Famous Landscape Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Landscape poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous landscape poems. These examples illustrate what a famous landscape poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky....Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky,...Read more of this...
by
Federico García Lorca
The fat lady came out first,
tearing out roots and moistening drumskins.
The fat lady
who turns dying octopuses inside out.
The fat lady, the moon's antagonist,
was running through the streets and deserted buildings
and leaving tiny skulls of pigeons in the corners
and stirring up the furies of the last centuries' feasts
and summoning the demon of bread through the sky's clean-swept hills
and filtering a...Read more of this...
by
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Repeat that, repeat,
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound....Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
Once, only once, I saw it clear, --
That Eden every human heart has dreamed
A hundred times, but always far away!
Ah, well do I remember how it seemed,
Through the still atmosphere
Of that enchanted day,
To lie wide open to my weary feet:
A little land of love and joy and rest,
With meadows of soft green,
Rosy with cyclamen, and sweet
With delicate breath...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,
plunges headlong into that black pond
where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind
which hungers to haul the white reflection down.
The austere sun descends above the fen,
an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look
longer on this landscape of chagrin;
feathered dark in thought, I stalk...Read more of this...
by
Paul Celan
tall poplars -- human beings of this earth!
black pounds of happiness -- you mirror them to death!
I saw you, sister, stand in that effulgence....Read more of this...
by
Stephen Dunn
The sky in the trees, the trees mixed up
with what's left of heaven, nearby a patch
of daffodils rooted down
where dirt and stones comprise a kind
of night, unmetaphysical, cool as a skeptic's
final sentence. What this scene needs
is a nude absentmindedly sunning herself
on a large rock, thinks the man fed up
with nature, or perhaps a lost tiger,
the maximum amount of wildness...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with...Read more of this...
by
Mari Evans
Black man running
Thru the ageless sun and shadow
History repeated past all logic
Who is it bides the time and why?
And for how long?...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
The kind old face, the egg-shaped head,
The tie, discreetly loud,
The loosely fitting shooting clothes,
A closely fitting shroud.
He liked old city dining rooms,
Potatoes in their skin,
But now his mouth is wide to let
The London clay come in.
He took me on long silent walks
In country lanes when young.
He knew the names of ev'ry bird
But not the song it sung.
And when he...Read more of this...
by
John Berryman
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Low lies the mere beneath the moorside, still
And glad of silence: down the wood sweeps clear
To the utmost verge where fed with many a rill
Low lies the mere.
The wind speaks only summer: eye nor ear
Sees aught at all of dark, hears aught of shrill,
From sound or shadow felt or fancied here.
Strange, as we praise the dead man's might and...Read more of this...
by
Hafez
Eyes that o’er the landscape fly,
Over dale & wood & stream
To the cloud-realms of the sky;
Eyes that wander still & dream,
Hopes that ever forward press
Seeking lovelier loveliness;
All the world is yours to roam
—Searching eye & swiftling thought—
Nowhere can ye make your home;
Not where peace so vainly sought
Bower’d in the valley lies,
Nor content’s small villages;
Nor can pleasure’s garish dress
Tempt you to...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Angle of a Landscape --
That every time I wake --
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack --
Like a Venetian -- waiting --
Accosts my open eye --
Is just a Bough of Apples --
Held slanting, in the Sky --
The Pattern of a Chimney --
The Forehead of a Hill --
Sometimes -- a Vane's Forefinger --
But that's -- Occasional --
The...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I
"O Time, whence comes the Mother's moody look amid her labours,
As of one who all unwittingly has wounded where she loves?
Why weaves she not her world-webs to according lutes and tabors,
With nevermore this too remorseful air upon her face,
As of angel fallen from grace?"
II
- "Her look is but her...Read more of this...
by
Robert Southey
Poussin! most pleasantly thy pictur'd scenes
Beguile the lonely hour; I sit and gaze
With lingering eye, till charmed FANCY makes
The lovely landscape live, and the rapt soul
From the foul haunts of herded humankind
Flies far away with spirit speed, and tastes
The untainted air, that with the lively hue
Of health and happiness illumes the cheek
Of mountain LIBERTY. My willing soul
All eager follows...Read more of this...
by
John Ashbery
The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits
in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How
pleasant
To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she
scratched
Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach
And was going to ask Wimpy...Read more of this...
by
Dorothy Parker
Now this must be the sweetest place
From here to heaven's end;
The field is white and flowering lace,
The birches leap and bend,
The hills, beneath the roving sun,
From green to purple pass,
And little, trifling breezes run
Their fingers through the grass.
So good it is, so gay it is,
So calm it is, and pure.
A one whose eyes may look on this
Must be the...Read more of this...
by
R S Thomas
To live in Wales is to be conscious
At dusk of the spilled blood
That went into the making of the wild sky,
Dyeing the immaculate rivers
In all their courses.
It is to be aware,
Above the noisy tractor
And hum of the machine
Of strife in the strung woods,
Vibrant with sped arrows.
You cannot live in the present,
At least not in Wales.
There is the language for...Read more of this...
by
William Lisle Bowles
Beautiful landscape! I could look on thee
For hours,--unmindful of the storm and strife,
And mingled murmurs of tumultuous life.
Here, all is still as fair--the stream, the tree,
The wood, the sunshine on the bank: no tear
No thought of time's swift wing, or closing night
Which comes to steal away the long sweet light,
No sighs of...Read more of this...
by
Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Man wants but little here below."
LITTLE I ask; my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own;
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten;--
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
ON a rocky peak once sat I early,
Gazing on the mist with eyes unmoving;
Stretch'd out like a pall of greyish texture,
All things round, and all above it cover'd.
Suddenly a boy appear'd beside me,
Saying "Friend, what meanest thou by gazing
On the vacant pall with such composure?
Hast thou lost for evermore all pleasure
Both in painting cunningly, and forming?"
On the child I...Read more of this...
by
Federico García Lorca
The men kept to themselves:
they were waiting for the swiftness of the last cyclists.
The women kept to themselves:
they were expecting the death of a boy on a Japanese schooner.
They all kept to themselves-
dreaming of the open beaks of dying birds,
the sharp parasol that punctures
a recently flattened toad,
beneath silence with a thousand ears
and tiny mouths of water
in the canyons that...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning...Read more of this...
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