Famous Holiday Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Holiday poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous holiday poems. These examples illustrate what a famous holiday poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Oscar Wilde
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which can winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
I
When shall I see the half moon sink again
Behind the black sycamore at the end of the garden?
When will the scent of the dim, white phlox
Creep up the wall to me, and in at my open window?
Why is it, the long slow stroke of the midnight bell,
(Will it never finish the twelve?)
Falls again and again on...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I love the cheery bustle
Of children round the house,
The tidy maids a-hustle,
The chatter of my spouse;
The laughter and the singing,
The joy on every face:
With frequent laughter ringing,
O, Home's a happy place!
Aye, Home's a bit of heaven;
I love it every day;
My line-up of eleven
Combine to make it gay;
Yet when in June they're leaving
For Sandport by the sea,
By rights I should...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
A SONG of the good green grass!
A song no more of the city streets;
A song of farms—a song of the soil of fields.
A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork;
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.
2
For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
We wear our sober Dresses when we die,
But Summer, frilled as for a Holiday
Adjourns her sigh --...Read more of this...
by
Sir Walter Raleigh
Now what is Love, I pray thee, tell?
It is that fountain and that well
Where pleasure and repentance dwell;
It is, perhaps, the sauncing bell
That tolls all into heaven or hell;
And this is Love, as I hear tell.
Yet what is Love, I prithee, say?
It is a work on holiday,
It is December matched with May,
When lusty bloods in fresh array
Hear ten months...Read more of this...
by
Judy Grahn
When she goes to Hollywood
she is an angel.
She writes in red red lipstick
on the window of her body,
long for me, oh need me!
Parts her lips like a lotus.
Opening night she stands, poised
on her carpet, luminescent,
young men humming
all around her. She is flying.
Her high heels are wands, her
furs electric. Her bracelets
flashing. How completely
dazzling her complexion,
how vibrant her hair and eyes,
how...Read more of this...
by
Alec Derwent (A D) Hope
To be put on the train and kissed and given my ticket,
Then the station slid backward, the shops and the neon lighting,
Reeling off in a drunken blur, with a whole pound note in my pocket
And the holiday packed with Perhaps. It used to be very exciting.
The present and past were enough. I did not mind...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Wife
The house is like a garden,
The children are the flowers,
The gardener should come methinks
And walk among his bowers,
Oh! lock the door on worry
And shut your cares away,
Not time of year, but love and cheer,
Will make a holiday.
The Husband
Impossible! You women do not know
The toil it takes to make a business grow.
I cannot join you until very late,
So hurry...Read more of this...
by
James Henry Leigh Hunt
It was the pleasant season yet,
When the stones at cottage doors
Dry quickly, while the roads are wet,
After the silver showers.
The green leaves they looked greener still,
And the thrush, renewing his tune,
Shook a loud note from his gladsome bill
Into the bright blue noon.
Robin Hood's mother looked out, and said
"It were a shame and a sin
For fear of getting a wet...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
'Twas in the month of March and in the year of 1899,
Which will be remembered for a very long time;
The wreck of the steamer "Stella" that was wrecked on the Casquet Rocks,
By losing her bearings in a fog, and received some terrible shocks.
The "Stella" was bound for the Channel Islands on a holiday trip,
And a number of passengers...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
He took the grade in second - quite a climb,
Dizzy and dangerous, yet how sublime!
The road went up and up; it curved around
The mountain and the gorge grew more profound.
He drove serenely, with no hint of haste;
And then she felt his arm go round her waist.
She shrank: she did not know him very well,
Being like her a guest at...Read more of this...
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...
by
Barry Tebb
I sat on a low stone wall
Watching the blue blood of the azaleas
Spatter on Haworth’s cobbles.
A seamless transparency of rain
Lowering over the turning trees
My thoughts drifting to Claudel’s
‘Five Great Odes’, to the stone marker
To the swathes of heather.
I stood on the moor top
Where the tracks cross
The fellside green
The fellside ochre,
Shifting reflections
Of C?zanne’s last winter....Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust
In shimmering exhaust
Searching to slake
Its fever in ocean
Will play and be idle or else it will bust.
The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings...Read more of this...
by
Laura Riding Jackson
The little quids, the million quids,
The everywhere, everything, always quids,
The atoms of the Monoton—
Each turned three essences where it stood
And ground a gisty dust from its neighbors' edges
Until a powdery thoughtfall stormed in and out,
The cerebration of a slippery quid enterprise.
Each quid stirred.
The united quids
Waved through a sinuous decision.
The quids, that had never done anything before
But be, be, be,...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Smart
That day i finished
A small piece
For an obscure magazine
I popped it in the box
And such a starry elation
Came over me
That I got whistled at in the street
For the first time in a long time.
I was dirty and roughly dressed
And had circles under my eyes
And far far from flirtation
But so full of completion
Of a deed duly done
An act of consummation
That...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
Little Betty Blue
Lost her holiday shoe;
What shall little Betty do?
Give her another
To match the other
And then she'll walk upon two....Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
A prisoner under the stars I lie,
With no friend near;
To-morrow they lead me forth to die,
The stake is ready, the torments set,
They will pay in full their deadly debt;
But I fear them not! Oh, none could fear
Of those who stood by Daulac's side
While he prayed and laughed and sang and fought
In the...Read more of this...
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...
by
Emily Dickinson
You know that Portrait in the Moon --
So tell me who 'tis like --
The very Brow -- the stooping eyes --
A fog for -- Say -- Whose Sake?
The very Pattern of the Cheek --
It varies -- in the Chin --
But -- Ishmael -- since we met -- 'tis long --
And fashions -- intervene --
When Moon's at full -- 'Tis...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
His face was like a lobster red,
His legs were white as mayonnaise:
"I've had a jolly lunch," he said,
That Englishman of pleasant ways.
"Thy do us well at our hotel:
In England food is dull these days."
"We had a big langouste for lunch.
I almost ate the whole of it.
And now I'll smoke and read my Punch,
And maybe siesta a bit;
And then I'll...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
One Day is there of the Series
Termed Thanksgiving Day.
Celebrated part at Table
Part in Memory.
Neither Patriarch nor Pussy
I dissect the Play
Seems it to my Hooded thinking
Reflex Holiday.
Had there been no sharp Subtraction
From the early Sum --
Not an Acre or a Caption
Where was once a Room --
Not a Mention, whose small Pebble
Wrinkled any Sea,
Unto Such, were such Assembly
'Twere Thanksgiving Day....Read more of this...
by
Robinson Jeffers
When the sun shouts and people abound
One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of
bronze
And the iron age; iron the unstable metal;
Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the tow-
ered-up cities
Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster.
Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains
will cure them,
Then nothing...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Beautiful Balmermo on the bonnie banks of Tay,
It's a very bonnie spot in the months of June or May;
The scenery there is charming and fascinating to see,
Especially the surroundings of the old Abbey,
Which is situated in the midst of trees on a rugged hill,
Which visitors can view at their own free will;
And the trees and shrubberies are lovely...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Holiday poems.