Famous Mid Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Invitation

by Thomas Godfrey
 DAMON.

Haste! Sylvia! haste, my charming Maid!
Let's leave these fashionable toys;
Let's seek the shelter of some shade,
And revel in ne'er fading joys.
See spring in liv'ry gay appears,
And winter's chilly blasts are fled;
Each grove its leafy honours rears,
And meads their lovely verdure spread!


SYLVIA.

Yes Damon, glad I'll quit the town,
Its gaities now languid seem;
Then sweets to luxury unknown
We'll taste, and sip th'...Read more of this...

Mid My Gold-Brown Curls

by George Eliot
 'Mid my gold-brown curls 
There twined a silver hair: 
I plucked it idly out 
And scarcely knew 'twas there. 
Coiled in my velvet sleeve it lay 
And like a serpent hissed: 
"Me thou canst pluck & fling away, 
One hair is lightly missed; 
But how on that near day 
When all the wintry army muster in array?"...Read more of this...

The Strange Lady

by William Cullen Bryant
 The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by, 
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool dear sky; 
Young Albert, in the forest's edge, has heard a rustling sound 
An arrow slightly strikes his hand and falls upon the ground. 

A lovely woman from the wood comes suddenly in sight; 
Her...Read more of this...

A mid-day plunge

by Kalidasa
A mid-day plunge will temper heat;
The breeze is rich with forest flowers;
To slumber in the shade is sweet;
And charming are the twilight hours....Read more of this...

Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down

by Thomas Lux
 As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge,
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell-plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food traps,
fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts,
sand grains, pollen....And inside
these jagged falling islands
live more microlives,
which feed creatures
on the way down
and all the way down. And you,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you...Read more of this...

A Passing Hail

by James Whitcomb Riley
 Let us rest ourselves a bit! 
Worry?-- wave your hand to it -- 
Kiss your finger-tips and smile 
It farewell a little while.

Weary of the weary way 
We have come from Yesterday, 
Let us fret not, instead, 
Of the wary way ahead.

Let us pause and catch our breath 
On the hither side of death, 
While we see the tender...Read more of this...

The Bluebell

by Anne Bronte
 A fine and subtle spirit dwells
In every little flower,
Each one its own sweet feeling breathes
With more or less of power. 
There is a silent eloquence
In every wild bluebell
That fills my softened heart with bliss
That words could never tell.

Yet I recall not long ago
A bright and sunny day,
'Twas when I led a toilsome life
So many leagues away;

That day along a...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXII. Vidi fra mille donne una già tale. BEAUTY SHOWED ITSELF IN, AND DISAPPEARED WITH, LAURA.  'Mid many fair one such by me was seenThat amorous fears my heart did instant seize,Beholding her—nor false the images—Equal to angels in her heavenly mien.Nothing in her was mortal or terrene,As one...Read more of this...

In The Forest

by Oscar Wilde
 Out of the mid-wood's twilight
Into the meadow's dawn,
Ivory limbed and brown-eyed,
Flashes my Faun!

He skips through the copses singing,
And his shadow dances along,
And I know not which I should follow,
Shadow or song!

O Hunter, snare me his shadow!
O Nightingale, catch me his strain!
Else moonstruck with music and madness
I track him in vain!...Read more of this...

The Mid-World

by George William Russell
 THIS is the red, red region
Your heart must journey through:
Your pains will here be legion
And joy be death for you.


Rejoice to-day: to-morrow
A turning tide shall flow
Through infinite tones of sorrow
To reach an equal woe.


You pass by love unheeding
To gain the goal you long—
But my heart, my heart is bleeding:
I cannot sing this song....Read more of this...

Memorabilia

by Robert Browning
 I

Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new?

II

But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at— 
My starting moves your laughter.

III

I crossed a moor with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world...Read more of this...

Mid-Term Break

by Seamus Heaney
 I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXXVIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXXVIII. Poi che voi ed io più volte abbiam provato. TO A FRIEND, COUNSELLING HIM TO ABANDON EARTHLY PLEASURES.  Still has it been our bitter lot to proveHow hope, or e'er it reach fruition, flies!Up then to that high good, which never dies,Lift we the heart—to heaven's pure bliss above.Read more of this...

Iceland First Seen

by William Morris
 Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like...Read more of this...

The Gardener LV: It Was Mid-Day

by Rabindranath Tagore
 It was mid-day when you went 
away .
The sun was strong in the sky.
I had done my work and sat alone
on my balcony when you went away.
Fitful gusts came winnowing
through the smells of may distant
fields.
The doves cooed tireless in the shade,
and a bee strayed in my room hum-
ming the news of many distant fields.
The village slept in the noonday
heat....Read more of this...

The Coastwise Lights

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...

Invern

by Ezra Pound
 Earth's winter cometh
And I being part of all
And sith the spirit of all moveth in me
I must needs bear earth's winter
Drawn cold and grey with hours
And joying in a momentary sun,
Lo I am withered with waiting till my spring cometh!
Or crouch covetous of warmth
O'er scant-logged ingle blaze,
Must take cramped joy in tomed Longinus
That, read I him first time
The woods...Read more of this...

To Charlotte

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 'MIDST the noise of merriment and glee,

'Midst full many a sorrow, many a care,
Charlotte, I remember, we remember thee,

How, at evening's hour so fair,
Thou a kindly hand didst reach us,

When thou, in some happy place

Where more fair is Nature s face,

Many a lightly-hidden trace
Of a spirit loved didst teach us.

Well 'tis that thy worth I rightly knew,--

That I, in...Read more of this...

At the Mid Hour of Night

by Thomas Moore
 At the mid hour of night, when stars are weeping, I fly 
To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye; 
And I think oft, if spirits can steal from the regions of air, 
To revisit past scenes of delight, thou wilt come to me there, 
And tell me our love is remember'd, even in...Read more of this...

The Sea Spirit

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I smile o'er the wrinkled blue­
Lo! the sea is fair,
Smooth as the flow of a maiden's hair;
And the welkin's light shines through
Into mid-sea caverns of beryl hue,
And the little waves laugh and the mermaids sing,
And the sea is a beautiful, sinuous thing! 

I scowl in sullen guise­
The sea grows dark and dun,
The swift clouds hide the sun
But not the...Read more of this...

Mid-ocean in War-time

by Joyce Kilmer
 (For My Mother)

The fragile splendour of the level sea,
The moon's serene and silver-veiled face,
Make of this vessel an enchanted place
Full of white mirth and golden sorcery.
Now, for a time, shall careless laughter be
Blended with song, to lend song sweeter grace,
And the old stars, in their unending race,
Shall heed and envy young humanity.
And yet to-night, a hundred leagues away,
These waters...Read more of this...

For All

by Gary Snyder
For All

 Ah to be alive
 on a mid-September morn
 fording a stream
 barefoot, pants rolled up,
 holding boots, pack on,
 sunshine, ice in the shallows,
 northern rockies.

 Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
 stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
 cold nose dripping
 singing inside
 creek music, heart music,
 smell of sun on gravel.

 I pledge allegiance

...Read more of this...

Eden in Winter

by Vachel Lindsay
 [Supposed to be chanted to some rude instrument at a modern fireplace]


Chant we the story now 
Tho' in a house we sleep; 
Tho' by a hearth of coals 
Vigil to-night we keep. 
Chant we the story now, 
Of the vague love we knew 
When I from out the sea 
Rose to the feet of you. 

Bird from the cliffs...Read more of this...

Rome: The Vatican-Sala Delle Muse

by Thomas Hardy
 I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the day, 
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away, 
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun, 
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One. 

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine, 
But each and the whole--an...Read more of this...

The Eruption Of Vesuvius

by Victor Hugo
 ("Quand longtemps a grondé la bouche du Vésuve.") 
 
 {I. vii.} 


 When huge Vesuvius in its torment long, 
 Threatening has growled its cavernous jaws among, 
 When its hot lava, like the bubbling wine, 
 Foaming doth all its monstrous edge incarnadine, 
 Then is alarm in Naples. 
 
 With dismay, 
 Wanton and wild...Read more of this...

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