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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King Canute

by Victor Hugo
 ("Un jour, Kanut mourut.") 
 
 {Bk. X. i.} 


 King Canute died.{1} Encoffined he was laid. 
 Of Aarhuus came the Bishop prayers to say, 
 And sang a hymn upon his tomb, and held 
 That Canute was a saint—Canute the Great, 
 That from his memory breathed celestial perfume, 
 And that they saw him, they...Read more of this...

To An Old Danish Song-book

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Welcome, my old friend,
Welcome to a foreign fireside,
While the sullen gales of autumn
Shake the windows.

The ungrateful world
Has, it seems, dealt harshly with thee,
Since, beneath the skies of Denmark,
First I met thee.

There are marks of age,
There are thumb-marks on thy margin,
Made by hands that clasped thee rudely,
At the alehouse.

Soiled and dull thou art;
Yellow are thy time-worn pages,
As the russet, rain-molested
Leaves...Read more of this...

Baltic Fog Notes

by Carl Sandburg
 (Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
A night harbor, blue dusk mountain shoulders against a night sky,
And a 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...

A Celebration

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 A middle-northern March, now as always— 
gusts from the South broken against cold winds— 
but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, 
it moves—not into April—into a second March, 

the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping 
upon the mold: this is the shadow projects the tree 
upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. 

So...Read more of this...

Thangbrand the Priest

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 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...Read more of this...

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