Famous Hillsides Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Fact Or Fable?

by Victor Hugo
 (BISMARCK AND NAPOLEON III.) 
 
 ("Un jour, sentant un royal appétit.") 
 
 {Bk. III. iii., Jersey, September, 1852.} 


 One fasting day, itched by his appetite, 
 A monkey took a fallen tiger's hide, 
 And, where the wearer had been savage, tried 
 To overpass his model. Scratch and bite 
 Gave place, however, to mere...Read more of this...

Kisiabaton

by Gary Snyder
Kisiabaton


Beat-up datsun idling in the road
 shreds of fog
 almost-vertical hillsides drop away
 huge stumps fading into mist
 soft warm rain

Snaggy, forked and spreading tops, a temperate cloud-forest tree 


Chamaecyparis formosiana--
 Taiwan hinoki,
hung-kuai     red cypress

That the tribal people call kisiabaton 


this rare old tree
 is what we came to see. 
...Read more of this...

In the footsteps of the walking air

by Kenneth Patchen
 In the footsteps of the walking air
Sky's prophetic chickens weave their cloth of awe
And hillsides lift green wings in somber journeying.

Night in his soft haste bumps on the shoulders of the abyss
And a single drop of dark blood covers the earth.

Now is the China of the spirit at walking
In my reaches.
A sable organ sounds in my gathered will
And love's...Read more of this...

Sabbaths W.I

by Derek Walcott
 Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday,
in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping

those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore
of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are
selling yellow sulphur stone

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance
the river whose bed is made of broken bottles
the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds...Read more of this...

General Roberts in Afghanistan

by William Topaz McGonagall
 'Twas in the year of 1878, and. the winter had set in,
Lord Roberts and the British Army their march did begin,
On their way to Afghanistan to a place called Cabul;
And the weather was bitter cold and the rivers swollen and full. 

And the enemy were posted high up amongst the hills,
And when they saw the British, with fear their...Read more of this...

Arithmetic on the Frontier

by Rudyard Kipling
 A great and glorious thing it is
 To learn, for seven years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
 Ere reckoned fit to face the foe --
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Three hundred pounds per annum spent
 On making brain and body meeter
For all the murderous intent
 Comprised in "villanous saltpetre!"
And...Read more of this...

By the Aurelian Wall

by Bliss Carman
 In Memory of John Keats
By the Aurelian Wall,
Where the long shadows of the centuries fall
From Caius Cestius' tomb,
A weary mortal seeking rest found room
For quiet burial,
Leaving among his friends
A book of lyrics.
Such untold amends
A traveller might make
In a strange country, bidden to partake
Before he farther wends;

Who slyly should bestow
The foreign reed-flute they had seen him blow
And finger cunningly,
On one...Read more of this...

The Maids Thought

by Robinson Jeffers
 Why listen, even the water is sobbing for something.
The west wind is dead, the waves
Forget to hate the cliff, in the upland canyons
Whole hillsides burst aglow
With golden broom. Dear how it rained last month,
And every pool was rimmed
With sulphury pollen dust of the wakening pines.
Now tall and slender suddenly
The stalks of purple iris blaze by the brooks,
The pencilled ones...Read more of this...

In California During the Gulf War

by Denise Levertov
 Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink--
a delicate abundance. They seemed

like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year's events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.

To some of us, the dejected...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

Good and Evil XXII

by Kahlil Gibran
 And one of the elders of the city said, "Speak to us of Good and Evil." 

And he answered: 

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil. 

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? 

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when...Read more of this...

Honey Harvest

by Martin Armstrong
Late in March, when the days are growing longer
And sight of early green
Tells of the coming spring and suns grow stronger,
Round the pale willow-catkins there are seen
The year's first honey-bees
Stealing the nectar: and bee-masters know
This for the first sign of the honey-flow.

Then in the dark hillsides the Cherry-trees
Gleam white with loads of blossom where the gleams
Of piled snow lately hung,...Read more of this...

I havent told my garden yet

by Emily Dickinson
 I haven't told my garden yet --
Lest that should conquer me.
I haven't quite the strength now
To break it to the Bee --

I will not name it in the street
For shops would stare at me --
That one so shy -- so ignorant
Should have the face to die.

The hillsides must not know it --
Where I have rambled so --
Nor tell the...Read more of this...

The Unsung Heroes

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
A song for the unsung heroes who rose in the country's need,
When the life of the land was threatened by the slaver's cruel greed,
For the men who came from the cornfield, who came from the plough and the flail,
Who rallied round when they heard the sound of the mighty man of the rail.
They laid them down in the valleys, they...Read more of this...

At Corfu

by Norman Dubie
 In seventeen hundred, a much hated sultan
visited us twice, finally
dying of headaches in the south harbor.

Ever since, visitors have come to the island.
They bring their dogs and children.

The ferry boat with a red cross
freshly painted on it
lifts in uneven drafts of smoke and steam
devising the mustard horizon
that is grotesque with purple thunderheads.

In the rising winds the angry sea birds
circle...Read more of this...

Iceland First Seen

by William Morris
 Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like...Read more of this...

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