Famous Campfire Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Sourdough Story

by Robert William Service
 Hark to the Sourdough story, told at sixty below,
When the pipes are lit and we smoke and spit
Into the campfire glow.
Rugged are we and hoary, and statin' a general rule,
A genooine Sourdough story
Ain't no yarn for the Sunday School.

A Sourdough came to stake his claim in Heav'n one morning early.
Saint Peter cried: "Who waits outside them gates so bright...Read more of this...

While The Bannock Bakes

by Robert William Service
 Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!
You'd little think that we were somewhere north of Sixty-three,
Though where I don't exactly know, and don't precisely care.
The man-size mountains palisade us round on every side;
The river is a-flop with fish, and ripples silver-clear;
The midnight...Read more of this...

How Poetry Comes to Me

by Gary Snyder
How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
 Boulders at night, it stays
 Frightened outside the
 Range of my campfire
 I go to meet it at the
 Edge of the light
...Read more of this...

Little Moccasins

by Robert William Service
 Come out, O Little Moccasins, and frolic on the snow!
Come out, O tiny beaded feet, and twinkle in the light!
I'll play the old Red River reel, you used to love it so:
Awake, O Little Moccasins, and dance for me to-night!

Your hair was all a gleamy gold, your eyes a corn-flower blue;
Your cheeks were pink as tinted shells, you stepped...Read more of this...

A Pot Of Tea

by Robert William Service
 You make it in your mess-tin by the brazier's rosy gleam;
 You watch it cloud, then settle amber clear;
You lift it with your bay'nit, and you sniff the fragrant steam;
 The very breath of it is ripe with cheer.
You're awful cold and dirty, and a-cursin' of your lot;
 You scoff the blushin' 'alf of it, so rich and rippin'...Read more of this...

The Dreamer

by Robert William Service
 The lone man gazed and gazed upon his gold,
His sweat, his blood, the wage of weary days;
But now how sweet, how doubly sweet to hold
All gay and gleamy to the campfire blaze.
The evening sky was sinister and cold;
The willows shivered, wanly lay the snow;
The uncommiserating land, so old,
So worn, so grey, so niggard in its woe,
Peered through its ragged...Read more of this...

Australian Scenery

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The Mountains 
A land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go 
By twisted tracks, on sidelings deep, where giant gum trees grow 
And the wind replies, in the river oaks, to the song of the stream below. 
A land where the hills keep watch and ward, silent and wide awake 
As those who sit by a dead campfire,...Read more of this...

The Christmas Trail

by Badger Clark
  The wind is blowin' cold down the mountain tips of snow
    And 'cross the ranges layin' brown and dead;
  It's cryin' through the valley trees that wear the mistletoe
    And mournin' with the gray clouds overhead.
  Yet it's sweet with the beat of my little hawse's feet
   ...Read more of this...

Honor Among Scamps

by Vachel Lindsay
 We are the smirched. Queen Honor is the spotless. 
We slept thro' wars where Honor could not sleep. 
We were faint-hearted. Honor was full-valiant. 
We kept a silence Honor could not keep. 

Yet this late day we make a song to praise her. 
We, codeless, will yet vindicate her code. 
She who was mighty, walks with us, the beggars....Read more of this...

Sixteen Months

by Carl Sandburg
 ON the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.
It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,
A morning campfire at a mountain lake.

On the lips of the child Janet,
Wisps of haze on ten miles of corn,
Young light blue calls to young light gold of morning....Read more of this...

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