Famous Hawk Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Picture-Writing

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 In those days said Hiawatha,
"Lo! how all things fade and perish!
From the memory of the old men
Pass away the great traditions,
The achievements of the warriors,
The adventures of the hunters,
All the wisdom of the Medas,
All the craft of the Wabenos,
All the marvellous dreams and visions
Of the Jossakeeds, the Prophets!
"Great men die and are forgotten,
Wise men speak; their words of wisdom
Perish...Read more of this...

The Black Hawk War of the Artists

by Vachel Lindsay
 WRITTEN FOR LORADO TAFT'S STATUE OF BLACK HAWK AT OREGON, ILLINOIS

To be given in the manner of the Indian Oration and the Indian War-Cry.


Hawk of the Rocks,
Yours is our cause to-day.
Watching your foes
Here in our war array,
Young men we stand,
Wolves of the West at bay. 
Power, power for war 
Comes from these trees divine; 
Power from the boughs, 
Boughs...Read more of this...

101. Song—Composed in Spring

by Robert Burns
 AGAIN rejoicing Nature sees
 Her robe assume its vernal hues:
Her leafy locks wave in the breeze,
 All freshly steep’d in morning dews.


 Chorus.—And maun I still on Menie doat,
 And bear the scorn that’s in her e’e?
 For it’s jet, jet black, an’ it’s like a hawk,
 An’ it winna let a body be.


In vain to me the cowslips...Read more of this...

The Skeleton in Armor

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"SPEAK! speak! thou fearful guest! 
Who, with thy hollow breast 
Still in rude armor drest, 
Comest to daunt me! 
Wrapt not in Eastern balms, 5 
But with thy fleshless palms 
Stretched, as if asking alms, 
Why dost thou haunt me?" 

Then, from those cavernous eyes 
Pale flashes seemed to rise, 10 
As when the Northern skies 
Gleam in December; 
And,...Read more of this...

The Hawk and the Babe

by Aleister Crowley
 [Dedicated to Raymond Radclyffe]

I am that hawk of gold
Proud in adamantine poise
On the pillars of torqoise,
See,beyond the starry fold,
Where a darkling orb is rolled.

There, beneath a grove of yew,
Plays a babe. Should I despise
Such a foam of gold, and eyes
Burning beryline, so blue
That the sun seems peeping through?

Did I swwop, were Heaven amazed?
With my beak I strike but once;
Out...Read more of this...

A Statesmans Holiday

by William Butler Yeats
 I lived among great houses,
Riches drove out rank,
Base drove out the better blood,
And mind and body shrank.
No Oscar ruled the table,
But I'd a troop of friends
That knowing better talk had gone
Talked of odds and ends.
Some knew what ailed the world
But never said a thing,
So I have picked a better trade
And night and morning sing:
Tall dames go walking in grass-green...Read more of this...

The Tournament

by Sidney Lanier
 Joust First.


I.

Bright shone the lists, blue bent the skies,
And the knights still hurried amain
To the tournament under the ladies' eyes,
Where the jousters were Heart and Brain.

II.

Flourished the trumpets: entered Heart,
A youth in crimson and gold.
Flourished again: Brain stood apart,
Steel-armored, dark and cold.

III.

Heart's palfrey caracoled gayly round,
Heart tra-li-ra'd merrily;
But Brain sat still, with never a sound,
So cynical-calm was he.

IV.

Heart's helmet-crest...Read more of this...

River Roads

by Carl Sandburg
 LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.
They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.
Let ’em hawk their caw and caw.

Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.
He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years
And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to...Read more of this...

The Hawk

by William Henry Davies
 Thou dost not fly, thou art not perched, 
The air is all around: 
What is it that can keep thee set, 
From falling to the ground? 
The concentration of thy mind 
Supports thee in the air; 
As thou dost watch the small young birgs, 
With such a deadly care. 

My mind has such a hawk as thou, 
It is...Read more of this...

Like unto a sparrow-hawk, I am flying away from this

by Omar Khayyam
Like unto a sparrow-hawk, I am flying away from this
world of mysteries, hoping to lift myself to a higher
world; but, fallen, here below, and finding no one worthy
to share my secret thoughts, I go out through the door
by which I entered....Read more of this...

You and I

by Roger McGough
 I explain quietly. You
hear me shouting. You
try a new tack. I
feel old wounds reopen.

You see both sides. I
see your blinkers. I
am placatory. You
sense a new selfishness.

I am a dove. You
recognize the hawk. You
offer an olive branch. I
feel the thorns.

You bleed. I
see crocodile tears. I
withdraw. You
reel from the impact....Read more of this...

A Ballad (thesis For A Doctors Degree)

by Andrei Voznesensky
 My doc announced yesterday : 
 "You may have talent, though it's hidden, 
 your beak, however, is frost-bitten, 
 so stick at home on a cold day". 

 The nose, eh? 

 As irretrievable as time, 
 conforming to the laws of medicine, 
 your nose, like that of any person, 
 keep growing 
 steadily, 
 with...Read more of this...

Rock And Hawk

by Robinson Jeffers
 Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life...Read more of this...

Ginza Samba

by Robert Pinsky
 A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax's Belgian imagination

And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming...Read more of this...

November

by William Cullen Bryant
 The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.
For days the shepherds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky— blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem...Read more of this...

The Hawk

by William Butler Yeats
 'Call down the hawk from the air;
Let him be hooded or caged
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild.'

'I will not be clapped in a hood,
Nor a cage, nor alight upon wrist,
Now I have learnt to be proud
Hovering over the wood
In the broken mist
Or tumbling cloud.'

'What tumbling cloud did...Read more of this...

Gone

by Adam Lindsay Gordon
 IN Collins Street standeth a statute tall, 
A statue tall, on a pillar of stone, 
Telling its story, to great and small, 
Of the dust reclaimed from the sand waste lone; 
Weary and wasted, and worn and wan, 
Feeble and faint, and languid and low, 
He lay on the desert a dying man; 
Who has gone, my friends, where...Read more of this...

Evening Hawk

by Robert Penn Warren
 From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion 
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk...Read more of this...

End of Summer

by Stanley Kunitz
 An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part...Read more of this...

With Scindia to Delphi

by Rudyard Kipling
 More than a hundred years ago, in a great battle fought near Delhi,
an Indian Prince rode fifty miles after the day was lost
with a beggar-girl, who had loved him and followed him in all his camps,
on his saddle-bow. He lost the girl when almost within sight of safety.
A Maratta trooper tells the story: --


The wreath of banquet overnight lay...Read more of this...

Apologia

by Oscar Wilde
 Is it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

Is it thy will - Love that I love so well -
That my Soul's House should be a tortured spot
Wherein, like evil paramours, must dwell
The quenchless flame, the...Read more of this...

Tunbridge Wells

by John Wilmot
 At five this morn, when Phoebus raised his head
From Thetis' lap, I raised myself from bed,
And mounting steed, I trotted to the waters
The rendesvous of fools, buffoons, and praters,
Cuckolds, whores, citizens, their wives and daughters.

My squeamish stomach I with wine had bribed
To undertake the dose that was prescribed;
But turning head, a sudden curséd view
That innocent provision overthrew,
And without drinking,...Read more of this...

The Fugitive

by Friedrich von Schiller
 The air is perfumed with the morning's fresh breeze,
From the bush peer the sunbeams all purple and bright,
While they gleam through the clefts of the dark-waving trees,
And the cloud-crested mountains are golden with light.

With joyful, melodious, ravishing, strain,
The lark, as he wakens, salutes the glad sun,
Who glows in the arms of Aurora again,
And blissfully smiling, his race 'gins to...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...

Hawk Roosting

by Ted Hughes
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of...Read more of this...

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