Famous Child Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Child poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous child poems. These examples illustrate what a famous child poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Katharine Tynan
Lest he miss other children, lo!
His angel is his playfellow.
A riotous angel two years old,
With wings of rose and curls of gold.
There on the nursery floor together
They play when it is rainy weather,
Building brick castles with much pain,
Only to knock them down again.
Two golden heads together look
An hour long o'er...Read more of this...
by
Elinor Wylie
The headlights raced; the moon, death-faced,
Stared down on that golden river.
I saw through the smoke the scarlet cloak
Of a boy who could not shiver.
His father's hand forced him to stand,
The traffic thundered slaughter;
One foot he thrust in the whirling dust
As it were running water.
As in a dream I saw the stream
Scatter in...Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child,...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
Eat steaks running with brown gravy,
Strawberries and cream, eclaires and coffee.
The dago shovelman finishes the dry bread and bologna,
Washes it down with a dipper from the water-boy,
And goes back to...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
The child's wonder
At the old moon
Comes back nightly.
She points her finger
To the far silent yellow thing
Shining through the branches
Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,
Crying with her little tongue, "See the moon!"
And in her bed fading to sleep
With babblings of the moon on her little mouth....Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
(O little white feet of mine)
Out in the storm and the rain you fly;
(Red, red shoes the colour of wine)
Can the children hear my cry?
(O little white feet of mine)
Never a child in the whole great town;
(Red, red shoes the colour of wine)
Lights out and the blinds pulled down.
(O little white feet of mine)
Never a light on a window...Read more of this...
by
Ogden Nash
FIRST
Be it a girl, or one of the boys,
It is scarlet all over its avoirdupois,
It is red, it is boiled; could the obstetrician
Have possibly been a lobstertrician?
His degrees and credentials were hunky-dory,
But how's for an infantile inventory?
Here's the prodigy, here's the miracle!
Whether its head is oval or spherical,
You rejoice to find it has only one,
Having dreaded a two-headed daughter...Read more of this...
by
Fernando Pessoa
As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Oh! vous aurez trop dit.")
{Bk. III. xiv., April, 1843.}
Ah, you said too often to your angel
There are other angels in the sky—
There, where nothing changes, nothing suffers,
Sweet it were to enter in on high.
To that dome on marvellous pilasters,
To that tent roofed o'er...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
THIS is the hero-heart of the enchanted isle,
Whom now the twilight children tenderly enfold,
Pat with their pearly palms and crown with elfin gold,
While in the mountain’s breast his brothers watch and smile.
Who now of Dana’s host may guide these dancing feet?
What bright immortal hides and through a child’s light breath
Laughs an immortal joy—Angus of love and death
Returned to make...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
At four years Nature is mountainous,
Mysterious, and submarine. Even
A city child knows this, hearing the subway's
Rumor underground. Between the grate,
Dropping his penny, he learned out all loss,
The irretrievable cent of fate,
And now this newest of the mysteries,
Confronts his honest and his studious eyes----
His mother much too fat and absentminded,
Gazing past his face, careless of him,
His fume, his charm, his...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Virgins promised when I died,
That they would each primrose-tide
Duly, morn and evening, come,
And with flowers dress my tomb.
--Having promised, pay your debts
Maids, and here strew violets....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
If you seek Him, abandon child and wife,
Arise, and sever all these ties to life;
All these are bonds to check you on your course.
Arise, and cut these bonds, as with a knife....Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Near by the silent waters of the Mediterranean,
And at the door of an old hut stood a coloured man,
Whose dress was oriental in style and poor with wear,
While adown his furrowed cheeks ran many a tear.
And the poor coloured man seemed very discontent,
And his grief overcame him at this moment;
And he wrung his hands in agony wild,
And he...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Si vous continuez toute pâle.")
{November, 1870.}
If you continue thus so wan and white;
If I, one day, behold
You pass from out our dull air to the light,
You, infant—I, so old:
If I the thread of our two lives must see
Thus blent to human view,
I...Read more of this...
by
William Henry Davies
A dear old couple my grandparents were,
And kind to all dumb things; they saw in Heaven
The lamb that Jesus petted when a child;
Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to them
Death was a rainbow in Eternity,
That promised everlasting brightness soon.
An old seafaring man was he; a rough
Old man, but kind; and hairy,...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE CHILD Margaret begins to write numbers on a Saturday morning, the first numbers formed under her wishing child fingers.
All the numbers come well-born, shaped in figures assertive for a frieze in a child’s room.
Both 1 and 7 are straightforward, military, filled with lunge and attack, erect in shoulder-straps.
The 6 and 9 salute as dancing sisters, elder and younger,...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
The young child, Christ, is straight and wise
And asks questions of the old men, questions
Found under running water for all children
And found under shadows thrown on still waters
By tall trees looking downward, old and gnarled.
Found to the eyes of children alone, untold,
Singing a low song in the loneliness.
And the young child, Christ, goes on asking
And the old men answer...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Why, Madam, will ye longer weep,
Whenas your baby's lull'd asleep?
And, pretty child, feels now no more
Those pains it lately felt before.
All now is silent; groans are fled;
Your child lies still, yet is not dead,
But rather like a flower hid here,
To spring again another year....Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
'The child is father to the man.'
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:
'The child is father to the man.'
No; what the poet did write ran,
'The man is father to the child.'
'The child is father to the man!'
How can he be? The words are wild....Read more of this...
by
Edgar Albert Guest
I will lend you, for a little time,
A child of mine, He said.
For you to love the while he lives,
And mourn for when he's dead.
It may be six or seven years,
Or twenty-two or three.
But will you, till I call him back,
Take care of him for Me?
He'll bring his charms to gladden you,
And should his stay be brief.
You'll have his lovely...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Go, pretty child, and bear this flower
Unto thy little Saviour;
And tell him, by that bud now blown,
He is the Rose of Sharon known.
When thou hast said so, stick it there
Upon his bib or stomacher;
And tell him, for good handsel too,
That thou hast brought a whistle new,
Made of a clean straight oaten reed,
To charm his cries at time of need;
Tell...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
All day he lay upon the sand
When summer sun was bright,
And let the grains sift through his hand
With infantile delight;
Just like a child, so soft and fair,
Though he was twenty-five -
An innocent, my mother -care
Had kept so long alive.
Oh it is hard to bear a cross
For five-and-twenty years;
A daft son and a husband's loss
Are woes out-weighing tears.
Yet bright and...Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had,...Read more of this...
by
Billy Collins
As sure as prehistoric fish grew legs
and sauntered off the beaches into forests
working up some irregular verbs for their
first conversation, so three-year-old children
enter the phase of name-calling.
Every day a new one arrives and is added
to the repertoire. You Dumb Goopyhead,
You Big Sewerface, You Poop-on-the-Floor
(a kind of Navaho ring to that one)
they yell from knee level, their little mugs
flushed with...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Child poems.