Famous Fourth Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Fourth poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous fourth poems. These examples illustrate what a famous fourth poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
David Berman
I know it's a bad title
but I'm giving it to myself as a gift
on a day nearly canceled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and I think "at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand"
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from the house
while still seated in...Read more of this...
by
Robert Graves
It doesn’t matter what’s the cause,
What wrong they say we’re righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we’re to do the fighting!
And since we lads are proud and true,
What else remains to do?
Lucasta, when to France your man
Returns his fourth time, hating war,
Yet laughs as calmly as he can
And flings an...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
I am the little man who smokes & smokes.
I am the girl who does know better but.
I am the king of the pool.
I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.
I am a government official & a goddamned fool.
I am a lady who takes jokes.
I am the enemy of the mind.
I am the auto salesman and lóve you.
I...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.
The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
In praise of Eliza Queen of the Shepherds
SEE where she sits upon the grassie greene,
(O seemely sight!)
Yclad in Scarlot, like a mayden Queene,
And ermines white:
Upon her head a Cremosin coronet 5
With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set:
Bay leaves betweene,
And primroses greene,
Embellish the sweete Violet.
Tell me, have ye seene her angelick face 10...Read more of this...
by
Anne Kingsmill Finch
Tis true of courage I'm no mistress
No Boadicia nor Thalestriss
Nor shall I e'er be famed hereafter
For such a Soul as Cato's Daughter
Nor active valour nor enduring
Nor leading troops nor forts securing
Like Teckley's wife or Pucell valiant
Will e'er be reckonded for my talent
Who all things fear whilst day is shining
And my own shadow light declining
And from the Spleen's...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
The Hunting
The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.
"If only you'd spoken before!
It's excessively awkward to mention it now,
With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!
"We should all of us grieve, as you well may believe,
If you never were met with again--
But surely, my man, when the voyage began,
You might have suggested it then?
"It's excessively...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--
Should rush into sight at...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
and fall to earth into indifferent ponds.
Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one.
And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,
in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.
But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,
already feel the...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
At first I suspected something --
She acted so calm and absent-minded.
And one day I heard the back door shut,
As I entered the front, and I saw him slink
Back of the smokehouse into the lot,
And run across the field.
And I meant to kill him on sight.
But that day, walking near Fourth Bridge,
Without a stick or a stone at hand,
All of...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comfy as comfy could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three.
And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot
Because he was five and a man--
And that's how it all began, my dears,
And that's how it all began!
Then we brought the lances down--then the...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
Something black somewhere in the vistas of his heart.
Tulips from Tates teazed Henry in the mood
to be a tulip and desire no more
but water, but light, but air.
Yet his nerves rattled blackly, unsubdued,
& suffocation called, dream-whiskey'd pour
sirening. Rosy there
too fly my Phil & Ellen roses, pal.
Flesh-coloured men & women come & punt
under my windows. I rave
or grunt against it,...Read more of this...
by
Lam Quang My
My space had three dimensions
too tight
And then I found the fourth
love without end...Read more of this...
by
Anne Killigrew
NOw liquid Streams by the fierce Gold do grow
As solid as the Rocks from whence they flow;
Now Tibers Banks with Ice united meet,
And it's firm Stream may well be term'd its Street;
Now Vot'ries 'fore the Shrines like Statues show,
And scarce the Men from Images we know;
Now Winters Palsey seizes ev'ry Age,
And none's so...Read more of this...
by
Richard Aldington
Four days the earth was rent and torn
By bursting steel,
The houses fell about us;
Three nights we dared not sleep,
Sweating, and listening for the imminent crash
Which meant our death.
The fourth night every man,
Nerve-tortured, racked to exhaustion,
Slept, muttering and twitching,
While the shells crashed overhead.
The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark, as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug...Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is
for park and playground, this helpless
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
All docile between this ocean and the other. If
flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
Cracks walls, it is only a slave's blunder or the
natural
Shudder of a new made...Read more of this...
by
Joyce Kilmer
(For Thomas Walsh)
I
On nights like this the huddled sheep
Are like white clouds upon the grass,
And merry herdsmen guard their sleep
And chat and watch the big stars pass.
It is a pleasant thing to lie
Upon the meadow on the hill
With kindly fellowship near by
Of sheep and men of gentle will.
I lean upon my broken crook
And dream of sheep and grass and...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
MAMIE beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana
town and dreamed of romance and big things off
somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.
She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down
where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and
when the newspapers came in on the morning mail
she knew there was a big Chicago...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought! Now you'll have to think the same thing forever!
...Read more of this...
by
John Gould Fletcher
At the first hour, it was as if one said, "Arise."
At the second hour, it was as if one said, "Go forth."
And the winter constellations that are like patient ox-eyes
Sank below the white horizon at the north.
At the third hour, it was as if one said, "I thirst";
At the fourth hour, all the earth...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the year of 1898, and on the 8th of June,
A mother and six children met with a cruel doom
In one of the most fearful fires for some years past
And as the spectators gazed upon them they stood aghast
The fire broke out in a hairdresser's, in the town of Scarborough,
And as the fire spread it filled the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
For Jeremy Reed
Rejection doesn’t lead me to dejection
But to inspiration via irritation
Or at least to a bit of naughty new year wit-
Oh isn’t it a shame my poetry’s not tame
Like Rupert’s or Jay’s - I never could
Get into their STRIDE just to much pride
To lick the arses of the poetry-of-earthers
Or the sad lady who runs KATABASIS from the back
Of...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The Celt in all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo,
His mental processes are plain--one knows what he will do,
And can logically predicate his finish by his start;
But the English--ah, the English!--they are quite a race apart.
Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and raw.
They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw;
But the straw that they were tickled...Read more of this...
by
Edmund Spenser
Calidore sees the Graces daunce,
To Colins melody:
The whiles his Pastorell is led,
[I]nto captiuity.
W Ho now does follow the foule Blatant Beast,
Whilest Calidore does follow that faire Mayd,
Vnmyndfull of his vow and high beheast,
Which by the Faery Queene was on him layd,
That he should neuer leaue, nor be delayd
From chacing him, till he had it attchieued?
But now entrapt of loue,...Read more of this...
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