Famous Dearth Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

The Young Soldier

by Wilfred Owen
 It is not death
Without hereafter
To one in dearth
Of life and its laughter,

Nor the sweet murder
Dealt slow and even
Unto the martyr
Smiling at heaven:

It is the smile
Faint as a (waning) myth,
Faint, and exceeding small
On a boy's murdered mouth....Read more of this...

Isles of Greece The

by George (Lord) Byron
 The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus
sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set...

The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians'...Read more of this...

Sonnet FOUND IN LAURA'S TOMB

by Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 406] SONNET FOUND IN LAURA'S TOMB. Qui reposan quei caste e felice ossa.  Here peaceful sleeps the chaste, the happy shadeOf that pure spirit, which adorn'd this earth:Pure fame, true beauty, and transcendent worth,Rude stone! beneath thy rugged breast are laid.Death sudden snatch'd the dear lamented maid!Read more of this...

Consolation

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
ALL are not taken; there are left behind 
Living Belov¨¨ds tender looks to bring 
And make the daylight still a happy thing  
And tender voices to make soft the wind: 
But if it were not so¡ªif I could find 5 
No love in all this world for comforting  
Nor any path but hollowly did ring 
Where 'dust to...Read more of this...

Sonnets xx

by William Shakespeare
 POOR soul, the centre of my sinful earth-- 
My sinful earth these rebel powers array-- 
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, 
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? 
Why so large cost, having so short a lease, 
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? 
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, 
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy...Read more of this...

Death And Birth

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Death and birth should dwell not near together:
Wealth keeps house not, even for shame, with dearth:
Fate doth ill to link in one brief tether
Death and birth.

Harsh the yoke that binds them, strange the girth
Seems that girds them each with each: yet whether
Death be best, who knows, or life on earth?

Ill the rose-red and the sable feather
Blend in one crown's...Read more of this...

De Profundis

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I

The face, which, duly as the sun, 
Rose up for me with life begun, 
To mark all bright hours of the day 
With hourly love, is dimmed away—
And yet my days go on, go on.

II 

The tongue which, like a stream, could run
Smooth music from the roughest stone, 
And every morning with ' Good day'
Make each day good, is...Read more of this...

The Isles of Greece

by George (Lord) Byron
 The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus
sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set...

The mountains look on Marathon--
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians'...Read more of this...

Proverbs of Hell (Excerpt from The Marriage of Heaven and H

by William Blake
 In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
The cut worm forgives the plow.
Dip him in the river who loves water.
A fool...Read more of this...

The Legend of St. Austin and the Child

by Katharine Tynan
 St. Austin, going in thought 
Along the sea-sands gray, 
Into another world was caught,
And Carthage far away. 

He saw the City of God 
Hang in the saffron sky; 
And this was holy ground he trod, 
Where mortals come not nigh. 

He saw pale spires aglow, 
Houses of heavenly sheen; 
All in a world of rose and snow, 
A sea...Read more of this...

Ode To Meaning

by Robert Pinsky
 Dire one and desired one,
Savior, sentencer--

In an old allegory you would carry
A chained alphabet of tokens:

Ankh Badge Cross.
Dragon,
Engraved figure guarding a hallowed intaglio,
Jasper kinema of legendary Mind,
Naked omphalos pierced
By quills of rhyme or sense, torah-like: unborn
Vein of will, xenophile
Yearning out of Zero.

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The...Read more of this...

An Edwardian Sunday Broomhill Sheffield

by John Betjeman
 High dormers are rising
So sharp and surprising,
And ponticum edges
The driveways of gravel;
Stone houses from ledges
Look down on ravines.
The vision can travel
From gable to gable,
Italianate mansion
And turretted stable,
A sylvan expansion
So varied and jolly
Where laurel and holly
Commingle their greens.

Serene on a Sunday
The sun glitters hotly
O'er mills that on Monday
With engines will hum.
By tramway excursion
To Dore and to Totley
In search of diversion
The...Read more of this...

Nos Immortales

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 Perhaps we go with wind and cloud and sun, 
Into the free companionship of air; 
Perhaps with sunsets when the day is done, 
All's one to me -- I do not greatly care; 
So long as there are brown hills -- and a tree 
Like a mad prophet in a land of dearth -- 
And I can lie and...Read more of this...

Lines from Endymion

by John Keats
 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loviliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondance, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the...Read more of this...

A Babys Death

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 A little soul scarce fledged for earth
Takes wing with heaven again for goal
Even while we hailed as fresh from birth
A little soul.

Our thoughts ring sad as bells that toll,
Not knowing beyond this blind world's girth
What things are writ in heaven's full scroll.

Our fruitfulness is there but dearth,
And all things held in time's control
Seem there, perchance, ill dreams, not worth
A...Read more of this...

The Rupaiyat of Omar Kalvin

by Rudyard Kipling
 Now the New Year, reviving last Year's Debt,
The Thoughtful Fisher casteth wide his Net;
 So I with begging Dish and ready Tongue
Assail all Men for all that I can get.

Imports indeed are gone with all their Dues --
Lo! Salt a Lever that I dare not use,
 Nor may I ask the Tillers in Bengal --
Surely my Kith and Kin...Read more of this...

Just Whistle A Bit

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Just whistle a bit, if the day be dark,
And the sky be overcast:
If mute be the voice of the piping lark,
Why, pipe your own small blast.
And it's wonderful how o'er the gray sky-track
The truant warbler comes stealing back.
But why need he come? for your soul's at rest,
And the song in the heart,—ah, that is best.[Pg 99]
Just whistle a...Read more of this...

My prayers must meet a brazen heaven

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 My prayers must meet a brazen heaven
And fail and scatter all away.
Unclean and seeming unforgiven
My prayers I scarcely call to pray.
I cannot buoy my heart above; 
Above I cannot entrance win.
I reckon precedents of love, 
But feel the long success of sin.

My heaven is brass and iron my earth: 
Yea, iron is mingled with my clay, 
So harden'd is...Read more of this...

eight roundels

by Rg Gregory
 (roundel: variation of the rondeau
consisting of three stanzas of three
lines each, linked together with but
two rhymes and a refrain at the end
of the first and third group)



1.
the blind rose

today's fullness is tomorrow's gone
(the next day after no one knows)
last year's dream now feeds upon
 what blindly grows

imagine if you like a rose
on which no likely sun has shone
a darkness...Read more of this...

Little Mack

by Eugene Field
 This talk about the journalists that run the East is bosh,
We've got a Western editor that's little, but, O gosh!
He lives here in Mizzoora where the people are so set
In ante-bellum notions that they vote for Jackson yet;
But the paper he is running makes the rusty fossils swear,--
The smartest, likeliest paper that is printed anywhere!
And, best of all, the...Read more of this...

1914 III: The Dead

by Rupert Brooke
 Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! 
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, 
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. 
These laid the world away; poured out the red 
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
That men call age; and...Read more of this...

The Show

by Wilfred Owen
 My soul looked down from a vague height with Death,
As unremembering how I rose or why,
And saw a sad land, weak with sweats of dearth,
Gray, cratered like the moon with hollow woe,
And fitted with great pocks and scabs of plaques.

Across its beard, that horror of harsh wire,
There moved thin caterpillars, slowly uncoiled.
It seemed they pushed themselves to be as...Read more of this...

A Thing of Beauty (Endymion)

by John Keats
 A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: 
Its lovliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep 
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing 
A flowery band to bind us to the earth, 
Spite of despondence, of...Read more of this...

What the People Said

by Rudyard Kipling
 (June 21st, 1887)
By the well, where the bullocks go
Silent and blind and slow --
By the field where the young corn dies
In the face of the sultry skies,
They have heard, as the dull Earth hears
The voice of the wind of an hour,
The sound of the Great Queen's voice:
"My God hath given me years,
Hath granted dominion and power:
And I bid you,...Read more of this...

Dream Song 58: Industrious affable having brain on fire

by John Berryman
 Industrious, affable, having brain on fire,
Henry perplexed himself; others gave up;
good girls gave in;
geography was hard on friendship, Sire;
marriages lashed & languished, anguished; dearth of group
and what else had been;

the splendour & the lose grew all the same,
Sire. His heart stiffened, and he failed to smile,
catching (enfit) on.
The law: we must, owing to chiefly shame
lacing our pride, down what...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Dearth poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace