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Famous Each Year Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Blackburn, Thomas
...,
There pedagogues to address for a decent fee.
'We like to meet,' he goes on, 'men eminent
In the field of letters each year,' and that's well put,
Though I find his words not wholly relevant
To this red-eyed fellow whose mouth tastes rank as soot.
No doubt what he's thinking of is poetry
When 'Thomas Blackburn' he writes, and not the fuss
A life makes when it has no symmetry,
Though the term 'a poet' being mainly posthumous,
Since I'm no stiff, is inappropriate....Read more of this...



by Service, Robert William
...
And though I'm stooped and silver-haired,
Let me with laughter make the hearth gay,
So by the gods I may be spared
Each year to hear: "Pop, Happy Birthday."...Read more of this...

by Edgar, Marriott
...at stumped him to know was this 'ere...
Where the English folk got all the money,
He came and took off them each year.

After duly considering the matter,
He concluded as how his best course,
Were to have an invasion of England,
And tap the supply at its source.

He got other Vikings to join him,
With a promise of plunder and spoil,
And raked up atrocity stories,
To bring all their blood to the boil.

They landed one morning at Weymouth,
And waited for...Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...o man might tell,
He staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell,
And turned each field into a gambler's hell.
Aye, as each year began,
My farmer to the neighboring city ran;
Passed with a mournful anxious face
Into the banker's inner place;
Parleyed, excused, pleaded for longer grace;
Railed at the drought, the worm, the rust, the grass;
Protested ne'er again 'twould come to pass;
With many an `oh' and `if' and `but alas'
Parried or swallowed searching questions rude,
And k...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Robert
...yards of the Grand Army of the Republic. 

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over...Read more of this...



by Bronte, Charlotte
...boding rain,
Gilbert, erewhile on journey gone, 
To-night comes home again.
Ten years have passed above his head, 
Each year has brought him gain;
His prosperous life has smoothly sped, 
Without or tear or stain. 

'Tis somewhat late­the city clocks
Twelve deep vibrations toll,
As Gilbert at the portal knocks, 
Which is his journey's goal.
The street is still and desolate, 
The moon hid by a cloud;
Gilbert, impatient, will not wait,­ 
His second knock peals loud....Read more of this...

by Tynan, Katharine
...loom, 
I, with the centuries to come. 

As the tree blossoms so bloom I, 
Flinging wild branches to the sky; 
Renew each year my leafy suit, 
Strike with the years a deeper root. 

Shelter a thousand birds to be, 
A thousand herds give praise to me; 
And in my kind and grateful shade 
How many a weary head be laid. 

I clothe myself without a stain. 
In me a child is born again, 
A child that looks with innocent eyes 
On a new world with glad surprise. 

T...Read more of this...

by Hacker, Marilyn
...a, Gaylord, Emilienne,
Tania, Eunice: this is for everyone
who marks the distance on a calendar
from what's less likely each year to "recur."
Our saved-for-now lives are life sentences
-- which we prefer to the alternative....Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...New eyes each year
Find old books here,
And new books,too,
Old eyes renew;
So youth and age
Like ink and page
In this house join,
Minting new coin....Read more of this...

by Matthews, William
...The lump of coal my parents teased
I'd find in my Christmas stocking
turned out each year to be an orange,
for I was their sunshine.

Now I have one C. gave me,
a dense node of sleeping fire.
I keep it where I read and write.
"You're on chummy terms with dread,"

it reminds me. "You kiss ambivalence
on both cheeks. But if you close your
heart to me ever I'll wreathe you in flames
and convert you to energy."

...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...he night
The charioteers of Arctos wheelèd round
Its glittering point, as seen from Helen's home,
Whose sad inhabitants each year would come,
With willing steps climbing that rugged height,
And hang long locks of hair, and garlands bound
With amaranth flowers, which, in the clime's despite,
Filled the frore air with unaccustomed light;
Such flowers as in the wintry memory bloom 
Of one friend left adorned that frozen tomb.

Helen, whose spirit was of softer mould,
Whose s...Read more of this...

by Butler, Ellis Parker
...p,
 Haw! Haw!
His widow is now Mrs. Bipp!

Henri Dupont was a fearless young ace;
Five thousand feet up he was hit;
Each year on his grave pretty flowers we place—
And his widow is now Mrs. Schmitt,
 Haw! Haw!
His widow is now Mrs. Schmitt!

Corporal Dunn was a volunteer bold;
He plunged in the deadliest fray;
A bayonet thrust laid him out stony cold—
And his widow is now Mrs. Gray,
 Haw! Haw!
His widow is now Mrs. Gray!

But Peter McGuck was a cowardly sn...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...r> 
Better (someone said) 
not to be born 
and far better 
not to be born twice 
at thirteen 
where the boardinghouse, 
each year a bedroom, 
caught fire. 

Dear friend, 
I will have to sink with hundreds of others 
on a dumbwaiter into hell. 
I will be a light thing. 
I will enter death 
like someone's lost optical lens. 
Life is half enlarged. 
The fish and owls are fierce today. 
Life tilts backward and forward. 
Even the wasps cannot find my ey...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...y,
so close to absolute,
so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come
for the last time.
And I who have,
each year of my life,
spoken to the tooth fairy,
believing in her,
even when I was her,
am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,
although your voice cries into the telephone:
Marry me! Marry me!
and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:
The love is in dark trouble!
The love is starting to die,
right now--
we are in the process of it.
The empty pro...Read more of this...

by Jarrell, Randall
...the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the story

We make of life. But after the last leaf,
The last light--for each year is leafless,

Each day lightless, at the last--the wood begins
Its serious existence: it has no path,

No house, no story; it resists comparison...
One clear, repeated, lapping gurgle, like a spoon

Or a glass breathing, is the brook,
The wood's fouled midnight water. If I walk into the wood

As far as I can walk, I come to my own d...Read more of this...

by Knight, Etheridge
...and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say).He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space.My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him.There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."...Read more of this...

by Clare, John
...xious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E'en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?...Read more of this...

by Bryant, William Cullen
...Shall think of childhood's careless day 
And long long hours of summer play  
In the shade of the apple-tree. 

Each year shall give this apple-tree 55 
A broader flush of roseate bloom  
A deeper maze of verdurous gloom  
And loosen when the frost-clouds lower  
The crisp brown leaves in thicker shower; 
The years shall come and pass but we 60 
Shall hear no longer where we lie  
The summer's songs the autumn's sigh  
In the boughs of the apple-tree. 

...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...the wild by the wattle beguiled, 
That a "stag" makes quite good enough mutton for shearers. 
Be that as it may, as each year passed away, 
a scapegoat was led to the desert and freighted 
With sin (the poor brute must have been overweighted) 
And left there -- to die as his fancy dictated. 

The day it has come, with trumpet and drum. 
With pomp and solemnity fit for the tomb 
They lead the old billy-goat off to his doom: 
On every hand a reverend band, 
Prophets...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...clearly willed,
Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds,
Whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled;
For whom each year we see
Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new;
Who hesitate and falter life away,
And lose tomorrow the ground won today— 
Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

Yes, we await it!—but it still delays,
And then we suffer! and amongst us one,
Who most has suffered, takes dejectedly
His seat upon the intellectual throne;
And all his store of sad ...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs