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Famous Hovel Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Gibran, Kahlil
...There in the suburb stood an old hut heavily laden with snow and on the verge of falling. In a dark recess of that hovel was a poor bed in which a dying youth was lying, staring at the dim light of his oil lamp, made to flicker by the entering winds. He a man in the spring of life who foresaw fully that the peaceful hour of freeing himself from the clutches of life was fast nearing. He was awaiting Death's visit gratefully, and upon his pale face appeared the daw...Read more of this...



by Kipling, Rudyard
...ts chaotic from its bed,
 So it spread --
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built
 On the silt --
Palace, byre, hovel -- poverty and pride --
 Side by side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
 Death looked down.
But the Rulers in that City by the Sea
 Turned to flee --
Fled, with each returning spring-tide from its ills
 To the Hills.
From the clammy fogs of morning, from the blaze
 Of old days,
From the sickness of the noontide, from the heat,
 Beat...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...from as old a race--
As Lady of LORETTO!

Her dwelling was a Goatherds poor;
Yet she his heart delighted;
Their little hovel open stood,
Beside a lonesome frowning wood.
To travellers--benighted.

Yet oft, at midnight when the Moon
Its dappled course was steering,
The Castle bell would break their sleep,
And ZORIETTO slow would creep--
To bar the wicket--fearing!

What did she fear? O! dreadful thought!
The Moon's wan lustre, streaming;
The dim grey lamps, the crashi...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...er, the fret --
It's too bleeding cruel for me.

I feel it's all wrong, but I can't tell you why --
The palace, the hovel next door;
The insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,
The crush and the rush and the roar.
I'm trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;
I cower in the crash and the glare;
Oh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,
For I know that it's safer up there!

I'm scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear
The voice of my solitudes call!
We're nothing but ...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...pieces,
And he must struggle after reconstruction, ignominiously.

And so behold him following the tail
Of that mud-hovel of his slowly rambling spouse,
Like some unhappy bull at the tail of a cow,
But with more than bovine, grim, earth-dank persistence.

Suddenly seizing the ugly ankle as she stretches out to walk,
Roaming over the sods,
Or, if it happen to show, at her pointed, heavy tail
Beneath the low-dropping back-board of her shell.

Their two shells like d...Read more of this...



by Service, Robert William
...in a pinching penny-way,
And grimed with the soiling of Mother Earth.

Then one day motoring past his cottage,
The hovel in which he had been born,
I saw him supping a mess of pottage,
on the sill door, so fail forlorn.
Thinks I: I'll give him a joy that's thrilling,
A spin in my open Cadillac;
And so I asked him, and he was willing,
And I installed him there in the back.

en I put the big bus through its paces,
A hundred miles an hour or more;
And he clutched at...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells! 
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths! 
Sea of the brine of life! sea of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves!
Howler and scooper of storms! capricious and dainty sea! 
I am integral with you—I too am of one phase, and of all phases. 

Partaker of influx and efflux I—extoller of hate and conciliation; 
Extoller of amies, and those that sleep in each others’ arms. 

I am he attesting sympathy;
(Shall I make my list of ...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...shrill blast
Swept o'er the stormy main. The boiling foam
Rose to an altitude so fierce and strong

That their low hovel totter'd. Oft they stole
To the rock's margin, and with fearful eyes
Mark'd the vex'd deep, as the slow rising moon
Gleam'd on the world of waters. 'Twas a scene
Would make a Stoic shudder! For, amid
The wavy mountains, they beheld, alone ,
A LITTLE BOAT, now scarcely visible;
And now not seen at all; or, like a buoy,
Bounding, and buffetting, ...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...nd a voice came human but high up,
Like a cottage climbed among
The clouds; or a serf of hut and croft
That sits by his hovel fire as oft,
But hears on his old bare roof aloft
A belfry burst in song.

"The gates of heaven are lightly locked,
We do not guard our gain,
The heaviest hind may easily
Come silently and suddenly
Upon me in a lane.

"And any little maid that walks
In good thoughts apart,
May break the guard of the Three Kings
And see the dear and dreadful thi...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
..., and, shudd'ring mark
(Amid the wonders of the frozen world)
Dissolving pyramids, and threatening peaks,
Hang o'er his hovel, terribly Sublime.

And oft, when Summer breath'd ambrosial gales,
Soft sailing o'er the waste of printless dew
Or twilight gossamer, his pensive gaze
Trac'd the swift storm advancing, whose broad wing
Blacken'd the rushy dome of his low Hut;
While the pale lightning smote the pathless top
Of tow'ring CENIS, scatt'ring high and wide
A mist of fleec...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...ugh our Armies,
 One answer from our Lands:--
"No dealings with Diabolus
 As long as Mansoul stands!"


A pedlar from a hovel,
 The lowest of the low,
The Father of the Novel,
 Salvation's first Defoe,
Eight blinded generations
 Ere Armageddon came,
He showed us how to meet it,
 And Bunyan was his name!...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...orthern, sickly light,
"And shroud me, in eternal gloom!
"My Indian plains, now smiling glow,
"There stands my Parent's hovel low,
"And there the tow'ring aloes rise
"And fling their perfumes to the skies!
"There the broad palm Trees covert lend,
"There Sun and Shade delicious blend;
"But here, amid the blunted ray,
"Cold shadows hourly cross my way!

"Was it for this, that on the main
"I met the tempest fierce and strong,
"And steering o'er the liquid plain,
"Still onward, p...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...Beneath an old wall, that went round an old Castle,
For many a year, with brown ivy o'erspread;
A neat little Hovel, its lowly roof raising,
Defied the wild winds that howl'd over its shed:
The turrets, that frown'd on the poor simple dwelling,
Were rock'd to and fro, when the Tempest would roar,
And the river, that down the rich valley was swelling,
Flow'd swiftly beside the green step of its door.

The Summer Sun, gilded the rushy-roof slanting,
The bright dew...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Mary Darby
...ng the church-yard path retrod,
The Shepherd's patient guard, lay silent on the sod.


VIII. 

Near their small hovel stood a tree,
Where TRIM was ev'ry morning found--
Waiting his master's company,
And looking wistfully around;
And if, along the upland mead,
He heard him tune the merry reed,
O, then ! o'er hedge and ditch, thro' brake and briar,
The Shepherd's dog would haste, with eyes that seem'd on fire.


IX. 

And now he pac'd the valley, free,
And now h...Read more of this...

by Morris, William
...ade, for ever drives,
Bids us grind treasure and fashion pleasure
For other hopes and other lives.

Where home is a hovel and dull we grovel,
Forgetting that the world is fair;
Where no babe we cherish, lest its very soul perish;
Where mirth is crime, and love a snare. 

Who now shall lead us, what God shall heed us
As we lie in the hell our hands have won?
For us are no rulers but fools and befoolers,
The great are fallen, the wise men gone.

I heard men saying, ...Read more of this...

by Pushkin, Alexander
...worries; there he passed
His summer days in constant prayer,
Deep studies and eternal fast.
Already with a humble shovel
The elder dug himself a grave -
As, calling saints to bless his hovel,
Death - nothing other - did he crave.

So once, upon a falling night, he
Was bowing by his wilted shack
With meekest prayer to the Almighty.
The grove was turning slowly black;
Above the lake a mist was lifting;
Through milky clouds across the sky
The ruddy moon was softly d...Read more of this...

by Thoreau, Henry David
...They who prepare my evening meal below
Carelessly hit the kettle as they go
With tongs or shovel,
And ringing round and round,
Out of this hovel
It makes an eastern temple by the sound.
At first I thought a cow bell right at hand
Mid birches sounded o'er the open land,
Where I plucked flowers
Many years ago,
Spending midsummer hours
With such secure delight they hardly seemed to flow....Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...beneath her while she sprawls along
In her ungainly pace,
Her folds of skin that work and row
Beneath the earth-soiled hovel in which she moves.

And so he strains beneath her housey wall,
And catches her trouser-legs in his beak
Suddenly, or her skinny limb,
And strange and grimly drags at her
Like a dog,
Only agelessly silent, with a reptile's awful persistency.

Grim, gruesome gallantry, to which he is doomed.
Dragged out of an eternity of silent isolation
And...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...le soul's membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.

Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell
In tortoise-nakedness,

Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spreadeagle over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in t...Read more of this...

by Gibran, Kahlil
...ven were weeping over the people's weakness and servitude, a sick woman was thinking. She lived in an old, deserted hovel and, lying in her hard bed beside her newly born infant wrapped with ragged swaddles, was starving to death. She was a penurious and miserable young wife neglected by humanity; her husband had fallen into the trap of death set by the prince's oppression, leaving a solitary woman to whom God had sent, that night, a tiny companion to prevent her from...Read more of this...

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