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Famous Fires Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...In the other gardens 
And all up the vale, 
From the autumn bonfires 
See the smoke trail! 

Pleasant summer over 
And all the summer flowers, 
The red fire blazes, 
The grey smoke towers. 

Sing a song of seasons! 
Something bright in all! 
Flowers in the summer, 
Fires in the fall!...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...one
Went the glad Greeks well pleased that they their simple vows had
done.

And the old priest put out the waning fires
Save that one lamp whose restless ruby glowed
For ever in the cell, and the shrill lyres
Came fainter on the wind, as down the road
In joyous dance these country folk did pass,
And with stout hands the warder closed the gates of polished brass.

Long time he lay and hardly dared to breathe,
And heard the cadenced drip of spilt-out wine,
And the ros...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...br>"
Then, with a smile of content, thus answered Basil the blacksmith,
Taking with easy air the accustomed seat by the fireside:--
"Benedict Bellefontaine, thou hast ever thy jest and thy ballad!
Ever in cheerfullest mood art thou, when others are filled with
Gloomy forebodings of ill, and see only ruin before them.
Happy art thou, as if every day thou hadst picked up a horseshoe."
Pausing a moment, to take the pipe that Evangeline brought him,
And with a coal from t...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...tored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered a...Read more of this...

by Pinsky, Robert
...und and afterlife,
Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto,

What has a brilliant, living soul to do with
Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
And troughs of smoking blood? Provincial stinkers,

Our languages don't touch you, you're like that mother
Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi,

The one who washed his hands of all those capers
Right at the outset. Or maybe he became
The author of these lines, a...Read more of this...



by Alighieri, Dante
...mong them. 

 Every tomb 
 Stood open, white with heat. No craft requires 
 More heated metal than the crawling fires 
 Made hot the sides of those sad sepulchres; 
 And cries of torture and most dire despair 
 Came from them, as the spirits wailed their doom. 

 I said, "Who are they, in these chests that lie 
 Confined, and join in this lamenting cry?" 

 My Master answered, "These in life denied 
 The faith that saves, and that resisting pride 
 Here brought th...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
.... 
Return or fly! — What glitters in the rear? 
'Tis Otho's banner — the pursuer's spear! 
Are those the shepherds' fires upon the height? 
Alas! they blaze too widely for the flight: 
Cut off from hope, and compass'd in the toil, 
Less blood, perchance, hath bought a richer spoil! 

XIII. 

A moment's pause — 'tis but to breathe their band 
Or shall they onward press, or here withstand? 
It matters little — if they charge the foes 
Who by their border-stream their ma...Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...beg for peace at Holland's doors. 
This done, among his Cyclops he retires 
To forge new thunder and inspect their fires. 

The court as once of war, now fond of peace, 
All to new sports their wanton fears release. 
From Greenwich (where intelligence they hold) 
Comes news of pastime martial and old, 
A punishment invented first to awe 
Masculine wives transgressing Nature's law, 
Where, when the brawny female disobeys, 
And beats the husband till for peace he p...Read more of this...

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...agre tribe assail 
Thy gentle form, and spotless mind. 

Their spells prevail! no more those eyes 
Shoot undulating fires; 
On thy wan cheek, the young rose dies, 
Thy lip's deep tint expires; 
Dark Melancholy chills thy mind; 
Thy silent tear reveals thy woe; 
TIME strews with thorns thy mazy way, 
Where'er thy giddy footsteps stray, 
Thy thoughtless heart is doom'd to find 
An unrelenting foe. 

'Tis thus, the infant Forest flow'r 
Bespangled o'er with glitt'ring de...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
.... Or when we lay 
Chained on the burning lake? That sure was worse. 
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires, 
Awaked, should blow them into sevenfold rage, 
And plunge us in the flames; or from above 
Should intermitted vengeance arm again 
His red right hand to plague us? What if all 
Her stores were opened, and this firmament 
Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire, 
Impendent horrors, threatening hideous fall 
One day upon our heads; while we perhaps,...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...meetest the orient sun, now flyest, 
With the fixed Stars, fixed in their orb that flies; 
And ye five other wandering Fires, that move 
In mystick dance not without song, resound 
His praise, who out of darkness called up light. 
Air, and ye Elements, the eldest birth 
Of Nature's womb, that in quaternion run 
Perpetual circle, multiform; and mix 
And nourish all things; let your ceaseless change 
Vary to our great Maker still new praise. 
Ye Mists and Exhalations, ...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...Horse Vale
And saw across the plains,
In the twilight high and far and fell,
Like the fiery terraces of hell,
The camp fires of the Danes--

The fires of the Great Army
That was made of iron men,
Whose lights of sacrilege and scorn
Ran around England red as morn,
Fires over Glastonbury Thorn--
Fires out on Ely Fen.

And as he went by White Horse Vale
He saw lie wan and wide
The old horse graven, God knows when,
By gods or beasts or what things then
Walked a new world ins...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...n the ditch. 
A gipsy's camp was in the copse, 
Three felted tents, with beehive tops, 
And round black marks where fires had been, 
And one old waggon painted green, 
And three ribbed horses wrenching grass, 
And three wild boys to watch me pass, 
And one old woman by the fire 
Hulking a rabbit warm from wire. 
I loved to see the horses bait, 
I felt I walked at Heaven's gate, 
That Heaven's gate was opened wide 
Yet still the gipsies camped outside. 
The waste s...Read more of this...

by Bridges, Robert Seymour
...cause of beauty given to man's desires
Writ in the expectancy of starry skies,
The faith which gloweth in our fleeting fires,
The aim of all the good that here we prize;
Which but to love, pursue and pray for well
Maketh earth heaven, and to forget it, hell. 

66
My wearied heart, whenever, after all,
Its loves and yearnings shall be told complete,
When gentle death shall bid it cease to beat,
And from all dear illusions disenthrall:
However then thou shalt appear to cal...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...r places being vacant at my side, 
This chance of noble deeds will come and go 
Unchallenged, while ye follow wandering fires 
Lost in the quagmire! Many of you, yea most, 
Return no more: ye think I show myself 
Too dark a prophet: come now, let us meet 
The morrow morn once more in one full field 
Of gracious pastime, that once more the King, 
Before ye leave him for this Quest, may count 
The yet-unbroken strength of all his knights, 
Rejoicing in that Order which he made....Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...the best, 
Incite futurity to do the rest.

Or with an even likelihood, 
He may have met with atrabilious eyes 
The fires of time on equal terms and passed 
Indifferently down, until at last 
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen. 
He may have had for evil or for good 
No argument; he may have had no care 
For what without himself went anywhere 
To failure or to glory, and least of all
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle; 
He may have b...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...The Argument.


Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burdend air;
Hungry clouds swag on the deep

Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along 
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow.
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.

Then the perilous path was planted:
And a river, and a spring
On every cliff and tomb;
And on the bleached bones
Red ...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...had been not,
As if the gazer's mind was strewn beneath
Her feet like embers, & she, thought by thought,
"Trampled its fires into the dust of death,
As Day upon the threshold of the east
Treads out the lamps of night, until the breath
"Of darkness reillumines even the least
Of heaven's living eyes--like day she came,
Making the night a dream; and ere she ceased
"To move, as one between desire and shame
Suspended, I said--'If, as it doth seem,
Thou comest from the realm witho...Read more of this...

by Bronte, Charlotte
...shade
As stars alone to-night will shine;
No moon is destined­pale­to gaze
On such a day's vast Phoenix blaze,
A day in fires decayed ! 

There­hand-in-hand we tread again 
The mazes of this varying wood, 
And soon, amid a cultured plain, 
Girt in with fertile solitude, 
We shall our resting-place descry, 
Marked by one roof-tree, towering high 
Above a farm-stead rude. 

Refreshed, erelong, with rustic fare, 
We'll seek a couch of dreamless ease; 
Courage will guard thy ...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...ime
You appeared before my eyes.
Sharp are black angels' wings,
The last judgment is coming soon,
And raspberry fires, like roses,
In the white snow bloom.



x x x

I do not count mortal days
Under the roof of a chilled empty building,
I'm reading the Apostles' words,
Words of Psalm-singer I am reading.
Sleet is fluffy, and stars turn blue,
And more marvelous is each meeting --
And in the Bible a leaf
On Song of Songs is sitting.



x...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things