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Famous Cypresses Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...ck buzzard floating
 slowly,
 high
 beyond the tree tops, 
Below, the red cedar, festoon’d with tylandria—the pines and cypresses, growing
 out
 of the
 white sand that spreads far and flat; 
Rude boats descending the big Pedee—climbing plants, parasites, with color’d
 flowers
 and
 berries, enveloping huge trees, 
The waving drapery on the live oak, trailing long and low, noiselessly waved by the wind;
The camp of Georgia wagoners, just after dark—the supper-fires, and the c...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt



...Along the avenue of cypresses, 
All in their scarlet cloaks and surplices 
Of linen, go the chanting choristers, 
The priests in gold and black, the villagers. . . 

And all along the path to the cemetery 
The round dark heads of men crowd silently, 
And black-scarved faces of womenfolk, wistfully 
Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery. 

And at the foot of a grave a fa...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.
...Dark cypresses--
The world is uneasily happy;
It will all be forgotten.
 --Theodore Storm

Mother of roots, you have not seeded
The tall ashes of loneliness
For me. Therefore,
Now I go.
If I knew the name,
Your name, all trellises of vineyards and old fire
Would quicken to shake terribly my
Earth, mother of spiraling searches, terrible
Fable of calcium, girl. I c...Read more of this...
by Wright, James
...he beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses....Read more of this...
by Doolittle, Hilda
...will not see it! 



3. The Laid Out Body 

Stone is a forehead where dreames grieve 
without curving waters and frozen cypresses. 
Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time 
with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets. 

I have seen grey showers move towards the waves 
raising their tender riddle arms, 
to avoid being caught by lying stone 
which loosens their limbs without soaking their blood. 

For stone gathers seed and clouds, 
skeleton larks and wolves of penumbr...Read more of this...
by García Lorca, Federico



...ow he will not die in paradise
nor hear again
the lutes of paradise among the olive trees,
by the clear pools under the cypresses. Time

begins now, in which he hears again
that pulse which is the narrative
sea, ar dawn when its pull is stongest.
What has brought us here
will lead us away; our ship
sways in the tined harbor water.

Now the spell is ended.
Giove him back his life,
sea that can only move forward....Read more of this...
by Gluck, Louise
...ith equal steps and fingers intertwined.
Thence to a lonely dwelling, where the shore
Is shadowed with steep rocks, and cypresses
Cleave with their dark green cones the silent skies
And with their shadows the clear depths below,

And where a little terrace from its bowers
Of blooming myrtle and faint lemon flowers 
Scatters its sense-dissolving fragrance o'er
The liquid marble of the windless lake;
And where the aged forest's limbs look hoar
Under the leaves which their green...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...Between the avenues of cypresses, 
All in their scarlet cloaks, and surplices 
Of linen, go the chaunting choristers, 
The priests in gold and black, the villagers. 

And all along the path to the cemetery 
The round, dark heads of men crowd silently 
And black-scarved faces of women-folk, wistfully 
Watch at the banner of death, and the mystery. 

And at the foot of a grave a fat...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.
...m with tears, 
Green hills of life that slope to death, 
And haunts of home, whose vistaed trees 
Shade off to mournful cypresses, 
With the white amaranths underneath. 
Even while I look, I can but heed 
The restless sands' incessant fall, 
Importunate hours that hours succeed 
Each clamorous with its own sharp need, 
And duty keeping pace with all. 
Shut down and clasp with heavy lids; 
I hear again the voice that bids 
The dreamer leave his dream midway 
For larger hopes a...Read more of this...
by Whittier, John Greenleaf
...—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
R...Read more of this...
by Boland, Eavan
...edles for hurricanes,
trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;
when I was green like them, I used to think
those cypresses, leaning against the sea,
that take the sea noise up into their branches,
are not real cypresses but casuarinas.
Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.
But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,
whoever called them so had a good cause,
watching their bending bodies wail like women
after a storm, when some schooner came home
with news of one more sa...Read more of this...
by Walcott, Derek
...d forever.
Finally it tried to infiltrate the exact
Center of my city, a small square bordered
With palm trees, olives, cypresses, a square
Where no one gathered, not even thieves or lovers.
It was a place which no longer had any purpose,
But held itself aloof, I thought, the way
A deaf aunt might, from opinions, styles, gossip.
I liked it there. It was completely lifeless,
Sad & clear in what seemed always a perfect, 
Windless noon. I saw it first as a child,
Looking down at...Read more of this...
by Levis, Larry
...s and stares. 
What was that dark shape she saw a moment 
trembling between the sheaves? The sky lowers, 
the small fat cypresses by the fields' edge 
part, and something is going. Is that the way 
she too must take? The world blurs before her eyes 
or her sight is failing. I cannot take her hand, 
then or now, and lead her to a resting place 
where our love matters. She stands frozen 
before the twenty-third summer of her life, 
someone I know, someone I will always know....Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip
...ight;
Breathing the peace of life,
Ease after toil and strife . . .
Hark to their silver sigh!
Olives against the sky.

Cypresses glooming the sky,
Stark at the end of the road;
Failing and faint am I,
Lief to be eased of my load;
There where the stones peer white
in the last of the silvery light,
Quiet and cold I'll lie -
Cypresses etching the sky.

Trees, trees against the sky -
O I have loved them well!
There are pleasures you cannot buy,
Treasurers you cannot sell,
And no...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...l, the white, white doves 
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky 
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me]. 

*** 
Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting 
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel 
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank— 
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in 
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass... 

*** 
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face 
And thought it through, you would have remem...Read more of this...
by Darwish, Mahmoud
...With maids stately as cypresses, and fair
As roses newly plucked, your wine-cups share,
Or e'er Death's blasts shall rend your robe of flesh
Like yonder rose leaves, lying scattered there!...Read more of this...
by Khayyam, Omar

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things