Famous Coasts Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Little Land

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 When at home alone I sit 
And am very tired of it, 
I have just to shut my eyes 
To go sailing through the skies-- 
To go sailing far away 
To the pleasant Land of Play; 
To the fairy land afar 
Where the Little People are; 
Where the clover-tops are trees, 
And the rain-pools are the seas, 
And the...Read more of this...

Wirers

by Siegfried Sassoon
 ‘Pass it along, the wiring party’s going out’— 
And yawning sentries mumble, ‘Wirers going out.’ 
Unravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud, 
They toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood. 

The Boche sends up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there,
Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts 
Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching...Read more of this...

Belisarius

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 I am poor and old and blind;
The sun burns me, and the wind
Blows through the city gate
And covers me with dust
From the wheels of the august
Justinian the Great. 

It was for him I chased
The Persians o'er wild and waste,
As General of the East;
Night after night I lay
In their camps of yesterday;
Their forage was my feast. 

For him, with sails...Read more of this...

To Canaris, The Greek Patriot

by Victor Hugo
 ("Canaris! nous t'avons oublié.") 
 
 {VIII., October, 1832.} 


 O Canaris! O Canaris! the poet's song 
 Has blameful left untold thy deeds too long! 
 But when the tragic actor's part is done, 
 When clamor ceases, and the fights are won, 
 When heroes realize what Fate decreed, 
 When chieftains mark no more which thousands...Read more of this...

At Tower Peak

by Gary Snyder
At Tower Peak

 Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing
 Freeways are clogged all day
 Academies packed with scholars writing papers
 City people lean and dark
 This land most real 
 As its western-tending golden slopes
 And bird-entangled central valley swamps
 Sea-lion, urchin coasts
 Southerly salmon-probes 
 Into the aromatic almost-Mexican hills
 Along a range of granite peaks
 The...Read more of this...

In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen ELIZABETH

by Anne Bradstreet
 Proem. 

1.1 Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
1.2 Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
1.3 Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime, 
1.4 And so has vow'd, whilst there is world or time. 
1.5 So great's thy glory, and thine excellence, 
1.6 The sound thereof raps every human sense 
1.7 That men account it no...Read more of this...

The Voyagers

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 We shall launch our shallop on waters blue from some dim primrose shore,
We shall sail with the magic of dusk behind and enchanted coasts before,
Over oceans that stretch to the sunset land where lost Atlantis lies,
And our pilot shall be the vesper star that shines in the amber skies. 

The sirens will call to us again, all sweet and...Read more of this...

The Day Of Doom

by Michael Wigglesworth
 Still was the night, Serene & Bright, 
when all Men sleeping lay;
Calm was the season, & carnal reason 
thought so 'twould last for ay.
Soul, take thine ease, let sorrow cease,
much good thou hast in store:
This was their Song, their Cups among, 
the Evening before.

Wallowing in all kind of sin, 
vile wretches lay secure:
The best of men had scarcely then...Read more of this...

The Planting of the Apple-Tree

by William Cullen Bryant
COME let us plant the apple-tree. 
Cleave the tough greensward with the spade; 
Wide let its hollow bed be made; 
There gently lay the roots and there 
Sift the dark mould with kindly care 5 
And press it o'er them tenderly  
As round the sleeping infant's feet  
We softly fold the cradle sheet; 
So plant we the apple-tree....Read more of this...

An Ode in Time of Hesitation

by William Vaughn Moody
 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted ***** regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.


I 

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made 
To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe, 
And set here in the city's talk and trade 
To the good memory of...Read more of this...

The Worlds in this World

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
 Doors were left open in heaven again: 
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
its last angles caught in sopped
newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 
all this in one American street. 
 Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 
recedes, incense is lit, an infant...Read more of this...

Mountains

by Henry Kendall
RIFTED mountains, clad with forests, girded round by gleaming pines, 
Where the morning, like an angel, robed in golden splendour shines; 
Shimmering mountains, throwing downward on the slopes a mazy glare 
Where the noonday glory sails through gulfs of calm and glittering air; 
Stately mountains, high and hoary, piled with blocks of amber cloud, 
Where the fading twilight lingers, when...Read more of this...

The Invincible Armada

by Friedrich von Schiller
 She comes, she comes--the burden of the deeps!
Beneath her wails the universal sea!
With clanking chains and a new god, she sweeps,
And with a thousand thunders, unto thee!
The ocean-castles and the floating hosts--
Ne'er on their like looked the wild water!--Well
May man the monster name "Invincible."
O'er shuddering waves she gathers to thy coasts!
The horror that she spreads can claim
Just title to...Read more of this...

Cleopatra

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 HER mouth is fragrant as a vine,
A vine with birds in all its boughs;
Serpent and scarab for a sign
Between the beauty of her brows
And the amorous deep lids divine.

Her great curled hair makes luminous
Her cheeks, her lifted throat and chin.
Shall she not have the hearts of us
To shatter, and the loves therein
To shred between her fingers thus?

Small ruined broken...Read more of this...

Daffy Duck In Hollywood

by John Ashbery
 Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of "I Thought about You" or something mellow from
Amadigi di Gaula for everything--a mint-condition can
Of Rumford's Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller's fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock--to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue...Read more of this...

At a Lunar Eclipse

by Thomas Hardy
 Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea, 
Now steals along upon the Moon's meek shine 
In even monochrome and curving line 
Of imperturbable serenity. 

How shall I link such sun-cast symmetry 
With the torn troubled form I know as thine, 
That profile, placid as a brow divine, 
With continents of moil and misery? 

And can immense Mortality but...Read more of this...

148. To Miss Logan with Beattie's Poems

by Robert Burns
 AGAIN the silent wheels of time
 Their annual round have driven,
And you, tho’ scarce in maiden prime,
 Are so much nearer Heaven.


No gifts have I from Indian coasts
 The infant year to hail;
I send you more than India boasts,
 In Edwin’s simple tale.


Our sex with guile, and faithless love,
 Is charg’d, perhaps too true;
But may, dear maid, each lover...Read more of this...

Forgetfulness

by Hart Crane
 Forgetfulness is like a song 
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders. 
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, 
Outspread and motionless, -- 
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly. 

Forgetfulness is rain at night, 
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child. 
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree, 
And it...Read more of this...

Hymn 16 Part 2

by Isaac Watts
 The enjoyment of Christ; or, Delight in ordinances.

Lord, what a heav'n of saving grace
Shines through the beauties of thy face,
And lights our passions to a flame!
Lord, how we love thy charming name!

When I can say, "My God is mine,"
When I can feel thy glories shine,
I tread the world beneath my feet,
And all that earth calls good or great.

While such...Read more of this...

The Book of Urizen: Chapter IX

by William Blake
 1. Then the Inhabitants of those Cities:
Felt their Nerves change into Marrow
And hardening Bones began 
In swift diseases and torments,
In throbbings & shootings & grindings
Thro' all the coasts; till weaken'd
The Senses inward rush'd shrinking,
Beneath the dark net of infection. 

2. Till the shrunken eyes clouded over
Discernd not the woven hipocrisy
But the streaky slime in their heavens
Brought together by narrowing...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXIX: Like Some Weak Lords

by Sir Philip Sidney
 Like some weak lords, neighbor'd by mighty kings, 
To keep themselves and their chief cities free, 
Do easily yield, that all their coasts may be 
Ready to store their camps of needful things: 

So Stella's heart finding what power Love brings, 
To keep itself in life and liberty, 
Doth willing grant, that in the frontiers he 
Use all to...Read more of this...

Deeply Morbid

by Stevie Smith
 Deeply morbid deeply morbid was the girl who typed the letters
Always out of office hours running with her social betters
But when daylight and the darkness of the office closed about her
Not for this ah not for this her office colleagues came to doubt her
It was that look within her eye
Why did it always seem to say goodbye?

Joan her name...Read more of this...

The Broken Balance

by Robinson Jeffers
 I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla

The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers...Read more of this...

Ode To The Lemon

by Pablo Neruda
 From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its plantarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid...Read more of this...

Psalm 84

by John Milton
 How lovely are thy dwellings fair!
O Lord of Hoasts, how dear
The pleasant Tabernacles are!
Where thou do'st dwell so near.
My Soul doth long and almost die
Thy Courts O Lord to see,
My heart and flesh aloud do crie,
O living God, for thee.
There ev'n the Sparrow freed from wrong
Hath found a house of rest, 
The Swallow there, to lay her young
Hath built...Read more of this...

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