Famous Gift Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Gift poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous gift poems. These examples illustrate what a famous gift poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so -
That her degree should be so great
Among the favoured of the Lord
That she may scarcely bear the weight
Of her bewildering reward.
As one apart, immune, alone,
Or featured for the shining ones,
And like to none that she has...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
We were three weeks
Into term, Sheila,
When you came
Through the classroom door;
Forty-four children
Bent over books,
Copying Roethke’s
‘The Lost Son’.
You wrote your
First poem on the ‘Moses’
Of Michelangelo.
Words cut like stone.
I taught you Greek
But your painting of
‘The Essence of the Rose’
Was pure Platonic form.
You drew the masks
Of Comedy and Tragedy
In perfect harmony.
Having seen neither;
So Socrates was right.
Those who have the Spirit’s gift
Will one...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Cool is the wind, for the summer is waning,
Who 's for the road?
Sun-flecked and soft, where the dead leaves are raining,
Who 's for the road?
Knapsack and alpenstock press hand and shoulder,
Prick of the brier and roll of the boulder;[Pg 164]
This be your lot till the season grow older;
Who 's for the road?
Up and away in the hush of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
BEFORE this little gift was come
The little owner had made haste for home;
And from the door of where the eternal dwell,
Looked back on human things and smiled farewell.
O may this grief remain the only one!
O may our house be still a garrison
Of smiling children, and for evermore
The tune of little feet be heard along the floor!...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
I walk among the rows of bowed heads--
the children are sleeping through fourth grade
so as to be ready for what is ahead,
the monumental boredom of junior high
and the rush forward tearing their wings
loose and turning their eyes forever inward.
These are the children of Flint, their fathers
work at the spark plug factory or truck
bottled water in 5 gallon sea-blue jugs
to...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
The gift of the body when the soul is given is but the accomplishment of two affections drawn headlong one towards the other.
You are only happy in your body that is so lovely in its native freshness because in all fervour you may offer it to me wholly as a total alms.
And I give myself to you knowing nothing except...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXV. O tempo, o ciel volubil che fuggendo. HE NO LONGER CONTEMPLATES THE MORTAL, BUT THE IMMORTAL BEAUTIES OF LAURA. O Time! O heavens! whose flying changes frameErrors and snares for mortals poor and blind;O days more swift than arrows or the wind,Experienced now, I know your treacherous aim.You I...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
A BROADSIDE DISTRIBUTED IN SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS
Censers are swinging,
Over the town;
Censers are swinging,
Look overhead!
Censers are swinging,
Heaven comes down.
City, dead city,
Awake from the dead!
Censers, tremendous,
Gleam overhead.
Wind-harps are ringing,
Wind-harps unseen—
Calling and calling:—
"Wake from the dead.
Rise, little city,
Shine like a queen."
Soldiers of Christ
For battle grow keen.
Heaven-sent winds
Haunt alley and lane.
Singing of life
In town-meadows green
After the toil
And battle and pain.
Incense is pouring
Like the spring...Read more of this...
by
William Strode
We are prevented; you whose Presence is
A Publick New-yeares gift, a Common bliss
To all that Love or Feare, give no man leave
To vie a Gift but first he shall receave;
Like as the Persian Sun with golden Eies
First shines upon the Priest and Sacrifice.
Ile on howere; May this yeare happier prove
Than all the Golden Age when Vertue strove
With nothing but...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
The Princess was of ancient line,
Of royal race was she;
Like cameo her face was fine,
With sad serentiy:
Yet bent she toiled with dimming eye,
Her rice and milk to buy.
With lacework that for pity plead,
So out of date it seemed,
She sought to make her daily bread,
As of her past she dreamed:
And though sometimes I heard her...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
See! I give myself to you, Beloved!
My words are little jars
For you to take and put upon a shelf.
Their shapes are quaint and beautiful,
And they have many pleasant colours and lustres
To recommend them.
Also the scent from them fills the room
With sweetness of flowers and crushed grasses.
When I shall have given you the last one,
You will have the whole of...Read more of this...
by
Odysseus Elytis
Translation from Greek: Marios Dikaiakos
I know that all this is worthless and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet
Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile
And the motherland a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
Scene: Federal Political Arena
A darkened cave. In the middle, a cauldron, boiling.
Enter the three witches.
1ST WITCH: Thrice hath the Federal Jackass brayed.
2ND WITCH: Once the Bruce-Smith War-horse neighed.
3RD WITCH: So Georgie comes, 'tis time, 'tis time,
Around the cauldron to chant our rhyme.
1ST WITCH: In the cauldron boil and bake
Fillet of a...Read more of this...
by
Sidney Lanier
It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;
And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
Down the hill-side and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.
Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril; she was the daintiest doe;
In the print of her velvet flank on the...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing --
"Nothing" is the force
That renovates the World --...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full charactered with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain
Beyond all date even to eternity—
Or at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to razed oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be missed.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need...Read more of this...
by
David Lehman
"He gave her class. She gave him sex."
-- Katharine Hepburn on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
He gave her money. She gave him head.
He gave her tips on "aggressive growth" mutual funds. She gave him a red rose
and a little statue of eros.
He gave her Genesis 2 (21-23). She gave him Genesis 1...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
The gift of yourself no longer satisfies you; you are prodigal of yourself: the rapture that bears you on to ever greater love springs up in you ceaselessly and untiringly, and carries you ever higher towards the wide heaven of perfect love.
A clasp of the hands, a gentle look impassions you; and your heart appears to me so suddenly lovely...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
EARTH, round, rolling, compact—suns, moons, animals—all these are words to be
said;
Watery, vegetable, sauroid advances—beings, premonitions, lispings of the future,
Behold! these are vast words to be said.
Were you thinking that those were the words—those upright lines? those curves,
angles,
dots?
No, those are not the words—the substantial words are in the ground and sea,
They are in...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
By what serene malevolence of names
Had you the gift of yours, Theophilus?
Not even a smeared young Cyclops at his games
Would have you long,—and you are one of us.
Told of your deeds I shudder for your dream
And they, no doubt, are few and innocent.
Meanwhile, I marvel; for in you, it seems,
Heredity outshines environment.
What...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
I
All you that are enamored of my name
And least intent on what most I require,
Beware; for my design and your desire,
Deplorably, are not as yet the same.
Beware, I say, the failure and the shame
Of losing that for which you now aspire
So blindly, and of hazarding entire
The gift that I was bringing when I...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The dead child lay in the shroud,
And the widow watched beside;
And her mother slept, and the Channel swept
The gale in the teeth of the tide.
But the mother laughed at all.
"I have lost my man in the sea,
And the child is dead. Be still," she said,
"What more can ye do to me?"
The widow watched the dead,
...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
"Hill of Jews," says one,
named for a cemetery
long gone."Hill of Jove,"
says another, and maybe
Jove stalked here
once or rests now
where so many lie
who felt God swell
the earth and burn
along the edges
of their breath.
Almost seventy years
since a troop of cavalry
jingled up the silent road,
dismounted, and loaded
their...Read more of this...
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