Famous Hermit Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Hermit poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous hermit poems. These examples illustrate what a famous hermit poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...oast,
The lordly dome.
Here, Doon pour’d down his far-fetch’d floods;
There, well-fed Irwine stately thuds:
Auld hermit Ayr staw thro’ his woods,
On to the shore;
And many a lesser torrent scuds,
With seeming roar.
Low, in a sandy valley spread,
An ancient borough rear’d her head;
Still, as in Scottish story read,
She boasts a race
To ev’ry nobler virtue bred,
And polish’d grace. 2
By stately tow’r, or palace fair,
Or ruins pendent in the air,
Bold stem...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...of desert cell,
Far from the cheerful haunt of men and herds,
And sits as safe as in a senate house
For who would rob a hermit of his weeds,
His few books, or his beads, or maple dish,
Or do his grey hairs any violence?
But Beauty, like the fair Hesperian tree
Laden with blooming gold, had need the guard
Of dragon-watch with unenchanted eye
To save her blossoms, and defend her fruit,
From the rash hand of bold Incontinence.
You may as well spread out the unsunned heaps
Of...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...the empyrean I have drunk my fill.
Let it content thee, Sister, seeing me
More happy than betides mortality.
A hermit young, I'll live in mossy cave,
Where thou alone shalt come to me, and lave
Thy spirit in the wonders I shall tell.
Through me the shepherd realm shall prosper well;
For to thy tongue will I all health confide.
And, for my sake, let this young maid abide
With thee as a dear sister. Thou alone,
Peona, mayst return to me. I own
This may ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...labs of rock with figures, knights on horse
Sculptured, and deckt in slowly-waning hues.
'Sir Knave, my knight, a hermit once was here,
Whose holy hand hath fashioned on the rock
The war of Time against the soul of man.
And yon four fools have sucked their allegory
From these damp walls, and taken but the form.
Know ye not these?' and Gareth lookt and read--
In letters like to those the vexillary
Hath left crag-carven o'er the streaming Gelt--
'PHOSPHORU...Read more of this...
by
Pope, Alexander
...es to Peter;
The good man heaps up nothing but mere metre,
Enjoys his garden and his book in quiet;
And then--a perfect hermit in his diet.
Of little use the man you may suppose,
Who says in verse what others say in prose:
Yet let me show, a poet's of some weight,
And (though no soldier) useful to the state.
What will a child learn sooner than a song?
What better teach a foreigner the tongue?
What's long or short, each accent where to place,
And speak in public with s...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...om among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and fe...Read more of this...
by
Naidu, Sarojini
...The new hath come and now the old retires:
And so the past becomes a mountain-cell,
Where lone, apart, old hermit-memories dwell
In consecrated calm, forgotten yet
Of the keen heart that hastens to forget
Old longings in fulfilling new desires.
And now the Soul stands in a vague, intense
Expectancy and anguish of suspense,
On the dim chamber-threshold . . . lo! he sees
Like a strange, fated bride as yet unknown,
His timid future shrinkin...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...geons flew,
The partridge drummed i' the wood, the mink
Went fishing down the river-brink.
The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
Peered from the doorway of his cell;
The muskrat plied the mason's trade,
And tier by tier his mud-walls laid;
And from the shagbark overhead
The grizzled squirrel dropped his shell.
Next, the dear aunt, whose smile of cheer
And voice in dreams I see and hear, --
The sweetest woman ever Fate
Perverse denied a household mate,
Who, ...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...
The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
an...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...as the tiptoe cozener?
381 No, no: veracious page on page, exact.
V
A Nice Shady Home
382 Crispin as hermit, pure and capable,
383 Dwelt in the land. Perhaps if discontent
384 Had kept him still the pricking realist,
385 Choosing his element from droll confect
386 Of was and is and shall or ought to be,
387 Beyond Bordeaux, beyond Havana, far
388 Beyond carked Yucatan, he might have come
389 To colonize his polar planterdom
390 And jig h...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...eck or pluck the blossoms white:¡ª
How should I know but that they might
Lead lives as glad as mine?
To make my hermit-home complete, 65
I brought clear water from the spring
Praised in its own low murmuring,
And cresses glossy wet.
And so, I thought, my likeness grew
(Without the melancholy tale) 70
To 'gentle hermit of the dale,'
And Angelina too.
For oft I read within my nook
Such minstrel stories; till the breeze
Made sounds poetic ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...dropt into a lowly vale,
Low as the hill was high, and where the vale
Was lowest, found a chapel, and thereby
A holy hermit in a hermitage,
To whom I told my phantoms, and he said:
`"O son, thou hast not true humility,
The highest virtue, mother of them all;
For when the Lord of all things made Himself
Naked of glory for His mortal change,
`Take thou my robe,' she said, `for all is thine,'
And all her form shone forth with sudden light
So that the angels were amaz...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...tins' distant hum,
While the deep peal's commanding tone
Should wake, in yonder islet lone,
A sainted hermit from his cell,
To drop a bead with every knell!
And bugle, lute, and bell, and all,
Should each bewildered stranger call
To friendly feast and lighted hall.
XVI.
'Blithe were it then to wander here!
But now—beshrew yon nimble deer—
Like that same hermit's, thin and spare,
The copse must give my e...Read more of this...
by
Trumbull, John
...br>
Hard by there dwelt an aged Owl,
Of all his friends the gravest fowl;
Who from the cares of business free,
Lived, hermit, in a hollow tree;
To solid learning bent his mind,
In trope and syllogism he shined,
'Gainst reigning follies spent his railing;
Too much a Stoic--'twas his failing.
Hither for aid our Sparrow came,
And told his errand and his name,
With panting breath explain'd his case,
Much trembling at the sage's face;
And begg'd his Owlship would declare
I...Read more of this...
by
Warton, Thomas
...ge
The thick-wove laurel shades; though roseate Morn
Pour all her splendors on th' empurpled scene;
Yet fells the hoary hermit truer joys,
As from the cliff that o'er his cavern hangs
He views the piles of fallen Persepolis
In deep arrangement hide the darksome plain.
Unbounded waste! the mouldering obelisk
Here, like a blasted oak, ascends the clouds;
Here Parian domes their vaulted halls disclose
Horrid with thorn, where lurks th' unpitying thief,
Whence flits the twili...Read more of this...
by
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
...t:
Dear Lord in Heaven! it was a joy
The dead men could not blast.
I saw a third-I heard his voice:
It is the Hermit good!
He singeth loud his godly hymns
That he makes in the wood.
He'll shrieve my soul he'll wash away
The Albatross's blood.
PART SEVEN
THIS Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn...Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
...itself divideWith every virtue from the noble breast,As some grave hermit seeks a lonely rest:The heavens were clear, and all the ambient airWithout a threatening cloud; no adversaire'Durst once appear, or her calm mind affright;Death singly did herself conclude the fight;Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-...Read more of this...
by
Pushkin, Alexander
....."
Then - disappears in limpid water,
And all is silent instantly...
On the third day the zealous hermit
Was sitting by the shore, in love,
Awaiting the delightful mermaid,
As shade was covering the grove...
Dark ceded to the sun's emergence;
Our monk had wholly disappeared -
Before a crowd of local urchins,
While fishing, found his hoary beard.
Translated by: Genia Gurarie, summer of 1995
Copyright retained by Genia Gurarie.
email: ...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...sleep
The glad, tired little boy.
In a chilly room once more
I will pray to Mother of God,
It is hard to be a hermit,
To be happy is also hard.
Only fiery sleep will come to me,
I'll enter a temple on the hill,
Five-domed, white, and stone-hewn,
On the paths remembered well.
x x x
The spring was still mysteriously swooning,
Across the hills wandered transparent wind
And the deep lake was growing blue among us --
A temple forged and kept...Read more of this...
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