Famous Graveyard Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Graveyard poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous graveyard poems. These examples illustrate what a famous graveyard poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Aiken, Conrad
...here in-gathered,
held in our hands, and in the wind
breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.
How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House
how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,
now long since dead, but then how young,
how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost
looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard
borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:
the father within him, the mother within him, the self
coming to self through l...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...old prophets tell,
Those signs the general word so well,
Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my watchings tense.
In graveyard green, behind his monument
To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,
Wearing his smile, and "Not the end!"
Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;
Or, if a dead Love's lips, whom dreams reveal
When midnight imps of King Decay
Delve sly to solve me back to clay,
Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;
Or, when Earth's Frail...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...tern
Sing how the seal has kissed her dead!
The long, laid minute's bride drifts on
Old in her cruel bed.
Over the graveyard in the water
Mountains and galleries beneath
Nightingale and hyena
Rejoicing for that drifting death
Sing and howl through sand and anemone
Valley and sahara in a shell,
Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy
Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl
Is old as water and plain as an eel;
Always good-bye to the long-legged bread
Scattered in the paths ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...?
7
By Kirkgate Market
Alone at night
I wandered
The Parish Church’s
Stone lit by a
Hundred bulbs but
Its graveyard
Shifted aside.
Where are the banked
Stones of the dead?
Behind screens they raised
Their bones and counted
Their skulls and moved
Them in barrows.
The railway’s banks
Are buttressed with the
Moved memorial stones
The diggers wore sacking
Over their faces and
Burned their shovels.
8
Every garden and park
Is a hypo...Read more of this...
by
García Lorca, Federico
...ath the tender protest of the
stars.
Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...set orbs emit a lurid light,
And as through pine trees moan the winds refrains,
So swells and dies away, the ghostly graveyard strains.
XVI.
Like worded wine is music to the ear,
And long indulged makes mad the hearts that hear.
The dancers, drunken with the monotone
Of oft repeated notes, now shriek and groan
And pierce their ruddy flesh with sharpened spears;
Still more excited when the blood appears,
With warlike yells, high in the air they bound,
Th...Read more of this...
by
Ammons, A R
...particularly, but not for
me, mother and father there, too, and others
close, close as burrowing
under skin, all in the graveyard
assembled, done for, the world they
used to wield, have trouble and joy
in, gone
the child in me that could not become
was not ready for others to go,
to go on into change, blessings and
horrors, but stands there by the road
where the mishap occurred, crying out for
help, come and fix this or we
can’t get by, but the great ones who
were to return,...Read more of this...
by
Slessor, Kenneth
...perplexed your youth,
And most your father, the old man gone blind,
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck,
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments
And tablets cut with dreams of piety
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment
At cargoes they had never thought to bear,
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.
Where have you gone? The tide is over you,
The turn of midnight water's over you,
As Time is over y...Read more of this...
by
Nesbitt, Kenn
...bed.
My mom heard my suspicion
and she said, “You’re not too swift.
Your father’s not a vampire.
He just works the graveyard shift.”
--Kenn Nesbitt
Copyright © Kenn Nesbitt 2009. All Rights Reserved....Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...tangled barberry-bushes
Hang their tufts of crimson berries
Over stone walls gray with mosses,
Pause by some neglected graveyard,
For a while to muse, and ponder
On a half-effaced inscription,
Written with little skill of song-craft,
Homely phrases, but each letter
Full of hope and yet of heart-break,
Full of all the tender pathos
Of the Here and the Hereafter;
Stay and read this rude inscription,
Read this Song of Hiawatha!...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...fold me close and kiss me warm
Till each quick breath end in a sigh
Of happy languor. Now, alone,
We lean upon this graveyard stone,
Uncheered, unkissed, my heart and I.
VI.
Tired out we are, my heart and I.
Suppose the world brought diadems
To tempt us, crusted with loose gems
Of powers and pleasures ? Let it try.
We scarcely care to look at even
A pretty child, or God's blue heaven,
We feel so tired, my heart and I.
VII.
Yet who complains ? My ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ya flour, whole milk solids, sucrose, starch, corn
oil, coconut oil, yeast, imitation vanilla, " but the can's only
a graveyard now for a Cobra Lily that has turned dry and
brown and has black freckles.
As a kind of funeral wreath, there is a red, white and
blue button sticking in the plant and the words on it say, "I'm
for Nixon."
The main energy for the ballet comes from a description
of the Cobra Lily. The description could be used as a welcome
mat o...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...and bursting in my head.
From time to time I wrote a word
Which lines and circles overscored.
My table seemed a graveyard, full
Of coffins waiting burial.
I seized these vile abortions, tore
Them into jagged bits, and swore
To be the dupe of hope no more.
Into the evening straight I went,
Starved of a day's accomplishment.
Unnoticing, I wandered where
The city gave a space for air,
And on the bridge's parapet
I leant, while pallidly there set
A dim, discou...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...is not He forgot ?
"For was not God my gardener
And silent like a slave;
That opened oaks on the uplands
Or thicket in graveyard gave?
"And was not God my armourer,
All patient and unpaid,
That sealed my skull as a helmet,
And ribs for hauberk made?
"Did not a great grey servant
Of all my sires and me,
Build this pavilion of the pines,
And herd the fowls and fill the vines,
And labour and pass and leave no signs
Save mercy and mystery?
"For God is a great servant,
And ros...Read more of this...
by
Berman, David
...m the sun,
the sky is blueberries and cream,
and the wind is as warm as air from a tire.
Even the headstones in the graveyard
Seem to stand up and say "Hello! My name is..."
It's enough to be sitting here on my porch,
thinking about Kermit Roosevelt,
following the course of an ant,
or walking out into the yard with a cordless phone
to find out she is going to be there tonight
On a day like today, what looks like bad news in the distance
turns out to be som...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ack sky, bowed and dripping with rain,
up Tilbury road,
comes the procession. A funeral procession, bound for
the graveyard
at Wayfleet. Feet and wheels -- feet and wheels. And
among them
one who is carried.
The bones in the deep, still earth shiver and pull. There
is a quiver
through the rotted stake. Then stake and bones fall together
in a little puffing of dust.
Like meshes of linked steel the rain shuts down
behind the procession,
now well...Read more of this...
by
Baudelaire, Charles
...eath,
The eternal smile of thirty-two white teeth.
For he who has not folded in his arms
A skeleton, nor fed on graveyard charms,
Recks not of furbelow, or paint, or scent,
When Horror comes the way that Beauty went.
O irresistible, with fleshless face,
Say to these dancers in their dazzled race:
"Proud lovers with the paint above your bones,
Ye shall taste death, musk scented skeletons!
Withered Antino?s, dandies with plump faces,
Ye varnished cadavers,...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Robert
...stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush
At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab's whaleboats in the East.
III
All you recovered from Poseidon died
With you, my cousin, and the harrowed brine
Is fruitless on the blue beard of the god,
Stretching beyond us to the castles in Spain,
Nantucket's westward haven. To Cape Cod
Guns, cradled on the ...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...r>
I saw the sign of a five and ten cent store there
And the Standard Oil Company and the International Harvester
And a graveyard and a ball grounds
And a short order counter where a man can get a stack of wheats
And a pool hall where a rounder leered confidential like and said:
“Lookin’ for a quiet game?”
The loafer lagged along and asked,
“Do you make guitars here?
Do you make boxes the singing wood winds ask to sleep in?
Do you rig up strings the singing wood winds sift o...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...ide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.
This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill's
the place I may well rest if there's a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.
If buried ashes saw then I'd survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,
which makes them lo...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Graveyard poems.