberator, the purifier?

But great is the realm
of the world-creator,
the world-sustainer
from whom we come,
in whom we move
and have our being,
about us, within us
t...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...known,
Death was half glad when he had got him down;
For he had any time this ten yeers full,
Dodg'd with him, betwixt Cambridge and the Bull.
And surely, Death could never have prevail'd,
Had not his weekly cours of carriage fail'd; 
But lately finding him so long at home,
And thinking now his journeys end was come,
And that he had tane up his latest Inne,
In the kind office of a Chamberlin
Shew'd him his room where he must lodge that night,
Pull'd off his Boots, and to...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...d gasp.
Thy age, like ours, O Soul of Sir John Cheek,
Hated not Learning wors then Toad or Asp;
When thou taught'st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek.

Note: Camb. Autograph supplies title, On the Detraction which
followed my writing certain Treatises....Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...set thee higher
Then his Casella, whom he woo'd to sing
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.

Note: 9 send] lend Cambridge Autograph MS....Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...I stand beneath the tree, whose branches shade
Thy western window, Chapel of St. John!
And hear its leaves repeat their benison
On him, whose hand thy stones memorial laid;
Then I remember one of whom was said
In the world's darkest hour, "Behold thy son!"
And see him living still, and wandering on
And waiting for the advent long delayed.
Not only ...Read more of this...

by McGonagall, William Topaz
...fell dead,
Pierced to the heart with a Russian ball,
And his men lamented sorely his downfall. 

While the Duke of Cambridge with the colours of two Regiments of Guards
Presses forward, and no obstacle his courage retards,
And with him about one hundred men,
And to keep up their courage he was singing a hymn to them. 

Then hand to hand they fought the Russians heroically,
Which was a most inspiring sight to see;
Captain Burnaby with thirteen Guardsmen fighting manfu...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...e empty sky,

Sartre’s waiters dancing like angels on the heads of pins,

And Wittgenstein, nodding in his smoke-filled Cambridge den,

Dreaming of a school room in the Austrian hills and walks

In mountain air, wondering why he wasn’t there.

We wondered, too, at what, if anything we knew, trying to sift some

Single fact that might elicit hope from loss, enough to get us through

Another year with other griefs to come, we knew. Some, by a little,

Through God’s grac...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...illustration of the mote and the beam, from Matthew.


THE TALE.


At Trompington, not far from Cantebrig,* *Cambridge
There goes a brook, and over that a brig,
Upon the whiche brook there stands a mill:
And this is *very sooth* that I you tell. *complete truth*
A miller was there dwelling many a day,
As any peacock he was proud and gay:
Pipen he could, and fish, and nettes bete*, *prepare
And turne cups, and wrestle well, and shete*. *shoot
Aye by his belt...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...with
these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to
vegetation ceremonies.
 Macmillan Cambridge.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel 2:1.
23. Cf. Ecclesiastes 12:5.
31. V. Tristan und Isolde, i, verses 5-8.
42. Id. iii, verse 24.
46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot
pack
of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience.Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...n?

One does not lose one's birthright, it appears.
I had been English then for many years.

X 
We went down to Cambridge, 
Cambridge in the spring. 
In a brick court at twilight 
We heard the thrushes sing, 
And we went to evening service 
In the chapel of the King. 
The library of Trinity, 
The quadrangle of Clare, 
John bought a pipe from Bacon, 
And I acquired there 
The Anecdotes of Painting 
From a handcart in the square.

The Playing fields at sunse...Read more of this...

by Wheatley, Phillis
...WHILE an intrinsic ardor prompts to write,
The muses promise to assist my pen;
'Twas not long since I left my native shore
The land of errors, and Egyptain gloom:
Father of mercy, 'twas thy gracious hand
Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.
Students, to you 'tis giv'n to scan the heights
Above, to traverse the ethereal space,
And mark the syste...Read more of this...

by Field, Eugene
...ccruing from McKean Buchanan's melancholy Dane;
Away out West I've witnessed Bandmann's peerless hardihood,
With Arthur Cambridge have I wrought where walking was not good;
In every phase of horror have I bravely borne my part,
And even on my uppers have I proudly stood for Art!
And, after all my suffering, it were not hard to show
That I got my allopathic dose with Brutus at St. Jo!

That army fell upon me in a most bewildering rage
And scattered me and mine upon that hi...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...

Wittgenstein served as a machine-gunner 
in the Austrian Army in World War I. 
Before the war he studied logic in Cambridge 
with Bertrand Russell. Having inherited 
his father's fortune (iron and steel), he 
gave away his money, not to the poor, whom 
it would corrupt, but to relations so rich 
it would not thus affect them. 

3. 

On leave in Vienna in August 1918 
he assembled his notebook entries 
into the Tractatus, Since it provided 
the definitive sol...Read more of this...

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