Famous Lavender Poems by Famous Poets

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

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In an Old Town Garden

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 Shut from the clamor of the street
By an old wall with lichen grown,
It holds apart from jar and fret
A peace and beauty all its own. 

The freshness of the springtime rains
And dews of morning linger here;
It holds the glow of summer noons
And ripest twilights of the year. 

Above its bloom the evening stars
Look down at closing of the day,
And...Read more of this...

Rusty Crimson

by Carl Sandburg
 (Chirstmas Day, 1917)THE FIVE O’CLOCK prairie sunset is a strong man going to sleep after a long day in a cornfield.

The red dust of a rusty crimson is fixed with two fingers of lavender. A hook of smoke, a woman’s nose in charcoal and … nothing.

The timberline turns in a cover of purple. A grain elevator humps a shoulder....Read more of this...

The Fruit Shop

by Amy Lowell
 Cross-ribboned shoes; a muslin gown,
High-waisted, girdled with bright blue;
A straw poke bonnet which hid the frown
She pluckered her little brows into
As she picked her dainty passage through
The dusty street. "Ah, Mademoiselle,
A dirty pathway, we need rain,
My poor fruits suffer, and the shell
Of this nut's too big for its kernel, lain
Here in the sun it has shrunk again.
The baker down...Read more of this...

Entanglements

by Barry Tebb
 Why is it that in dreams I have visited -

As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school

In our once so green and pleasant land?

Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not

In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom

Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned

At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute

I returned...Read more of this...

Memoranda

by Carl Sandburg
 THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.

Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in...Read more of this...

The Little Old Lady in Lavender Silk

by Dorothy Parker
 I was seventy-seven, come August,
I shall shortly be losing my bloom;
I've experienced zephyr and raw gust
And (symbolical) flood and simoom.

When you come to this time of abatement,
To this passing from Summer to Fall,
It is manners to issue a statement
As to what you got out of it all.

So I'll say, though reflection unnerves me
And pronouncements I dodge as I can,
That...Read more of this...

Sunday

by James Schuyler
 The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is 
more than green and
throws up sharp and 
cutting lights to 
slice through the 
plane tree leaves. And 
on the cloudless blue 
I scribble your name....Read more of this...

Alone

by Walter de la Mare
 Over the fence, the dead settle in
for a journey. Nine o'clock.
You are alone for the first time
today. Boys asleep. Husband out.

A beer bottle sweats in your hand,
and sea lavender clogs the air
with perfume. Think of yourself.
Your arms rest with nothing to do

after weeks spent attending to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car...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...

The Village Garden

by Amy Levy
 To E.M.S.


Here, where your garden fenced about and still is,
Here, where the unmoved summer air is sweet
With mixed delight of lavender and lilies,
Dreaming I linger in the noontide heat.

Of many summers are the trees recorders,
The turf a carpet many summers wove;
Old-fashioned blossoms cluster in the borders,
Love-in-a-mist and crimson-hearted clove.

All breathes of peace and sunshine in the present,
All tells of...Read more of this...

The Old Women

by Arthur Symons
 They pass upon their old, tremulous feet, 
Creeping with little satchels down the street, 
And they remember, many years ago, 
Passing that way in silks. They wander, slow 
And solitary, through the city ways, 
And they alone remember those old days 
Men have forgotten. In their shaking heads 
A dancer of old carnivals yet treads 
The measure of past...Read more of this...

Old Man

by Edward Thomas
 Old Man, or Lads-Love, - in the name there’s nothing
To one that knows not Lads-Love, or Old Man, 
The hoar green feathery herb, almost a tree, 
Growing with rosemary and lavender.
Even to one that knows it well, the names
Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is: 
At least, what that is clings not to the names
In spite of time....Read more of this...

The Garden Wall

by Denise Levertov
 Bricks of the wall, 
so much older than the house - 
taken I think from a farm pulled down 
when the street was built - 
narrow bricks of another century. 

Modestly, though laid with panels and parapets, 
a wall behind the flowers - 
roses and hollyhocks, the silver 
pods of lupine, sweet-tasting 
phlox, gray 
lavender - 
unnoticed - 
but...Read more of this...

Small Comfort

by Katha Pollitt
 Coffee and cigarettes in a clean cafe,
forsythia lit like a damp match against
a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away
again in the lavender closet-too late to find
comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine
people would rather be happy than suffering
and inflicting suffering. We're near the end,

but...Read more of this...

Nantucket

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains—
Smell of cleanliness—

Sunshine of late afternoon—
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying— And the
immaculate white bed...Read more of this...

The Moose

by Elizabeth Bishop
 From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats 
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

No Need

by Alain Bosquet
 The elephant's trunk
is for picking up pistachios:
no need to bend over.
The giraffe's neck
is for grazing on stars:
no need to fly.
The chameleon's skin,
green, blue, lavender, white,
as it wishes,
is for hiding from ravenous animals:
no need to flee.
The turtle's shell,
is for sleeping inside,
even in winter:
no need for a house.
The poet's poem,
is for saying all of that
and a thousand thousand thousand other things:
no...Read more of this...

Elegy: Walking the Line

by Edgar Bowers
 Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In...Read more of this...

Description

by Mark Doty
 My salt marsh
-mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out-

how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we'll never need

to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune…

I could go...Read more of this...

Broceliande

by Alan Seeger
 Broceliande! in the perilous beauty of silence and menacing shade, 
Thou art set on the shores of the sea down the haze 
of horizons untravelled, unscanned. 
Untroubled, untouched with the woes of this world 
are the moon-marshalled hosts that invade 
Broceliande. 


Only at dusk, when lavender clouds in the orient twilight disband, 
Vanishing where all the blue afternoon they...Read more of this...

My Philosophy of Life

by John Ashbery
 Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be...Read more of this...

Vain Gratuities

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 Never was there a man much uglier 
In eyes of other women, or more grim: 
"The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim, 
So let us pray she's a philosopher," 
They said; and there was more they said of her-- 
Deeming it, after twenty years with him, 
No wonder that she kept her figure slim 
And always made...Read more of this...

That Day you came

by Lizette Woodworth Reese
 Such special sweetness was about
 That day God sent you here,
I knew the lavender was out,
 And it was mid of year.

Their common way the great winds blew,
 The ships sailed out to sea;
Yet ere that day was spent I knew
 Mine own had come to me.

As after song some snatch of tune
 Lurks still in grass or bough,
So,...Read more of this...

The Pobble Who Has No Toes

by Edward Lear
 The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said "Some day you may lose them all;"
He replied "Fish, fiddle-de-dee!"
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said "The World in general knows
There's nothing so good for a Pobble's toes!"

The Pobble who has no toes
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set...Read more of this...

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