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Famous Iceland Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Williams, William Carlos (WCW)
...his the stain of a violet 
grew in that place the spring that foresaw its own doom. 

And this, a certain July from Iceland: 
a young woman of that place 
breathed it toward the South. It took root there. 
The color ran true but the plant is small. 

This falling spray of snow-flakes is 
a handful of dead Februaries 
prayed into flower by Rafael Arevalo Martinez 
of Guatemala. 
 Here's that old friend who 
went by my side so many years: this full, fragile ...Read more of this...



by Sandburg, Carl
...tongues of water sing around it with snow from the mountains.

Bury me in the North Atlantic.
A fog there from Iceland will be a murmur in gray over me and a long deep wind sob always.

Bury me in an Illinois cornfield.
The blizzards loosen their pipe organ voluntaries in winter stubble and the spring rains and the fall rains bring letters from the sea....Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...altic shore, 
 Seized Celtic ports, still needing more and more. 
 On all the Northern Sea his crafts roused fear: 
 Iceland beheld his demon navy near. 
 Antwerp the German burnt; and Prussias twain 
 Bowed to the yoke. The Polish King was fain 
 To help the Russian Spotocus—his aid 
 Was like the help that in their common trade 
 A sturdy butcher gives a weaker one. 
 The King it is who seizes, and this done, 
 The Emp'ror pillages, usurping right 
 In war Teuton...Read more of this...

by Morris, William
...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 the building of Gods that have been,
T...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...d with head erect, 
 All white and ghastly in his robe of snow, 
 Went forth into great silence and great night 
 By Iceland and Norway. After him 
 Gloom swallowed up the universe. He stood 
 A sovran kingdomless, a lonely ghost 
 Confronted with Immensity. He saw 
 The awful Infinite, at whose portal pale 
 Lightning sinks dying; Darkness, skeleton 
 Whose joints are nights, and utter Formlessness 
 Moving confusedly in the horrible dark 
 Inscrutable and blind. ...Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw—or northward in Christiania or Stockholm—or in Siberian
 Irkutsk—or in some street in Iceland; 
I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them again.

10
I see vapors exhaling from unexplored countries; 
I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poison’d splint, the fetish, and the obi. 

I see African and Asiatic towns; 
I see Algiers, Tripoli, Derne, Mogadore, Timbuctoo, Monrovia; 
I see the swarms of Pekin, Canton, Benare...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...Short of stature, large of limb,
Burly face and russet beard,
All the women stared at him,
When in Iceland he appeared.
"Look!" they said,
With nodding head,
"There goes Thangbrand, Olaf's Priest."

All the prayers he knew by rote,
He could preach like Chrysostome,
From the Fathers he could quote,
He had even been at Rome.
A learned clerk,
A man of mark,
Was this Thangbrand, Olaf's Priest.

He was quarrelsome and loud,
And impatient of con...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...and friendship
Made the gloomy Northern winter
Bright as summer.

Once some ancient Scald,
In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings.

Once in Elsinore,
At the court of old King Hamlet
Yorick and his boon companions
Sang these ditties.

Once Prince Frederick's Guard
Sang them in their smoky barracks;--
Suddenly the English cannon
Joined the chorus!

Peasants in the field,
Sailors on the roaring ocean,
Students, tradesmen,...Read more of this...

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