Famous Cemetery Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Cemetery poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cemetery poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cemetery poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Gluck, Louise
...born,
new orphans. They sit with their hands folded,
trying to decide about this new life.
Then they're in the cemetery, some of them
for the first time. They're frightened of crying,
sometimes of not crying. Someone leans over,
tells them what to do next, which might mean
saying a few words, sometimes
throwing dirt in the open grave.
And after that, everyone goes back to the house,
which is suddenly full of visitors.
The widow sits on the couch, ver...Read more of this...
by
Amichai, Yehuda
...On a little hill amid fertile fields lies a small cemetery,
a Jewish cemetery behind a rusty gate, hidden by shrubs,
abandoned and forgotten. Neither the sound of prayer
nor the voice of lamentation is heard there
for the dead praise not the Lord.
Only the voices of our children ring out, seeking graves
and cheering
each time they find one--like mushrooms in the forest, like
wild strawberries....Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...cross of your arms!
How terrible and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely be...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...ence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.
For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.
It is true but only partly true that a city is a "tyranny of
numbers"
(This is the chant of the urban metropolitan and
metaphysical self
After the first two World Wars of the 20th century)
--- T...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...I am standing in the cemetery at Byrds, Texas.
What did Judy say? "God-forsaken is beautiful, too."
A very old man who has cancer on his face and takes
care of the cemetery, is raking a grave in such a
manner as to almost (polish it like a piece of silver.
An old dog stands beside him. It's a hot day: 105.
What am I doing out here in west Texas, standing in
...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
....
41
Hunslet de Ledes
Hop-scotch, hide and seek,
Bogies-on-wheels
Not one tree in Hunslet
Except in the cemetery
The lake filled in
For fifty years,
The bluebell has rung
Its last perfumed peal.
42
I couldn’t play out on Sunday
Mam and dad thought us a cut
Above the rest, it was another
Test I failed, keeping me and
Margaret apart was like the Aztecs
Tearing the heart from the living flesh.
43
Father, your office job
Didn’t sa...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter 'em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B'nai Israel Cemetery
But l want a big funeral
St. Patrick's Cathedral, St. Mark's Church, the largest synagogue in
Manhattan
First, there's family, brother, nephews, spry aged Edith stepmother
96, Aunt Honey from old Newark,
Doctor Joel, cousin Mindy, brother Gene one eyed one ear'd, sister-
in-law blonde Connie, five nephews, stepbrothers & sisters
their...Read more of this...
by
Hall, Donald
...In a week or ten days
the snow and ice
will melt from Cemetery Road.
I'm coming! Don't move!
Once again it is April.
Today is the day
we would have been married
twenty-six years.
I finished with April
halfway through March.
You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.
Then they stay dead.
Will Hall ever write
lines that do anything
but whine and complain?
In Ap...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...& Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until th...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...me . . .
Rings of sound ebb slowly into the silence.
IV
On the day when my uncle and I drove to the cemetery,
Rain rattled on the roof of the carriage;
And talkng constrainedly of this and that
We refrained from looking at the child's coffin on the seat before us.
When we reached the cemetery
We found that the thin snow on the grass
Was already transparent with rain;
And boards had been laid upon it
That we might walk without wetting our feet.<...Read more of this...
by
Berry, Wendell
...g, the nuthatches walking
headfirst down the trunks,
crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness
as they are doing now
in the cemetery across the street
where the past and the dead
keep each other. To remember,
to hear and remember, is to stop
and walk on again
to a livelier, surer measure.
It is dangerous
to remember the past only
for its own sake, dangerous
to deliver a message
you did not get....Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...good. When we reached
Stanley, the streets were white and dry like a collision at a
high rate of speed between a cemetery and a truck loaded
with sacks of flour.
We stopped at a store in Stanley. I bought a candy bar and
asked how the trout fishing was in Cuba. The woman at the
store said, "You're better off dead, you Commie bastard. "
I got a receipt for the candy bar to be used for income tax
purposes.
The old ten-cent deduction.
I ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...
Indians carrying something.
Finally the path went away from the creek and we climbed
a hill and arrived at the cemetery. It was a very old ceme-
tery and kind of run down with weeds and death growing there
like partners in a dance.
There was a cobblestone street leading up from the ceme-
tery to the town of Ixtlan, pronounced East-LON, on top of
another hill. There were no houses along the street untilyou
reached the town.
In the hair of the ...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...erself,
Under he didn't care how great a stone:
He'd sell a yoke of steers to pay for it.
And weren't there special cemetery flowers,
That, once grief sets to growing, grief may rest;
The flowers will go on with grief awhile,
And no one seem neglecting or neglected?
A prudent grief will not despise such aids.
He thought of evergreen and everlasting.
And then he had a thought worth many of these.
Somewhere must be the grave of the young boy
Who married her for ...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...ave Carl fell silently around,
Because he had saved two hundred passengers from being drowned.
In a quiet village cemetery he now sleeps among the silent dead,
In the south of Germany, with a tombstone at his head,
Erected by the passengers he saved in the train,
And which to his memory will long remain....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...k’d partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads
out;
Where burial coaches enter the arch’d gates of a cemetery;
Where winter wolves bark amid wastes of snow and icicled trees;
Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and
feeds upon small crabs;
Where the splash of swimmers and divers cools the warm noon;
Where the katy-did works her chromatic reed on the walnut-tree over the well;
Through patches of citrons and cucumb...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...an end to all his peace and enjoyment.
The poor lad was almost mad, and the next day
His parent's remains to the cemetery were taken away;
And when his father was buried, distracted like he grew,
And he strolled through the streets crying, What shall I do!
And all night he wandered on sad and alone,
Until he began to think of returning home,
But, to his surprise, on raising his head to look around,
He was in a part of the country which to him was unknown ground. ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...icles give place—the funeral of an old Broadway
stage-driver, the cortege mostly drivers.
Steady the trot to the cemetery, duly rattles the death-bell, the gate is pass’d, the
new-dug grave is halted at, the living alight, the hearse uncloses,
The coffin is pass’d out, lower’d and settled, the whip is laid on the coffin,
the
earth is swiftly shovel’d in,
The mound above is flatted with the spades—silence,
A minute—no one moves or speaks—it is done,
He is decently...Read more of this...
by
Piercy, Marge
...In flat America, in Chicago,
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side.
Forty feet of Corinthian candle
celebrate Pullman embedded
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete.
The Potter Palmers float
in an island parthenon.
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat
are postmarked with angels and lambs.
But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned
in a triangle of trees swims dappled...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...ing each other, we'll exit..
Why are things not working for us?
Or we'll sit on the pressed-down snow
In a cemetery, lightly sigh,
And you with your stick paint the palace
Where together we'll be for all time.
Consolation
You won't hear about him any longer,
You won't hear about him in the wind,
In the mournful fire-consumed Poland
His grave you will not find.
May your spirit be still an peaceful,
There will be no losses now:
He is n...Read more of this...
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