Famous Lichens Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Lukannon

by Rudyard Kipling
 I met my mates in the morning (and oh, but I am old!)
Where roaring on the ledges the summer ground-swell rolled;
I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers' song -- 
The beaches of Lukannon -- two million voices strong!


The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,
The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes,
The song...Read more of this...

Memories

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Oft I remember those I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was lead
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
As graves with grasses are, and at their head
The stone with moss and lichens so o'er spread,
Nothing is legible but the name alone.
And is it...Read more of this...

The Steeple-Jack

by Marianne Moore
 Dürer would have seen a reason for living
 in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
 with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.

One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep
 flying back and forth over the town...Read more of this...

The Shampoo

by Elizabeth Bishop
 The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you've been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so...Read more of this...

Earths Immortalities

by Robert Browning
 FAME.

See, as the prettiest graves will do in time,
Our poet's wants the freshness of its prime;
Spite of the sexton's browsing horse, the sods
Have struggled through its binding osier rods;
Headstone and half-sunk footstone lean awry,
Wanting the brick-work promised by-and-by;
How the minute grey lichens, plate o'er plate,
Have softened down the crisp-cut name and date!

LOVE.

So, the year's done with
(_Love me for ever!_)
All...Read more of this...

Sing To Me

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Sing to me! Something of sunlight and bloom, 
I am so compassed with sorrow and gloom, 
I am so sick with the world’s noisse and strife, -
Sing of the beauty and brightness of life –
Sing to me, sing to me! 

Sing to me! Something that’s jubilant, glad! 
I am so weary, my soul so sad.
All my earth riches are...Read more of this...

Leaves Compared With Flowers

by Robert Frost
 A tree's leaves may be ever so good,
So may its bar, so may its wood;
But unless you put the right thing to its root
It never will show much flower or fruit.

But I may be one who does not care
Ever to have tree bloom or bear.
Leaves for smooth and bark for rough,
Leaves and bark may be tree enough.

Some giant trees...Read more of this...

Giant Toad

by Elizabeth Bishop
 I am too big. Too big by far. Pity me. 
 My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even 
so. They see too much, above, below. And yet, there is not much 
to see. The rain has stopped. The mist is gathering on my skin 
in drops. The drops run down my back, run from...Read more of this...

Song For The Rainy Season

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Hidden, oh hidden 
in the high fog 
the house we live in, 
beneath the magnetic rock, 
rain-, rainbow-ridden, 
where blood-black 
bromelias, lichens, 
owls, and the lint 
of the waterfalls cling, 
familiar, unbidden. 

In a dim age 
of water 
the brook sings loud 
from a rib cage 
of giant fern; vapor 
climbs up the thick growth 
effortlessly, turns back, 
holding...Read more of this...

Grey Evening

by D. H. Lawrence
 When you went, how was it you carried with you
My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours? 
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers, 
And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped
Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields 
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped
And garnered that the golden daylight yields....Read more of this...

World Below the Brine The

by Walt Whitman
 THE world below the brine; 
Forests at the bottom of the sea—the branches and leaves, 
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds—the thick tangle, the openings,
 and
 the pink turf, 
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold—the play of light
 through
 the water, 
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks—coral, gluten, grass, rushes—and the aliment
 of
 the...Read more of this...

Celebration

by Denise Levertov
 Brilliant, this day – a young virtuoso of a day.
Morning shadow cut by sharpest scissors,
deft hands. And every prodigy of green – 
whether it's ferns or lichens or needles
or impatient points of buds on spindly bushes – 
greener than ever before. And the way the conifers
hold new cones to the light for the blessing,
a festive right, and sing the...Read more of this...

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