Famous Memories Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Memories poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous memories poems. These examples illustrate what a famous memories poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Hilaire Belloc
To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend,
To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend
Wine, true begetter of all arts that be;
Wine, privilege of the completely free;
Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong;
Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong,
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!
Sing how the Charioteer from Asia came,
And on his front the little dancing flame
Which marked the God-head. Sing the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Eggshell and Wedgwood Blue were just two
Of the range on the colour cards Dulux
Tailored to our taste in the fifties,
Brentford nylons, Formica table tops and
Fablon shelf-covering in original oak or
Spruce under neon tubes and Dayglo shades.
Wartime brown and green went out, along with
The Yorkist Range, the wire-mesh food safe
In the cellar, the scrubbed board bath lid
And marbled glass bowl...Read more of this...
by
Carolyn Kizer
for Maxine Kumin
Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses
More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.
They moan about...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
Shaken,
The blossoms of lilac,
And shattered,
The atoms of purple.
Green dip the leaves,
Darker the bark,
Longer the shadows.
Sheer lines of poplar
Shimmer with masses of silver
And down in a garden old with years
And broken walls of ruin and story,
Roses rise with red rain-memories.
May!
In the open world
The sun comes and finds your face,
Remembering all....Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
'Not a child: I call myself a boy,'
Says my king, with accent stern yet mild,
Now nine years have brought him change of joy;
'Not a child.'
How could reason be so far beguiled,
Err so far from sense's safe employ,
Stray so wide of truth, or run so wild?
Seeing his face bent over book or toy,
Child I called him, smiling: but he smiled
Back,...Read more of this...
by
Anne Bradstreet
Proem.
1.1 Although great Queen, thou now in silence lie,
1.2 Yet thy loud Herald Fame, doth to the sky
1.3 Thy wondrous worth proclaim, in every clime,
1.4 And so has vow'd, whilst there is world or time.
1.5 So great's thy glory, and thine excellence,
1.6 The sound thereof raps every human sense
1.7 That men account it no...Read more of this...
by
Dale Harcombe
This time I know
I will never see him again.
For a time he played the game,
like a child experimenting with blocks,
building towers and fortresses
but never bridges.
Bridges are hard.
Invariably his feet would slip,
before he found
the acceptance parents had denied
and other...Read more of this...
by
Alan Dugan
The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a *****,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Two blind men met. Said one: "This earth
Has been a blackout from my birth.
Through darkness I have groped my way,
Forlorn, unknowing night from day.
But you - though War destroyed your sight,
Still have your memories of Light,
And to allay your present pain
Can live your golden youth again."
Then said the second: "Aye, it's true,
It must seem magical to you
To know the...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Chatterton
Recite the loves of Narva and Mored
The priest of Chalma's triple idol said.
High from the ground the youthful warriors sprung,
Loud on the concave shell the lances rung:
In all the mystic mazes of the dance,
The youths of Banny's burning sands advance,
Whilst the soft virgin panting looks behind,
And rides upon the pinions of the...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
...Read more of this...
by
Robert Lowell
Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming
in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,
I hog a whole house on Boston's
"hardly passionate Marlborough Street,"
where even the man
scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,
has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,
and is "a young Republican."
I have a nine months' daughter,
young enough to be my granddaughter.
Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo...Read more of this...
by
David Berman
I know it's a bad title
but I'm giving it to myself as a gift
on a day nearly canceled by sunlight
when the entire hill is approaching
the ideal of Virginia
brochured with goldenrod and loblolly
and I think "at least I have not woken up
with a bloody knife in my hand"
by then having absently wandered
one hundred yards from the house
while still seated in...Read more of this...
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...
by
Walter Savage Landor
Ah, what avails the sceptred race!
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee....Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
I had a dream, a dream of dread:
I thought that horror held the house;
A burglar bent above my bed,
He moved as quiet as a mouse.
With hairy hand and naked knife
He poised to plunge a bloody stroke,
Until despairful of my life
I shrieked with terror - and awoke.
I had a dream of weary woes:
In weather that was fit to freeze,
I thought...Read more of this...
by
Mahmoud Darwish
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
I
"Soul! Shall I see thy face," she said,
"In one brief hour?
And away with thee from a loveless bed
To a far-off sun, to a vine-wrapt bower,
And be thine own unseparated,
And challenge the world's white glower?
II
She quickened her feet, and met him where
They had predesigned:
And they clasped, and...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d
alone, bare-headed, barefoot,
Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows, twining and twisting as if they were alive,
Out from the...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Oh! the calm summer garden where nothing moves! Unless it be, near the middle of the bright and radiant pond, the goldfish like tongues of fire.
They are our memories playing in our thoughts that are calm and stilled and limpid, like the trustful and restful water.
And the water brightens and the fishes leap at the abrupt and marvellous sun, not...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
There was a green branch hung with many a bell
When her own people ruled this tragic Eire;
And from its murmuring greenness, calm of Faery,
A Druid kindness, on all hearers fell.
It charmed away the merchant from his guile,
And turned the farmer's memory from his cattle,
And hushed in sleep the roaring ranks of battle:
And all grew friendly for a little while.
Ah,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Like Some Old fashioned Miracle
When Summertime is done --
Seems Summer's Recollection
And the Affairs of June
As infinite Tradition
As Cinderella's Bays --
Or Little John -- of Lincoln Green --
Or Blue Beard's Galleries --
Her Bees have a fictitious Hum --
Her Blossoms, like a Dream --
Elate us -- till we almost weep --
So plausible -- they seem --
Her Memories like Strains -- Review...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but...Read more of this...
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