Famous Enclosed Rhyme Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Hymn 2

by Isaac Watts
 The deity and humanity of Christ.

John 1:1,3,14; Col. 1:16.

Ere the blue heav'ns were stretched abroad,
From everlasting was the Word:
With God he was; the Word was God,
And must divinely be adored.

By his own power were all things made;
By him supported all things stand;
He is the whole creation's head,
And angels fly at his command.

Ere sin was born, or Satan fell,
He led...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 15. To-night the winds begin to rise

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 To-night the winds begin to rise
And roar from yonder dropping day:
The last red leaf is whirl'd away,
The rooks are blown about the skies;
The forest crack'd, the waters curl'd,
The cattle huddled on the lea;
And wildly dash'd on tower and tree
The sunbeam strikes along the world:
And but for fancies, which aver
That all thy motions gently pass
Athwart a plane of molten glass,
I...Read more of this...

Desolation

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 I think that the bitterest sorrow or pain
Of love unrequited, or cold death’s woe, 
Is sweet, compared to that hour when we know
That some grand passion is on the wane.

When we see that the glory, and glow, and grace
Which lent a splendour to night and day, 
Are surely fading, and showing grey
And dull groundwork of the commonplace.

When fond expressions...Read more of this...

Reconciliation

by Siegfried Sassoon
 When you are standing at your hero’s grave,
Or near some homeless village where he died,
Remember, through your heart’s rekindling pride,
The German soldiers who were loyal and brave.

Men fought like brutes; and hideous things were done;
And you have nourished hatred, harsh and blind. 
But in that Golgotha perhaps you’ll find
The mothers of the men who killed your son....Read more of this...

John Keats

by George (Lord) Byron
 Who killed John Keats? 
'I,' says the Quarterly, 
So savage and Tartarly; 
''Twas one of my feats.' 

Who shot the arrow? 
'The poet-priest Milman 
(So ready to kill man), 
Or Southey or Barrow.'...Read more of this...

The Art Of Poetry

by Jorge Luis Borges
 To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year...Read more of this...

Parting At Morning

by Robert Browning
 Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
And the sun looked over the mountain's rim:
And straight was a path of gold for him,
And the need of a world of men for me....Read more of this...

Comfort To A Youth That Had Lost His Love

by Robert Herrick
 What needs complaints,
When she a place
Has with the race
Of saints?
In endless mirth,
She thinks not on
What's said or done
In earth:
She sees no tears,
Or any tone
Of thy deep groan
She hears;
Nor does she mind,
Or think on't now,
That ever thou
Wast kind:--
But changed above,
She likes not there,
As she did here,
Thy love.
--Forbear, therefore,
And lull asleep
Thy woes, and weep
No more....Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 22. The path by which we twain did go

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 The path by which we twain did go,
Which led by tracts that pleased us well,
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell,
From flower to flower, from snow to snow:
And we with singing cheer'd the way,
And, crown'd with all the season lent,
From April on to April went,
And glad at heart from May to May:
But where the path we walk'd began
To slant...Read more of this...

Magdalen Walks

by Oscar Wilde
 The little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.

A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning 
breeze,
The odour of deep wet grass, and of brown new-furrowed earth,
The birds...Read more of this...

San Miniato

by Oscar Wilde
 See, I have climbed the mountain side
Up to this holy house of God,
Where once that Angel-Painter trod
Who saw the heavens opened wide, 

And throned upon the crescent moon
The Virginal white Queen of Grace, -
Mary! could I but see thy face
Death could not come at all too soon. 

O crowned by God with thorns and pain!
Mother of Christ! O mystic...Read more of this...

Wedding Toast

by Richard Wilbur
 St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not...Read more of this...

Afterwards

by Thomas Hardy
 When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
 And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
 "He was a man who used to notice such things"? 

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
 The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon...Read more of this...

La Mer

by Oscar Wilde
 A white mist drifts across the shrouds,
A wild moon in this wintry sky
Gleams like an angry lion's eye
Out of a mane of tawny clouds.

The muffled steersman at the wheel
Is but a shadow in the gloom; -
And in the throbbing engine-room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.

The shattered storm has left its trace
Upon this huge and heaving dome,
For the thin...Read more of this...

Searching

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 These quiet Autumn days, 
My soul, like Noah's dove, on airy wings
Goes out and searches for the hidden things
Beyond the hills of haze.

With mournful, pleading cries, 
Above the waters of the voiceless sea
That laps the shore of broad Eternity, 
Day after day, it flies, 

Searching, but all in vain, 
For some stray leaf that it may light upon, 
And...Read more of this...

You Ask Me Why Tho Ill at Ease

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the mist,
And languish for the purple seas.
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From...Read more of this...

Transfiguration

by Louisa May Alcott
 Mysterious death! who in a single hour 
Life's gold can so refine 
And by thy art divine 
Change mortal weakness to immortal power! 

Bending beneath the weight of eighty years 
Spent with the noble strife 
of a victorious life 
We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears. 

But ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung 
A miracle...Read more of this...

In Memoriam A. H. H.: 121. Sad Hesper oer the buried sun

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
The team is loosen'd from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken'd in the brain.
Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,
By thee the world's great work is heard
Beginning, and the...Read more of this...

Eternities

by G K Chesterton
 I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.
Well hath He spoken: "Swear not by thy head.
Thou knowest not the hairs," though He, we read,
Writes that wild number in His own strange book.

I cannot count the sands or search the seas,
Death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.
Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,
And I will name the leaves upon...Read more of this...

In The Firelight

by Eugene Field
 The fire upon the hearth is low,
And there is stillness everywhere,
While like winged spirits, here and there,
The firelight shadows fluttering go.
And as the shadows round me creep,
A childish treble breaks the gloom,
And softly from a further room
Comes, "Now I lay me down to sleep."

And somehow, with that little prayer
And that sweet treble in my ears,
My thoughts go back to...Read more of this...

Neutral Tones

by Thomas Hardy
 WE stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by...Read more of this...

The True Knowledge

by Oscar Wilde
 Thou knowest all; I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed -
The land is black with briar and weed,
Nor cares for falling tears or rain.

Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate.

Thou knowest all; I cannot see.
I trust I...Read more of this...

Squash in Blossom

by Robert Francis
 How lush, how loose, the uninhibited squash is.
If ever hearts (and these immoderate leaves
Are vegetable hearts) were worn on sleeves,
The squash's are. In green the squash vine gushes.

The flowers are cornucopias of summer,
Briefly exuberant and cheaply golden.
And if they make a show of being hidden,
Are open promiscuously to every comer.

Let the squash be what it was doomed to be
By...Read more of this...

Reverence

by Robert William Service
 I saw the Greatest Man on Earth,
Aye, saw him with my proper eyes.
A loin-cloth spanned his proper girth,
But he was naked otherwise,
Excepting for his grey sombrero;
And when his domelike head he bared,
With reverence I stared and stared,
As mummified as any Pharaoh.

He leaned upon a little cane,
A big cigar was in his mouth;
Through spectacles of yellow stain
He gazed and gazed...Read more of this...

Reunited

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Let us begin, dear love, where we left off; 
Tie up the broken threads of that old dream; 
And go on happy as before; and seem
Lovers again, though all the world may scoff.

Let us forget the graves, which lie between
Our parting and our meeting, and the tears
That rusted out the goldwork of the years; 
The frosts that fell upon...Read more of this...

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