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Famous Loitered Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves, 
And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay; 
While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way. 
I did not hear the birds about the eaves, 
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves: 
Only my soul kept watch from day to day, 
My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-- 
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves. 
At length there came the step upon the stair, 
Upon the lock the old familiar hand: 
Then first my spirit seemed ...Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina



...gain!

I let my neighbours pass me, ones and twos
And groups; the latest said the night grew chill,
And hastened: but I loitered, while the dews
Fell fast I loitered still....Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina
...crags;
Come, Laura, not another maiden lags,
No wilful squirrel wags,
The beasts and birds are fast asleep."
But Laura loitered still among the rushes
And said the bank was steep.

And said the hour was early still,
The dew not fallen, the wind not chill:
Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
"Come buy, come buy,"
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;
Let al...Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina
...ns: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps' flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone....Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...out;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should - by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance--
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part...Read more of this...
by Hardy, Thomas



...ntal Bible-oaks;
and a tiny rowboat that comes drifting out
of somebody's dreams, slowly foundering.
Winter has already loitered here,
lightly powdering these fields,
casting an impenetrable haze
that fills the world as far as the horizon.
I used to think that after we are gone
there's nothing, simply nothing at all.
Then who's that wandering by the porch
again and calling us by name?
Whose face is pressed against the frosted pane?
What hand out there is waving like a branch?...Read more of this...
by Akhmatova, Anna
...The mountain brook sung lonesomelike, and loitered on its way
Ez if it waited for a child to jine it in its play;
The wild-flowers uv the hillside bent down their heads to hear
The music uv the little feet that had somehow grown so dear;
The magpies, like winged shadders, wuz a-flutterin' to an' fro
Among the rocks an' holler stumps in the ragged gulch below;
The pines an' hemlocks tosst their bough...Read more of this...
by Field, Eugene
...delayed:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, where every sport could please,
How often have I loitered o'er your green,
Where humble happiness endeared each scene;
How often have I paused on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whispering lovers made;
How often have I blessed...Read more of this...
by Goldsmith, Oliver
...),

"He summoned Autumn, slanting down
The second bar. Thereover strode
A Wether, fleeced in burning brown,
And largely loitered down the Road.

"Far as the farmers sight his shape
Majestic moving o'er the way,
All cry `To harvest,' crush the grape,
And haul the corn and house the hay,

"Till presently, no man can say,
(So brown the woods that line that end)
If yet the brown-fleeced Wether may,
Or not, have passed beyond the Bend.

"Now turn I towards the Shepherd: lo,
An age...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney
...We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot's house.

Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss.

Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.

We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leav...Read more of this...
by Wilde, Oscar
...yre,
     Show me the fair would scorn to spy
     And prize such conquest of her eve!
     VI.

     While yet he loitered on the spot,
     It seemed as Ellen marked him not;
     But when he turned him to the glade,
     One courteous parting sign she made;
     And after, oft the knight would say,
     That not when prize of festal day
     Was dealt him by the brightest fair
     Who e'er wore jewel in her hair,
     So highly did his bosom swell
     As at...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter
...h that might not keep him long. 

So down the road I went, pausing to see 
How slow the dusk drew on, and how the folk 
Loitered about their doorways, well-content 
With the fine weather and the waxing year.
The miller’s house, that glimmered with grey walls, 
Turned me aside; and for a while I leaned 
Along the tottering rail beside the bridge 
To watch the dripping mill-wheel green with damp. 
The miller peered at me with shadowed eyes
And pallid face: I could not hear his ...Read more of this...
by Sassoon, Siegfried
...t was the man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town, 
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down. 
He loitered here he loitered there, till he was like to drop, 
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop. 
"Ere! shave my beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark, 
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark." 
The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are, 
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash he smoked a huge cigar; 
He was...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...It was a man from Ironbark who struck the Sydney town,
He wandered over street and park, he wandered up and down,
He loitered here, he loitered there, till he was like to drop,
Until at last in sheer despair he sought a barber's shop.
" 'Ere! shave me beard and whiskers off, I'll be a man of mark,
I'll go and do the Sydney toff up home in Ironbark!"

The barber man was small and flash, as barbers mostly are,
He wore a strike-your-fancy sash, he smoked a huge cigar:
He was ...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton
..."Too late for love, too late for joy,
Too late, too late!
You loitered on the road too long,
You trifled at the gate:
The enchanted dove upon her branch
Died without a mate.
The enchanted princess in her tower
Slept, died, behind the grate;
Her heart was starving all this while
You made it wait.

"Ten years ago, five years ago,
One year ago,
Even then you had arrived in time,
Though somewhat slow;
Then you had known he...Read more of this...
by Rossetti, Christina
...here on the shining shieldHis hands had set no dancing-floorBut a weed-choked field. A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,Loitered about that vacancy; a birdFlew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,Were axioms to him, who'd never heardOf any world where promises were kept,Or one could weep because another wept.The thin-lipped armorer,Hephaestos, hobbled away,Thetis of the shining breastsCried out in dismayAt what the god had ...Read more of this...
by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
..."What shall we learn
From this whisperer, fragile and white?"

And had you not been an enchantress
They would not have loitered to mock
Nor spared your white parrots who walked by their paws
With bantering venturesome talk.

You made a white fire of The Leaf.
You sang while the tiger-chiefs hissed.
You chanted of "Peace to the wonderful world."
And they saw you in dazzling mist.
And their steps were no longer insane,
Kindness came down like the rain,
They dreamed that like f...Read more of this...
by Lindsay, Vachel
...ALL day they loitered by the resting ships, 
Telling their beauties over, taking stock; 
At night the verdict left my messmate's lips, 
"The Wanderer is the finest ship in dock." 

I had not seen her, but a friend, since drowned, 
Drew her, with painted ports, low, lovely, lean, 
Saying, "The Wanderer, clipper, outward bound, 
The loveliest ship my eyes have ever seen-- ...Read more of this...
by Masefield, John
...ives, and golden was the honey;
golden, too, the music,
Where the honey-makers hummed among the trees. 

Happy Aristæus loitered in the garden, wandered
in the orchard,
Careless and contented, indolent and free; 
Lightly took his labour, lightly took his pleasure,
till the fated moment
When across his pathway came Eurydice. 

Then her eyes enkindled burning love within him;
drove him wild with longing,
For the perfect sweetness of her flower-like face;
Eagerly he followed, wh...Read more of this...
by Dyke, Henry Van
...eater Good contended
as sap on the bark of the maples, and even I
was enabled to witness the truly Existential where it loitered
famously in the shadows as if waiting for the moon.
All this I saw in the late afternoon in the company of no one.

And of course I went back to work the next morning. Like you,
like anyone, like the rumored angels of high office,
like the demon foremen, the bedeviled janitors, like you,
I returned to my job--but now there was a match-head in
my tho...Read more of this...
by Bell, Marvin

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry