Famous Grown Up Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Grown Up poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous grown up poems. These examples illustrate what a famous grown up poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
G K Chesterton
Under what withering leprous light
The very grass as hair is grey,
Grass in the cracks of the paven courts
Of gods we graved but yesterday.
Senate, republic, empire, all
We leaned our backs on like a wall
And blessed as stron as strong and blamed as stolid--
Can it be these that waver and fall?
And what is this like a ghost returning,
A dream grown strong...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
On a lonely selection far out in the West
An old woman works all the day without rest,
And she croons, as she toils 'neath the sky's glassy dome,
`Sure I'll keep the ould place till the childer come home.'
She mends all the fences, she grubs, and she ploughs,
She drives the old horse and she milks all...Read more of this...
by
Seamus Heaney
I
To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither...Read more of this...
by
Robert Francis
Those who have touched it or been touched by it
Or brushed by something that the vine has brushed,
Or burning it, have stood where the sly smoke
Has touched them-Know the meaning of its name.
The leaf is smooth. Its green is innocence.
A clean, unblemished leaf, glossy when young.
A leaf the unobserving might overlook
And the observing find too prosperous.
I've seen a vine...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
Wind of the dead men's feet,
Blow down the empty street
Of this old city by the sea
With news for me!
Blow me beyond the grime
And pestilence of time!
I am too sick at heart to war
With failure any more.
Thy chill is in my bones;
The moonlight on the stones
Is pale, and palpable, and cold;
I am as one grown old.
I call from room to...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
I.
Moonlight silvers the tops of trees,
Moonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall
And through the evening fall,
Clearly, as if through enchanted seas,
Footsteps passing, an infinite distance away,
In another world and another day.
Moonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,
Moonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,
And the boughs of elms grow green and cold,
Our footsteps echo on gleaming stones,
The leaves are stirred to...Read more of this...
by
William Barnes
In the zunsheen of our zummers
Wi’ the hay time now a-come,
How busy wer we out a-vield
Wi’ vew a-left at hwome,
When waggons rumbled out ov yard
Red wheeled, wi’ body blue,
And back behind ‘em loudly slamm’d
The geate a’vallen to.
Drough daysheen ov how many years
The geate ha’ now a-swung
Behind the veet o’ vull-grown men
And vootsteps of the young.
Drough years o’ days it...Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
Half-Past-Six and I were talking
In a very grown-up way;
We had got so tired with running
That we did not want to play.
"How do babies come, I wonder,"
He said, looking at the sky,
"Does God mix the things together
An' just make it-like a pie?"
I was really not quite certain,
But it sounded very nice;
It was all that we could think of,
Besides a book...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Who's she, that one in your arms?
She's the one I carried my bones to
and built a house that was just a cot
and built a life that was over an hour
and built a castle where no one lives
and built, in the end, a song
to go with the ceremony.
Why have you brought her here?
Why do you knock on my door
with your...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("Dors-tu? mère de notre mère.")
{III., 1823.}
"To die—to sleep."—SHAKESPEARE.
Still asleep! We have been since the noon thus alone.
Oh, the hours we have ceased to number!
Wake, grandmother!—speechless say why thou art grown.
Then, thy lips are so cold!—the Madonna of stone
Is like thee in thy holy...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
six...six...why only yesterday
it seems that fist shot out
that one eye winked...and yet
now that this day's arrived
it really is as if six years
have blinked - and you've sprung
through a thousand instant snaps
into this boy whose tongue
can't help but say thought not thinked
who's no longer to be fed
with ideas any more than food
will pick and choose as he wishes
will draw with...Read more of this...
by
Dorothy Parker
The things she knew, let her forget again-
The voices in the sky, the fear, the cold,
The gaping shepherds, and the ***** old men
Piling their clumsy gifts of foreign gold.
Let her have laughter with her little one;
Teach her the endless, tuneless songs to sing,
Grant her her right to whisper to her son
The foolish names one dare not call a king.
Keep...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
six...six...why only yesterday
it seems that fist shot out
that one eye winked...and yet
now that this day's arrived
it really is as if six years
have blinked - and you've sprung
through a thousand instant snaps
into this boy whose tongue
can't help but say thought not thinked
who's no longer to be fed
with ideas any more than food
will pick and choose as he wishes
will draw with...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass his fickle hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow'st.
If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May Time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her,...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
HER mist of primroses within her breast
Twilight hath folded up, and o’er the west,
Seeking remoter valleys long hath gone,
Not yet hath come her sister of the dawn.
Silence and coolness now the earth enfold,
Jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold,
Hazes of nebulous silver veil the height,
And shake in tremors through the shadowy night.
Heard through the stillness, as in whispered...Read more of this...
by
William Barnes
No, I'm a man, I'm vull a man,
You beat my manhood, if you can.
You'll be a man if you can teake
All steates that household life do meake.
The love-toss'd child, a-croodlen loud,
The bwoy a-screamen wild in play,
The tall grown youth a-steppen proud,
The father staid, the house's stay.
No ; I can boast if others can,
I'm vull a man.
A young-cheak'd mother's tears...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Who is your lady of love, O ye that pass
Singing? and is it for sorrow of that which was
That ye sing sadly, or dream of what shall be?
For gladly at once and sadly it seems ye sing.
--Our lady of love by you is unbeholden;
For hands she hath none, nor eyes, nor lips, nor golden
Treasure of hair, nor face nor...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Take my love, it is not true,
So let it tempt no body new;
Take my lady, she will sigh
For my bed where'er I lie;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my bones alone.
Take my raiment, now grown cold,
To give to some poor poet old;
Take the skin that hoods this truth
If his age would wear my youth;
Take them, said the skeleton,
But leave my...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
I found that ivory image there
Dancing with her chosen youth,
But when he wound her coal-black hair
As though to strangle her, no scream
Or bodily movement did I dare,
Eyes under eyelids did so gleam;
Love is like the lion's tooth.
When She, and though some said she played
I said that she had danced heart's truth,
Drew a knife to strike him dead,
I could but...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.
As she endured it all: bore up under
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,
serenely as a woman carrying water
moves...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
To-day my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme—
And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream.
But pardon, dear departed Guest,
I will not rant, I will not rail;
For good the grain must feel the flail;
There are whom love has never blessed.
I had and have a younger brother,
One...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to...Read more of this...
by
William Morris
Love is enough: draw near and behold me
Ye who pass by the way to your rest and your laughter,
And are full of the hope of the dawn coming after;
For the strong of the world have bought me and sold me
And my house is all wasted from threshold to rafter.
--Pass by me, and hearken, and think of me not!
Cry...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Grown Up poems.