Famous Mill Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Mill poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous mill poems. These examples illustrate what a famous mill poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, de clouds is mighty heavy
An' de rain is mighty thick;
Keep a song up on de way.
An' de waters is a rumblin'
On de boulders in de crick,
Keep a song up on de way.
Fu' a bird ercross de road
Is a-singin' lak he knowed
Dat we people did n't daih
Fu' to try de rainy aih
Wid a song up on de way.
What's de use...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Now ere I slept, my prayer had been that I might see my way
To do the will of Christ, our Lord and Master, day by day;
And with this prayer upon my lips, I knew not that I dreamed,
But suddenly the world of night a pandemonium seemed.
From forest, and from slaughter house, from bull ring, and from stall,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Composed of chalk dust,
Pencil shavings and
The sharp odour
Of stale urine;
It meets me now and then
Creeping down a creosoted corridor
Or waiting to be banged
With the dust from piles of books
On top of a cupboard.
The double desks heeled with iron
Having long been replaced;
The steel-nibbed pens and
Ink watered to pale grey
Gone too: the cane’s bamboo bite
Has nothing left to bite on
And David’s...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
Pocket watch, I tick well.
The streets are lizardly crevices
Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide.
It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac,
A palace of velvet
With windows of mirrors.
There one is safe,
There are no family photographs,
No rings through the nose, no cries.
Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women
Gulp at my bulk
And I, in my snazzy blacks,
Mill a litter of breasts like...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Uninterruptedly falls the snow,
Like meagre, long wool-strands, scant and slow,
O'er the meagre, long plain disconsolate.
Cold with lovelessness, warm with hate.
Infinite, infinite falls the snow.
Like a moment's time.
Monotonously, in a moment's time;
On the houses it falls and drops, the snow.
Monotonous, whitening them o'er with rime;
It falls on the sheds and their palings below.
And myriad-wise, it falls and lies
In ridgèd waves
In the...Read more of this...
by
Mark Twain
On the Erie Canal, it was,
All on a summer's day,
I sailed forth with my parents
Far away to Albany.
From out the clouds at noon that day
There came a dreadful storm,
That piled the billows high about,
And filled us with alarm.
A man came rushing from a house,
Saying, "Snub up your boat I pray,
Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,
Snub up while yet...Read more of this...
by
Paul Eluard
I. Soon
Of all the springtimes of the world
This one is the ugliest
Of all of my ways of being
To be trusting is the best
Grass pushes up snow
Like the stone of a tomb
But I sleep within the storm
And awaken eyes bright
Slowness, brief time ends
Where all streets must pass
Through my innermost...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
The miller's wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
"There are no millers any more,"
Was all that she had heard him say;
And he had lingered at the door
So long that it seemed yesterday.
Sick with a fear that had no form
She knew that she...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
M was a millWhich stood on a hill,And turned round and roundWith a loud hummy sound. m Useful old mill!...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
He is said to have been the last Red man
In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed--
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher's license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
'Whose business,--if I take it on myself,
Whose business--but why talk round the barn?--
When it's just that...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
How can you, my Lord, thus delight to torment all
The Peers of realm about cheapening their corn,
When you know, if one hasn't a very high rental,
'Tis hardly worth while being very high born?
Why bore them so rudely, each night of your life,
On a question, my Lord, there's so much to abhor in?
A question - like asking one, "How is...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Over the borders, a sin without pardon,
Breaking the branches and crawling below,
Out through the breach in the wall of the garden,
Down by the banks of the river we go.
Here is a mill with the humming of thunder,
Here is the weir with the wonder of foam,
Here is the sluice with the race running under--...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
SOME books are lies frae end to end,
And some great lies were never penn’d:
Ev’n ministers they hae been kenn’d,
In holy rapture,
A rousing whid at times to vend,
And nail’t wi’ Scripture.
But this that I am gaun to tell,
Which lately on a night befell,
Is just as true’s the Deil’s in hell
Or Dublin city:
That e’er he nearer comes oursel’
...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
O KEN ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten,
An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten?
She gotten a coof wi’ a claut o’ siller,
And broken the heart o’ the barley Miller.
The Miller was strappin, the Miller was ruddy;
A heart like a lord, and a hue like a lady;
The laird was a widdifu’, bleerit knurl;
She’s left the...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[This Ballad is introduced in the Wanderjahre,
in a tale called The Foolish Pilgrim.]
WHENCE comes our friend so hastily,
When scarce the Eastern sky is grey?
Hath he just ceased, though cold it be,
In yonder holy spot to pray?
The brook appears to hem his path,
Would he barefooted o'er it go?
Why curse his orisons in wrath,
Across those heights beclad with snow?
Alas! his...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself...Read more of this...
by
William Topaz McGonagall
Near the village of Udorf, on the banks of the Rhine,
There lived a miller and his family, once on a time;
And there yet stands the mill in a state of decay,
And concerning the miller and his family, attend to my lay.
The miller and his family went to Church one Sunday morn,
Leaving behind their darling child, the youngest born,
In...Read more of this...
by
A E Housman
Westward on the high-hilled plains
Where for me the world began,
Still, I think, in newer veins
Frets the changeless blood of man.
Now that other lads than I
Strip to bathe on Severn shore,
They, no help, for all they try,
Tread the mill I trod before.
There, when hueless is the west
And the darkness hushes wide,...Read more of this...
by
William Allingham
Through grass, through amber'd cornfields, our slow Stream--
Fringed with its flags and reeds and rushes tall,
And Meadowsweet, the chosen of them all
By wandering children, yellow as the cream
Of those great cows--winds on as in a dream
By mill and footbridge, hamlet old and small
(Red roofs, gray tower), and sees the sunset gleam
On mullion'd...Read more of this...
by
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Heigho! the lark and the owl!
One flies the morning, and one lulls the night:
Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,
Sings like the fool through darkness and light.
"A widow bird sate mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
"There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Dew -- is the Freshet in the Grass --
'Tis many a tiny Mill
Turns unperceived beneath our feet
And Artisan lies still --
We spy the Forests and the Hills
The Tents to Nature's Show
Mistake the Outside for the in
And mention what we saw.
Could Commentators on the Sign
Of Nature's Caravan
Obtain "Admission" as a Child
Some Wednesday Afternoon....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Forget! The lady with the Amulet
Forget she wore it at her Heart
Because she breathed against
Was Treason twixt?
Deny! Did Rose her Bee --
For Privilege of Play
Or Wile of Butterfly
Or Opportunity -- Her Lord away?
The lady with the Amulet -- will face --
The Bee -- in Mausoleum laid --
Discard his Bride --
But longer than the little Rill --
That cooled the Forehead...Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
O KEN ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten,
An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten?
A braw new naig wi’ the tail o’ a rottan,
And that’s what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten.
O ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill lo’es dearly,
An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill lo’es dearly?
A dram o’ gude strunt in...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha'nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still...
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha'nacker Mill.
Ha'nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
YOU never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for--how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
I say good-by because I know they tap your wrists,
In the dark, in the silence, day by day,
And all the blood of you...Read more of this...
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