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Famous Fog Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Aiken, Conrad
...Nor can we say why here. The peachtree bough
scrapes on the wall at midnight, the west wind
sculptures the wall of fog that slides
seaward, over the Gulf Stream.
 The rat 
comes through the wainscot, brings to his larder
the twinned acorn and chestnut burr. Our sleep
lights for a moment into dream, the eyes
turn under eyelids for a scene, a scene,
o and the music, too, of landscape lost.
And yet, not lost. For here savannahs wave
cressets of pampas, and t...Read more of this...



by Teasdale, Sara
...ke dew to fill it to the brim. . . .

How cold it is! Even the lights are cold;
They have put shawls of fog around them, see!
What if the air should grow so dimly white
That we would lose our way along the paths
Made new by walls of moving mist receding
The more we follow. . . . What a silver night!
That was our bench the time you said to me
The long new poem -- but how different now,
How eerie with the curtain of the fog
Making it strange to a...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...Unless the goddess that in rural shrine
Dwell'st here with Pan or Sylvan, by blest song
Forbidding every bleak unkindly fog
To touch the prosperous growth of this tall wood.
 LADY. Nay, gentle shepherd, ill is lost that praise
That is addressed to unattending ears.
Not any boast of skill, but extreme shift
How to regain my severed company,
Compelled me to awake the courteous Echo
To give me answer from her mossy couch.
 COMUS: What chance, good lady, hath bere...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...ndered how the bliss would look—
And would it feel as big—
When I could take it in my hand—
As hovering—seen—through fog—

And then—the size of this "small" life—
The Sages—call it small—
Swelled—like Horizons—in my vest—
And I sneered—softly—"small"!

280

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—

And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—...Read more of this...

by Keats, John
...d look
Athwart the sallows of a river nook
To catch a glance at silver throated eels,--
Or from old Skiddaw's top, when fog conceals
His rugged forehead in a mantle pale,
With an eye-guess towards some pleasant vale
Descry a favourite hamlet faint and far.

 These raven horses, though they foster'd are
Of earth's splenetic fire, dully drop
Their full-veined ears, nostrils blood wide, and stop;
Upon the spiritless mist have they outspread
Their ample feathers, are in slumb...Read more of this...



by Ginsberg, Allen
...whose skyscrapers stand in the long 
 streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- 
 tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose 
 smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! 
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch 
 whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch 
 whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch 
 whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 
 Moloch whose name is the Mind! 
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream 
 Angels! Crazy in ...Read more of this...

by Soto, Gary
...'s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing
Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl's hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands....Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...d town. 
He heard the crowing of the cock, 
And the barking of the farmer's dog, 
And felt the damp of the river-fog, 
That rises when the sun goes down. 

It was one by the village clock, 
When he galloped into Lexington. 
He saw the gilded weathercock 
Swim in the moonlight as he passed, 
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare, 
Gaze at him with a spectral glare, 
As if they already stood aghast 
At the bloody work they would look upon. 
...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...n: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.

The Jew of Malta.


I

AMONG the smoke and fog of a December afternoon
You have the scene arrange itself—as it will seem to do—
With “I have saved this afternoon for you”;
And four wax candles in the darkened room,
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,
An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb
Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.
We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole
...Read more of this...

by Ashbery, John
...people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you
Like light behind windblown fog and sand,
Filtered and influenced by it, until no part
Remains that is surely you. Those voices in the dusk
Have told you all and still the tale goes on
In the form of memories deposited in irregular
Clumps of crystals. Whose curved hand controls,
Francesco, the turning seasons and the thoughts
That peel off and fly away at breathless speeds
Like...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it. 

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and
 contenders; 
I have no mockings or arguments—I witness and wait. 

5
I believe in you, my Soul—the other I am must not abase itself to you; 
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from your throat; 
Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the
 ...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...t.

You, who sought me for nine years,
in stories made up in front of your naked mirror
or walking through rooms of fog women,
you trying to forget the mother
who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door
as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...e rhythm changes as though a mist
Were curling and twisting
Over the landscape.
For a moment a rhythmless, tuneless fog
Encompasses her. Then her senses jog
To the breath of a stately minuet.
Herr Altgelt's violin is set
In tune to the slow, sweeping bows, and retreats 
and advances,
To curtsies brushing the waxen floor as the Court 
dances.
Long and peaceful like warm Summer nights
When stars shine in the quiet river. And 
against the lights
Blundering in...Read more of this...

by Browning, Robert
...his bonnet the pricker blustered,
With feather dank as a bough of wet fennel;
For the court-yard walls were filled with fog
You might have cut as an axe chops a log---
Like so much wool for colour and bulkiness;
And out rode the Duke in a perfect sulkiness,
Since, before breakfast, a man feels but queasily,
And a sinking at the lower abdomen
Begins the day with indifferent omen.
And lo, as he looked around uneasily,
The sun ploughed the fog up and drove it asunder
This wa...Read more of this...

by Nwakanma, Obi
...ir 
nakedness - they limber; 
like the gods terrified into silence, 
like tall brooding deities looming out of the 
fog: 

The forest hugs them 
carves them into stones, 
Etches them into the slow 
eastern landscape: rivers, hills 
the slow running water, 
times broken inscapes…

The willows are burdened with ice 
the white shrouds of burial spread 
upon the earth's ravaged face; the eyes 
unseeing, the mouth unspeaking, 
a gust of wind proclaims the anger of...Read more of this...

by Walcott, Derek
...


5 Shabine Encounters the
 Middle Passage

Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn,
brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea
like the kettle steaming when I put it down
slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see:
where the horizon was one silver haze,
the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close
that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,
it was horrors, but it was beautiful.
We float through a rustling forest of ships
with sails dry like paper,...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
 Unreal City, 
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I sa...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...beauties never end!

VI 
When the sun shines on England, it atones 
For low-hung leaden skies, and rain and dim 
Moist fogs that paint the verdure on her stones 
And fill her gentle rivers to the brim. 
When the sun shines on England, shafts of light 
Fall on far towers and hills and dark old trees, 
And hedge-bound meadows of a green as bright— 
As bright as is the blue of tropic seas. 
When the sun shines, it is as if the face 
Of some proud man relaxed his haughty...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...e him in light of day,
And then it was strange
To remember the way.
Like incense of thousand censers
Flowed the fog
And the companion bothered
The heart with a song.
Ancient gates I remember
And the end of the way --
There the man who went with me
"Forgive," did say.
He gave me a copper cross
Like my brother very own
And everywhere I hear the sound
Of the steppe song.
Here I am at home like home --
I cry and I am in rue
Answer to me, my strang...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing--
Memories growning, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.

Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waisting-deep in history--

Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetn...Read more of this...

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Book: Shattered Sighs