Famous Hummed Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Songs of the Lathes

by Rudyard Kipling
 1918Being the Words of the Tune Hummed at Her Lathe by Mrs. L. Embsay, Widow
The fans and the beltings they roar round me.
The power is shaking the floor round me
Till the lathes pick up their duty and the midnight-shift takes over.
 It is good for me to be here!

Guns in Flanders--Flanders guns!
(I had a man that worked 'em once!)
Shells...Read more of this...

Little Pierres Song

by William Topaz McGonagall
 In a humble room in London sat a pretty little boy,
By the bedside of his sick mother her only joy,
Who was called Little Pierre, and who's father was dead;
There he sat poor boy, hungry and crying for bread. 

There he sat humming a little song, which was his own,
But to the world it was entirely unknown,
And as he sang...Read more of this...

The Trail O' Love

by Badger Clark
  My love was swift and slender
    As an antelope at play,
  And her eyes were gray and tender
    As the east at break o' day,
  And I sure was shaky hearted
    And her flower face was pale
  On that silver night we parted,
   ...Read more of this...

A Family

by W S Merwin
Would you believe me
if I told you the name of the farmers
at the end of the lake
where it grew shallow over the mossy rocks
and if you came in the morning the grass was blue
the fur of the rocks was wet the small frogs jumped
and the lake was silent behind you
except for echoes

you tied your boat carefully to a tree
before setting...Read more of this...

In The Kalahari Desert

by Craig Raine
 The sun rose like a tarnished
looking-glass to catch the sun

and flash His hot message
at the missionaries below--

Isabella and the Rev. Roger Price,
and the Helmores with a broken axle

left, two days behind, at Fever Ponds.
The wilderness was full of home:

a glinting beetle on its back
struggled like an orchestra

with Beethoven. The Hallé,
Isabella thought and hummed.

Makololo, their Zulu guide,
puzzled out the Bible,...Read more of this...

The Return

by Philip Levine
 All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing. What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
and follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn
in August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.
Often he'd leave the Terraplane beside the highway
to enter the...Read more of this...

Los Angeles 1954

by David St John
 It was in the old days,
When she used to hang out at a place
Called Club Zombie,
A black cabaret that the police liked
To raid now and then. As she
Stepped through the door, the light
Would hit her platinum hair,
And believe me, heads would turn. Maestro
Loved it; he'd have her by
The arm as he led us through the packed crowd
To a private...Read more of this...

The Paper Windmill

by Amy Lowell
 The little boy pressed his face against the window-pane 
and looked out
at the bright sunshiny morning. The cobble-stones of 
the square
glistened like mica. In the trees, a breeze danced and 
pranced,
and shook drops of sunlight like falling golden coins into the brown 
water
of the canal. Down stream slowly drifted a long string 
of galliots
piled with crimson cheeses. The little...Read more of this...

Maud Muller

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 Maud Muller on a summer's day 
Raked the meadow sweet with hay. 

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth 
Of simple beauty and rustic health. 

Singing, she wrought, and her merry gleee 
The mock-bird echoed from his tree. 

But when she glanced to the far-off town 
White from its hill-slope looking down, 

The sweet song died, and a vague...Read more of this...

How Samson Bore Away the Gates of Gaza

by Vachel Lindsay
 (A ***** Sermon.)


Once, in a night as black as ink,
She drove him out when he would not drink.
Round the house there were men in wait
Asleep in rows by the Gaza gate.
But the Holy Spirit was in this man.
Like a gentle wind he crept and ran.
("It is midnight," said the big town clock.)

He lifted the gates up, post and lock.
The...Read more of this...

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates...Read more of this...

In The New Sun

by Philip Levine
 Filaments of light 
slant like windswept rain. 
The orange seller hawks 
into the sky, a man with a hat 
stops below my window 
and shakes his tassels. 
 Awake 
in Tetuan, the room filling 
with the first colors, and water running 
in a tub. 

* 

A row of sparkling carp 
iced in the new sun, odor 
of first love,...Read more of this...

Beloved Name

by Victor Hugo
 ("Le parfum d'un lis.") 
 
 {Bk. V. xiii.} 


 The lily's perfume pure, fame's crown of light, 
 The latest murmur of departing day, 
 Fond friendship's plaint, that melts at piteous sight, 
 The mystic farewell of each hour at flight, 
 The kiss which beauty grants with coy delay,— 
 
 The sevenfold scarf that parting...Read more of this...

A Retrospect Of Humidity

by Les Murray
 All the air conditioners now slacken
their hummed carrier wave. Once again
we've served our three months with remissions
in the steam and dry iron of this seaboard.
In jellied glare, through the nettle-rash season
we've watched the sky's fermenting laundry
portend downpours. Some came, and steamed away,
and we were clutched back into the rancid
saline midnights of orifice weather,
to damp grittiness and wiping off the...Read more of this...

It will be Summer -- eventually

by Emily Dickinson
 It will be Summer -- eventually.
Ladies -- with parasols --
Sauntering Gentlemen -- with Canes --
And little Girls -- with Dolls --

Will tint the pallid landscape --
As 'twere a bright Bouquet --
Thro' drifted deep, in Parian --
The Village lies -- today --

The Lilacs -- bending many a year --
Will sway with purple load --
The Bees -- will not despise the...Read more of this...

Valenciennes

by Thomas Hardy
 By Corporal Tullidge. See "The Trumpet-Major"
In Memory of S. C. (Pensioner). Died 184-

WE trenched, we trumpeted and drummed,
And from our mortars tons of iron hummed
Ath'art the ditch, the month we bombed
The Town o' Valencie?n.

'Twas in the June o' Ninety-dree
(The Duke o' Yark our then Commander be?n)
The German Legion, Guards, and we
Laid siege to Valencie?n.

This was the first time in...Read more of this...

The White Bees

by Henry Van Dyke
 I 

LEGEND 

Long ago Apollo called to Aristæus, 
youngest of the shepherds,
Saying, "I will make you keeper of my bees." 
Golden were the hives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees. 

Happy Aristæus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free; 
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his...Read more of this...

Dream Song 50: In a motion of night they massed nearer my post

by John Berryman
 In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.
I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out
I studied my weapons system.
Grenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout
of the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes, and most
of my pencils were sharp.

This edge of the galaxy has often seen
a defence so stiff, but it could only go
one way.
-”Mr Bones, your troubles...Read more of this...

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