Famous Civic Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Civic poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous civic poems. These examples illustrate what a famous civic poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...nder the wreaths that crowned each royal head.
Life was made greater by their sweetheart prayers.
Passion was turned to civic strength that day—
Piling the marbles, making fairer domes
With zeal that else had burned bright youth away.
I have seen priestesses of life go by
Gliding in samite through the incense-sea—
Innocent children marching with them there,
Singing in flowered robes, "THE EARTH IS FREE":
While on the fair, deep-carved unfinished towers
Sentinels watched in ar...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...f an equal
humanity,
How often your Re-volution has proven but E-volution
Roll’d again back on itself in the tides of a civic insanity!...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...weeping.
Night has come to Leeds, the carnival is bright
With neon lights outlining every stall and carousel,
The Civic Hall is strung with a thousand bulbs,
On Beeston Hill I hold the city in my arms.
39
An iridescent car of fire
Is drawn across the winter sky
From the gates of heaven to Mount St. Mary’s;
On Beeston Hill a haptic wind raises
The ghosts of splayed dead leaves
And light through chandeliers glows
In a thousand shades, pale carousels
In mys...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...Moscow ballet at seven in the evening.
You look at everything. You lay your cheek
against my shoulder, smoothing down my sleeve,
the Russian blizzards somehow less than bleak,
portrayed with whimsy on the backdrop screens
in dolloped watercolors as they are.
I ask if you know what their movement means.
You wish our situation not so far.
And everywhere, th...Read more of this...
by
Reeser, Jennifer
...d's annals have known her name;
And still to the three-hilled rebel town
Dear is that ancient name's renown,
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son.
O Damsel Dorothy! Dorothy Q.!
Strange is the gift that I owe to you;
Such a gift as never a king
Save to daughter or son might bring,--
All my tenure of heart and hand,
All my title to house and land;
Mother and sister and child and wife
And joy and sorrow and death and life!
What if a hundre...Read more of this...
by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...ess blood,
And, spite of Jove, his banks o'erflows,
Uxorious flood.
Yes, Fame shall tell of civic steel
That better Persian lives had spilt,
To youths, whose minish'd numbers feel
Their parents' guilt.
What god shall Rome invoke to stay
Her fall? Can suppliance overbear
The ear of Vesta, turn'd away
From chant and prayer?
Who comes, commission'd to atone
For crime like ...Read more of this...
by
Horace,
...ere grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked ***** infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston,...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...nd now thicker, like the flakes
In a fall of snow, and so press in, perforce
Of multitude, as crowds that in an hour
Of civic tumult jam the doors, and bear
The keepers down, and throng, their rags and the
The basest, far into that council-hall
Where sit the best and stateliest of the land?
³Can I not fling this horror off me again,
Seeing with how great ease Nature can smile
Balmier and nobler from her bath of storm,
At random ravage? and how easily
The mountain there h...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...elf, among th' Eustatians,
Insults so well the laws of nations;
Ev'n Tryon's fame grows dim, and mourning
He yields the civic crown of burning.
I see, with pleasure and surprize,
New triumph sparkling in your eyes;
But view, where now renew'd in might,
Again the Rebels dare the fight."
"I look'd, and far in southern skies
Saw Greene, their second hope, arise,
And with his small, but gallant, band.
Invade the Carolinian land.
As winds, in stormy circles whirl'd,
Rush billowy o...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...ights faintly ! My country is there,
Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow :
My Italy 's THERE, with my brave civic Pair,
To disfranchise despair !
XIX.
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn ;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this -- and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.
XX.
Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the we...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...No Brigadier throughout the Year
So civic as the Jay --
A Neighbor and a Warrior too
With shrill felicity
Pursuing Winds that censure us
A February Day,
The Brother of the Universe
Was never blown away --
The Snow and he are intimate --
I've often seem them play
When Heaven looked upon us all
With such severity
I felt apology were due
To an insulted sky
Whose pompous frown was Nutriment
To the...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...e of the Mont Saint Gothard,
We shall begin by way of rejoicing;
None of that shooting the sky (blank cartridge),
Nor a civic guard, all plumes and lacquer,
Hunting Radetzky's soul like a partridge
Over Morello with squib and cracker.
XXXIII.
This time we'll shoot better game and bag 'em hot---
No mere display at the stone of Dante,
But a kind of sober Witanagemot
(Ex: ``Casa Guidi,'' _quod videas ante_)
Shall ponder, once Freedom restored to Florence,
How Art may return th...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...Rome is but nature's twin, which has reflected Rome.
We see its civic might, the signs of its decorum
In the transparent air, the firmament's blue dome,
The colonnades of groves and in the meadow's forum....Read more of this...
by
Mandelstam, Osip
...pe.
Who will they find
In the dark woods of the dark mind
Now I have gone
Into the world?
Across the blazing civic lawn
A shadow's hurled
And I must follow.
Something slides beneath my vest
Like melted tallow,
Thick but thin,
Burning where it comes to rest
On what was skin.
Who will they find?
A man with no eyes in his head?
Or just a mind
Calm and alone?
Or just a mouth, silent, dead,
The lips half gone?
Will they presume
That some...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...been gilt and graved
On cloud-kissed column, by the sweet south ocean laved.
From us no crown! no honors from the civic sheaf—
Purely this poet's tear-bejewelled, aye-green leaf!
H.L.W.
...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...'t or won't determine
What's best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you're old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!"
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.
An hour they sate in council,
At length the Mayor broke silence:
"For a guilder I'd my ermine gown sell;
I wish I were a mile hence!
It's easy to bid on...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...ng of a faith,
Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made,
Some patient force to change them when we will,
Some civic manhood firm against the crowd--
But yonder, whiff! there comes a sudden heat,
The gravest citizen seems to lose his head,
The king is scared, the soldier will not fight,
The little boys begin to shoot and stab,
A kingdom topples over with a shriek
Like an old woman, and down rolls the world
In mock heroics stranger than our own;
Revolts, repub...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...feel,
Within whose heated bosom throngs
The memory of a thousand wrongs.
To him had Venice ceased to be
Her ancient civic boast — "the Free;"
And in the palace of St Mark
Unnamed accusers in the dark
Within the "Lion's mouth" had placed
A charge against him uneffaced:
He fled in time, and saved his life,
To waste his future years in strife,
That taught his land how great her loss
In him who triumph'd o'er the Cross,
'Gainst which he rear'd the Crescent high,
And...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...")
{I., July, 1830.}
Youth of France, sons of the bold,
Your oak-leaf victor-wreaths behold!
Our civic-laurels—honored dead!
So bright your triumphs in life's morn,
Your maiden-standards hacked and torn,
On Austerlitz might lustre shed.
All that your fathers did re-done—
A people's rights all nobly won—
Ye tore them living from the shroud!
Three glorious days bright July's gift,
The Bastiles off our hearts ye lift!
Oh! of s...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...then
To honour not herself but worthy men.
These virtues now are banished out of town,
Our Civil Wars have lost the civic crown.
He highest builds, who with most art destroys,
And against others' fame his own employs.
I see the envious caterpillar sit
On the fair blossom of each growing wit.
The air's already tainted with the swarms
Of insects which against you rise in arms:
Word-peckers, paper-rats, book-scorpions,
Of wit corrupted, the unfashioned sons.
The ba...Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
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