Famous Lights Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Lights poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous lights poems. These examples illustrate what a famous lights poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edward Thomas
I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.
Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.
Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends,
All...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry -- over headland, ness, and voe --
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!
Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest when...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
wherever there's a tear in the fabric
around weymouth - portland appears
from abbotsbury hill it's just a long
thin line humped at one end
closer (from chesil beach) a head-on
massive lump of rock gnashed by the sea
if you stand at sandsfoot castle
there's a military feel - an armed guard
of an island harsh with prisons
snarling with secrets visitors don't probe
but on the road...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
When in from Delos came the gold
That held the dream of Pericles,
When first Athenian ears were told
The tumult of Euripides,
When men met Aristophanes,
Who fledged them with immortal quills—
Here, where the time knew none of these,
There were some islands and some hills.
When Rome went ravening to see
The sons of mothers end their...Read more of this...
by
Robert Graves
I hardly remember your voice, but the pain of you
floats in some remote current of my blood.
I carry you in my depths, trapped in the sludge
like one of those corpses the sea refuses to give up.
It was a spoiled remnant of the South. A beach
without fishing boats, where the sun was for sale.
A stretch of shore, now a jungle...Read more of this...
by
Edna St. Vincent Millay
"Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Like Mighty Foot Lights -- burned the Red
At Bases of the Trees --
The far Theatricals of Day
Exhibiting -- to These --
'Twas Universe -- that did applaud --
While Chiefest -- of the Crowd --
Enabled by his Royal Dress --
Myself distinguished God --...Read more of this...
by
Delmore Schwartz
Silence is a great blue bell
Swinging and ringing, tinkling and singing,
In measure's pleasure, and in the supple symmetry
of the soaring of the immense intense wings
glinting against
All the blue radiance above us and within us, hidden
Save for the stars sparking, distant and unheard in their
singing.
And this is the first meaning of the famous saying,
The stars sang....Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
Fire lighted; on the table a meal for sleepy men;
A lantern in the stable; a jingle now and then;
The mail-coach looming darkly by light on moon and star;
The growl of sleepy voices; a candle in the bar;
A stumble in the passage of folk with wits abroad;
A swear-word from a bedroom---the shout of "All aboard!"...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Dawn’s my Mr Right, already
Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,
The neon lights of Leeds last night still
Sovereign in my sights, limousines and
Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled
Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,
Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines
Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,
Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots
Are...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
ON either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro' the field the road runs by
To many-tower'd Camelot; 5
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 10
Little breezes...Read more of this...
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...
by
Ruth Padel
We're talking different kinds of vulnerability here.
These icicles aren't going to last for ever
Suspended in the ultra violet rays of a Dumfries sun.
But here they hang, a frozen whirligig of lightning,
And the famous American sculptor
Who scrambles the world with his tripod
For strangeness au naturel, got sunset to fill them.
It's not comfortable, a double helix of opalescent...Read more of this...
by
Wilfred Owen
We'd found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,
And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell
Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.
Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime
Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,
Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.
What murk of air remained stank old, and sour
With fumes of whizz-bangs, and...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
When I’m among a blaze of lights,
With tawdry music and cigars
And women dawdling through delights,
And officers in cocktail bars,
Sometimes I think of garden nights
And elm trees nodding at the stars.
I dream of a small firelit room
With yellow candles burning straight,
And glowing pictures in the gloom,
And kindly books that hold me late.
Of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
I SEND to you, commissioners,
A paper that may please ye, sirs
(For troth they say it might be worse
An' I believe't)
And on your business lay my curse
Before I leav't.
I thocht I'd serve wi' you, sirs, yince,
But I've thocht better of it since;
The maitter I will nowise mince,
But tell ye true:
I'll service wi' some ither prince,
An' no wi' you.
I've no been...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs,
Balance-loving nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode,
Each color with its counter glowed,
To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;
Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough,
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
In one body grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal...Read more of this...
by
John Wilmot
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?
Without thy light what light remains in me?
Thou art my life; my way, my light's in thee;
I live, I move, and by thy beams I see.
Thou art my life-if thou but turn away
My life's a thousand...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
One of the Down and Out--that's me. Stare at me well, ay, stare!
Stare and shrink--say! you wouldn't think that I was a millionaire.
Look at my face, it's crimped and gouged--one of them death-mask things;
Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings?
Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum;
A knight of the...Read more of this...
by
John Matthew
Resolutions I have made,
Kept, I have none,
Why do I have to make,
Resolutions anymore?
I pause through endless time,
For this year to pass,
And the lights of celebration to die,
On this New Year day.
Remember those magical days,
When the promise of togetherness,
Held us together, tentatively,
Alas! No more!
Years just flow by,
As water beneath bridges,
Gathering speed towards,
The great sea of immortality.
There you and I,
Will...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
The grey gull sat on a floating whale,
On a floating whale sat he,
And he told his tale of the storm and the gale,
And the ships that he saw with steam and sail,
As he flew by the Northern Sea.
"I have seen a sign that is strange and new,
That I never before did see:
A...Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
"Break me my bounds, and let me fly
To regions vast of boundless sky;
Nor I, like piteous Daphne, be
Root-bound. Ah, no! I would be free
As yon same bird that in its flight
Outstrips the range of mortal sight;
Free as the mountain streams that gush
From bubbling springs, and downward rush
Across the serrate mountain's side,—
The rocks o'erwhelmed, their banks defied,—
And like the passions in...Read more of this...
by
Robert Bly
Tell me about the train that people say got buried
By the avalanche--was it snow?--It was
In Colorado, and no one saw it happen.
There was smoke from the engine curling up
Lightly through fir tops, and the engine sounds.
There were all those people reading--some
From Thoreau, some from Henry Ward Beecher.
And the engineer smoking and putting his head out.
I wonder when that happened....Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
I have opened the window to warm my hands on the sill
Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon
Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still
In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.
The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,
Like savage music striking far off, and there
On the great, uplifted...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
"Lights out" along the land,
"Lights out" upon the sea.
The night must put her hiding hand
O'er peaceful towns where children sleep,
And peaceful ships that darkly creep
Across the waves, as if they were not free.
The dragons of the air,
The hell-hounds of the deep,
Lurking and prowling everywhere,
Go forth to seek their helpless prey,
Not knowing whom they maim or slay--
Mad harvesters, who...Read more of this...
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