Famous Hiding Poems by Famous Poets

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

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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...

Omens

by Thomas Moore
 When daylight was yet sleeping under the pillow, 
And stars in the heavens still lingering shone, 
Young Kitty, all blushing, rose up from her pillow, 
The last time she e'er was to press it alone. 
For the youth whom she treasured her heart and her soul in 
Had promised to link the last tie before noon; 
And when once...Read more of this...

Doc Hill

by Edgar Lee Masters
I went up and down the streets
Here and there by day and night,
Through all hours of the night caring for the poor who were sick.
Do you know why?
My wife hated me, my son went to the dogs.
And I turned to the people and poured out my love to them.
Sweet it was to see the crowds about the lawns on the...Read more of this...

Inaugural Poem

by Maya Angelou
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven...Read more of this...

The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
 dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
 Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
 As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
 Rebuffed...Read more of this...

The Dead Heart

by Anne Sexton
 After I wrote this, a friend scrawled on this page, "Yes." 

And I said, merely to myself, "I wish it could be for a 
different seizure--as with Molly Bloom and her ‘and 
yes I said yes I will Yes."

It is not a turtle 
hiding in its little green shell. 
It is not a stone 
to pick up and put...Read more of this...

What Is Love?

by Ernest Dowson
 What is Love? 
Is it a folly, 
Is it mirth, or melancholy? 
 Joys above, 
Are there many, or not any? 
 What is Love? 

 If you please, 
A most sweet folly! 
Full of mirth and melancholy: 
 Both of these! 
In its sadness worth all gladness, 
 If you please! 

 Prithee where, 
Goes Love a-hiding? 
Is...Read more of this...

Elijah Browning

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I was among multitudes of children
Dancing at the foot of a mountain.
A breeze blew out of the east and swept them as leaves,
Driving some up the slopes.... All was changed.
Here were flying lights, and mystic moons, and dream-music.
A cloud fell upon us. When it lifted all was changed.
I was now amid multitudes who were wrangling.
Then a figure in shimmering...Read more of this...

Who dares to take this life from me Knows no better

by T Wignesan
for Eric Mottram

"Nur wenn das Herz erschlossen,

Dann ist die Erde schön."

Goethe.

I

An important thing in living
Is to know when to go;
He who does not know this
Has not far to go,
Though death may come and go
When you do not know.


Come, give me your hand,
Together shoulder and cheek to shoulder
We'll go, sour kana in cheeks
And in the mornings cherry sticks
To gum: the infectious...Read more of this...

New York at Night

by Amy Lowell
 A near horizon whose sharp jags
Cut brutally into a sky
Of leaden heaviness, and crags
Of houses lift their masonry
Ugly and foul, and chimneys lie
And snort, outlined against the gray
Of lowhung cloud. I hear the sigh
The goaded city gives, not day
Nor night can ease her heart, her anguished labours stay.
Below, straight streets, monotonous,
From north and south, from east and west,
Stretch glittering;...Read more of this...

Covering Wings

by Katherine Mansfield
Love! Love! Your tenderness,
Your beautiful, watchful ways
Grasp me, fold me, cover me;
I lie in a kind of daze,
Neither asleep nor yet awake,
Neither a bud nor flower.
Brings to-morrow
Joy or sorrow,
The black or the golden hour?

Love! Love! You pity me so!
Chide me, scold me--cry,
"Submit--submit! You must not fight!"
What may I do, then? Die?
But, oh my horror of quiet beds!
How can I...Read more of this...

Acon and Rhodope

by Walter Savage Landor
 The Year's twelve daughters had in turn gone by,
Of measured pace tho' varying mien all twelve,
Some froward, some sedater, some adorn'd
For festival, some reckless of attire.
The snow had left the mountain-top; fresh flowers
Had withered in the meadow; fig and prune
Hung wrinkling; the last apple glow'd amid
Its freckled leaves; and weary oxen blinkt
Between the trodden corn and twisted vine,
Under whose...Read more of this...

Recovering Amid The Farms

by Jack Gilbert
 Every morning the sad girl brings her three sheep 
and two lambs laggardly to the top of the valley, 
past my stone hut and onto the mountain to graze. 
She turned twelve last year and it was legal 
for the father to take her out of school. She knows 
her life is over. The sadness makes her fine, 
makes...Read more of this...

A Baby In The House

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 I knew that a baby was hid in that house,
Though I saw no cradle and heard no cry;
But the husband was tip-toeing 'round like a mouse,
And the good wife was humming a soft lullaby;
And there was a look on the face of the mother,
That I knew could mean only one thing, and no other.

The mother, I said to myself,...Read more of this...

The Broken Balance

by Robinson Jeffers
 I. Reference to a Passage in Plutarch's Life of Sulla

The people buying and selling, consuming pleasures, talking in the archways,
Were all suddenly struck quiet
And ran from under stone to look up at the sky: so shrill and mournful,
So fierce and final, a brazen
Pealing of trumpets high up in the air, in the summer blue over Tuscany.
They marvelled; the soothsayers...Read more of this...

Sonnet 34: Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day

by William Shakespeare
 Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day
And make me travel forth without my cloak,
To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy brav'ry in their rotten smoke?
'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,
For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not...Read more of this...

Guenevere

by Sara Teasdale
 I was a queen, and I have lost my crown;
A wife, and I have broken all my vows;
A lover, and I ruined him I loved: --
There is no other havoc left to do.

A little month ago I was a queen,
And mothers held their babies up to see
When I came riding out of Camelot.
The women smiled, and all the world...Read more of this...

I Remember the Snows in the Summers Light

by Dejan Stojanovic
I remember the snows in the summer's light 
Thinking of winter in summer; 
When I see the blue, I see white; 

I see the fume over roofs so bright, 
Feel the warm air caressed by azure, 
I remember the snows in the summer's light. 

Summers are lazy in my inner sight, 
Winters, lazy on the outside, are sure to secure...Read more of this...

Cruisers

by Rudyard Kipling
 As our mother the Frigate, bepainted and fine,
Made play for her bully the Ship of the Line;
So we, her bold daughters by iron and fire,
Accost and decoy to our masters' desire.

Now, pray you, consider what toils we endure,
Night-walking wet sea-lanes, a guard and a lure;
Since half of our trade is that same pretty sort
As mettlesome wenches do practise in...Read more of this...

Blanche Sweet

by Vachel Lindsay
 MOVING-PICTURE ACTRESS

(After seeing the reel called "Oil and Water.")


Beauty has a throne-room
In our humorous town,
Spoiling its hob-goblins,
Laughing shadows down.
Rank musicians torture
Ragtime ballads vile,
But we walk serenely
Down the odorous aisle.
We forgive the squalor
And the boom and squeal
For the Great Queen flashes
From the moving reel.

Just a prim blonde stranger
In her early day,
Hiding brilliant weapons,
Too averse to play,
Then she burst upon us
Dancing...Read more of this...

Homeward Bound

by Henry Van Dyke
 Home, for my heart still calls me;
Home, through the danger zone;
Home, whatever befalls me,
I will sail again to my own! 

Wolves of the sea are hiding
Closely along the way,
Under the water biding
Their moment to rend and slay. 

Black is the eagle that brands them,
Black are their hearts as the night,
Black is the hate that sends them
To murder but not...Read more of this...

In Hilly-Wood

by John Clare
 How sweet to be thus nestling deep in boughs,
Upon an ashen stoven pillowing me;
Faintly are heard the ploughmen at their ploughs,
But not an eye can find its way to see.
The sunbeams scarce molest me with a smile,
So thick the leafy armies gather round;
And where they do, the breeze blows cool the while,
Their leafy shadows dancing on the ground.
Full many...Read more of this...

Memorial Day For The War Dead

by Yehuda Amichai
 Memorial day for the war dead. Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you. Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
"Behind all this some great happiness is...Read more of this...

The Rival

by James Whitcomb Riley
 I so loved once, when Death came by I hid 
 Away my face, 
And all my sweetheart's tresses she undid 
 To make my hiding-place. 

The dread shade passed me thus unheeding; and 
 I turned me then 
To calm my love -- kiss down her shielding hand 
 And comfort her again. 

And lo! she answered not:...Read more of this...

Dream Song 32: And where friend Quo lay you hiding

by John Berryman
 And where, friend Quo, lay you hiding
across malignant half my years or so?
One evil faery
it was workt night, with amoroso pleasing
menace, the panes shake
where Lie-by-the-fire is waiting for his cream.

A tiger by a torrent in rain, wind,
narrows fiend's eyes for grief
in an old ink-on-silk,
reminding me of Delphi, and,
friend Quo, once was safe
imagination as sweet milk.

Let all the flowers wither...Read more of this...

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