Famous Gipsy Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Craftsman

by Rudyard Kipling
 Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,
He to the overbearing Boanerges
Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor,
 Blessed be the vintage!)

Saying how, at an alehouse under Cotswold,
He had made sure of his very Cleopatra,
Drunk with enormous, salvation-con temning
 Love for a tinker.

How, while he hid from Sir Thomas's keepers,
Crouched in a ditch and drenched by the midnight
Dews, he...Read more of this...

Gipsy

by Robert William Service
 The poppies that in Spring I sow,
In rings of radiance gleam and glow,
Like lords and ladies gay.
A joy are they to dream beside,
As in the air of eventide
They flutter, dip and sway.

For some are scarlet, some are gold,
While some in fairy flame unfold,
And some are rose and white.
There's pride of breeding in their glance,
And pride of beauty as they...Read more of this...

The Wood

by Charlotte Bronte
 BUT two miles more, and then we rest ! 
Well, there is still an hour of day, 
And long the brightness of the West 
Will light us on our devious way; 
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood­ 
So total is the solitude, 
We safely may delay. 

These massive roots afford a seat, 
Which seems for weary travellers made....Read more of this...

On Gipsy

by Ben Jonson
XLI. ? ON GIPSY.       GIPSY, new bawd, is turn'd physician, And gets more gold than all the College can : Such her quaint practice is, so it allures, For what she gave, a whore ;  a bawd, she cures....Read more of this...

454. Epistle from Esopus to Maria

by Robert Burns
 FROM those drear solitudes and frowsy cells,
Where Infamy with sad Repentance dwells;
Where turnkeys make the jealous portal fast,
And deal from iron hands the spare repast;
Where truant ’prentices, yet young in sin,
Blush at the curious stranger peeping in;
Where strumpets, relics of the drunken roar,
Resolve to drink, nay, half, to whore, no more;
Where tiny thieves not destin’d yet to swing,
Beat hemp...Read more of this...

The Englishman In Italy

by Robert Browning
 (PIANO DI SORRENTO.)

Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco;
Now, open your eyes— 
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
As you tell your beads;
All the memories plucked at Sorrento
—The flowers,...Read more of this...

The Gipsy Trail

by Rudyard Kipling
 The white moth to the closing bine,
 The bee to the opened clover,
And the gipsy blood to the gipsy blood
 Ever the wide world over.

Ever the wide world over, lass,
 Ever the trail held true,
Over the world and under the world,
 And back at the last to you.

Out of the dark of the gorgio camp,
 Out of the grime...Read more of this...

Run to Death

by Amy Levy
 A True Incident of Pre-Revolutionary French History.


Now the lovely autumn morning breathes its freshness in earth's face,
In the crowned castle courtyard the blithe horn proclaims the chase;
And the ladies on the terrace smile adieux with rosy lips
To the huntsmen disappearing down the cedar-shaded groves,
Wafting delicate aromas from their scented finger tips,
And the gallants wave in answer, with their gold-embroidered...Read more of this...

North Atlantic

by Carl Sandburg
 WHEN the sea is everywhere
from horizon to horizon ..
 when the salt and blue
 fill a circle of horizons ..
I swear again how I know
the sea is older than anything else
and the sea younger than anything else.

My first father was a landsman.
My tenth father was a sea-lover,
 a gipsy sea-boy, a singer of chanties.
 (Oh Blow the Man Down!)

The...Read more of this...

Gipsy Love

by Arthur Symons
 The gipsy tents are on the down, 
The gipsy girls are here; 
And it's O to be off and away from the town 
With a gipsy for my dear! 

We'd make our bed in the bracken 
With the lark for a chambermaid; 
The lark would sing us awake in the morning, 
Singing above our head. 

We'd drink the sunlight...Read more of this...

The Poppy

by Francis Thompson
 To Monica

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there:
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,
And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.

With burnt mouth, red like a lion's, it drank
The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,
And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine
When the Eastern conduits...Read more of this...

Juggling Jerry

by George Meredith
 Pitch here the tent, while the old horse grazes:
By the old hedge-side we'll halt a stage.
It's nigh my last above the daisies:
My next leaf'll be man's blank page.
Yes, my old girl! and it's no use crying:
Juggler, constable, king, must bow.
One that outjuggles all's been spying
Long to have me, and he has me now.

We've travelled times to this old common:
Often...Read more of this...

Gipsy Song

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 IN the drizzling mist, with the snow high-pil'd,
In the Winter night, in the forest wild,
I heard the wolves with their ravenous howl,
I heard the screaming note of the owl:

Wille wau wau wau!


Wille wo wo wo!

Wito 
hu!

I shot, one day, a cat in a ditch--
The dear black cat of Anna the witch;
Upon me, at night, seven were-wolves came down,
Seven women...Read more of this...

At Thirty-Five

by Robert William Service
 Three score and ten, the psalmist saith,
And half my course is well-nigh run;
I've had my flout at dusty death,
I've had my whack of feast and fun.
I've mocked at those who prate and preach;
I've laughed with any man alive;
But now with sobered heart I reach
The Great Divide of Thirty-five.

And looking back I must confess
I've little cause to feel elate.
I've played...Read more of this...

The Ladies

by Rudyard Kipling
 I've taken my fun where I've found it;
 I've rouged an' I've ranged in my time;
I've 'ad my pickin' o' seethearts,
 An' four o' the lot was prime.
One was an 'arf-caste widow,
 One was awoman at Prome,
One was the wife of a jemadar-sais
 An' one is a girl at 'ome.

Now I aren't no 'and with the ladies,
 For, takin'...Read more of this...

The Vagabond

by Henry Lawson
 White handkerchiefs wave from the short black pier 
As we glide to the grand old sea -- 
But the song of my heart is for none to hear 
If one of them waves for me. 
A roving, roaming life is mine, 
Ever by field or flood -- 
For not far back in my father's line 
Was a dash of...Read more of this...

A Rolling Stone

by Robert William Service
 There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;
The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering, a-wandering,
Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
 And I roomed in the cool of a cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
 The...Read more of this...

The Fire At Tranter Sweatleys

by Thomas Hardy
 They had long met o' Zundays--her true love and she-- 
 And at junketings, maypoles, and flings; 
But she bode wi' a thirtover uncle, and he 
Swore by noon and by night that her goodman should be 
Naibor Sweatley--a gaffer oft weak at the knee 
From taking o' sommat more cheerful than tea-- 
 Who tranted, and moved people's...Read more of this...

To a Goose

by Robert Southey
 If thou didst feed on western plains of yore 
Or waddle wide with flat and flabby feet 
Over some Cambrian mountain's plashy moor, 
Or find in farmer's yard a safe retreat 
From gipsy thieves and foxes sly and fleet; 
If thy grey quills by lawyer guided, trace 
Deeds big with ruin to some wretched race, 
Or love-sick poet's sonnet,...Read more of this...

The Wood

by Charlotte Bronte
 But two miles more, and then we rest ! 
Well, there is still an hour of day, 
And long the brightness of the West 
Will light us on our devious way; 
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood­ 
So total is the solitude, 
We safely may delay. 

These massive roots afford a seat, 
Which seems for weary travellers made....Read more of this...

La Gitana

by Aleister Crowley
 Your hair was full of roses in the dewfall as we danced, 
The sorceress enchanting and the paladin entranced, 
In the starlight as we wove us in a web of silk and steel 
Immemorial as the marble in the halls of Boabdil, 
In the pleasuance of the roses with the fountains and the yews 
Where the snowy Sierra soothed...Read more of this...

An Adventure in the Life of King James V of Scotland

by William Topaz McGonagall
 On one occasion King James the Fifth of Scotland, when alone, in disguise,
Near by the Bridge of Cramond met with rather a disagreeable surprise.
He was attacked by five gipsy men without uttering a word,
But he manfully defended himself with his sword. 

There chanced to be a poor man threshing corn in a barn near by,
Who came out on hearing...Read more of this...

Nights Nothings Again

by Carl Sandburg
 WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?

Who picked a crimson cryptogram,
the tail light of a motor car turning a corner,
or the midnight sign of a chile con carne place,
or a man out of the ashes of false dawn muttering “hot-dog” to the night watchmen:
Is there a spieler...Read more of this...

Upon Cupid

by Robert Herrick
 Love, like a gipsy, lately came,
And did me much importune
To see my hand, that by the same
He might foretell my fortune.

He saw my palm; and then, said he,
I tell thee, by this score here,
That thou, within few months, shalt be
The youthful Prince D'Amour here.

I smiled, and bade him once more prove,
And by some cross-line show it,
That I could ne'er...Read more of this...

The Indian Gipsy

by Sarojini Naidu
 IN tattered robes that hoard a glittering trace 
Of bygone colours, broidered to the knee, 
Behold her, daughter of a wandering race, 
Tameless, with the bold falcon's agile grace, 
And the lithe tiger's sinuous majesty. 


With frugal skill her simple wants she tends, 
She folds her tawny heifers and her sheep 
On lonely meadows when the daylight ends, 
Ere...Read more of this...

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