Famous Moon Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Face of the spring moon

by Kobayashi Issa
 Face of the spring moon--
about twelve years old,
I'd say....Read more of this...

Ballad of the Moon

by Federico García Lorca
 The moon came into the forge
in her bustle of flowering nard.
The little boy stares at her, stares.
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her amrs,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings."
"Let me dance, my little one.
When the gypsies come,
they'll...Read more of this...

Since the day when Venus and the moon appeared in

by Omar Khayyam
Since the day when Venus and the moon appeared in
the sky, no one has seen anything here below preferable
to ruby wine. I am truly astonished at the wine-merchants,
for how can they buy anything superior to
that which they sell?...Read more of this...

Mondnacht (Night Of The Moon)

by Joseph Freiherr Von Eichendorff
 Es war, als hätt' der Himmel 
Die Erde still geküsst 
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer 
Von ihm nun träumen müsst 

Die Luft ging durch die Felder 
Die Ähren wogten sacht 
Es rauschten leis die Wälder 
So sternklar war die Nacht 

Und meine Seele spannte 
Weit ihre Flügel aus 
Flog durch die stillen Lande 
Als flöge sie nach Haus



It was as...Read more of this...

The moon tonight

by Kobayashi Issa
 The moon tonight--
I even miss
her grumbling....Read more of this...

Song of the Moon

by Claude McKay
 The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes,
And falls along cemented steel and stone,
Upon the grayness of a million homes,
Lugubrious in unchanging monotone. 
Upon the clothes behind the tenement,
That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,
Linking each flat to each indifferent,
Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

There is no magic from your presence here,
Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing...Read more of this...

Under the Moon

by Li Po
 Under the crescent moon's faint glow
The washerman's bat resounds afar,
And the autumn breeze sighs tenderly.
But my heart has gone to the Tartar war,
To bleak Kansuh and the steppes of snow,
Calling my husband back to me....Read more of this...

Having Lost My Sons I Confront The Wreckage Of The Moon: Christmas 1960

by James Wright
 After dark
Near the South Dakota border,
The moon is out hunting, everywhere,
Delivering fire,
And walking down hallways
Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,
It ights on the ruins
Of a white city
Frost, frost.

Where are they gone
Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings
And dark faces.

I am sick
Of it, and I go on
Living, alone, alone,
Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves
Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter
Moon spills...Read more of this...

On An Eclipse Of The Moon

by Walter Savage Landor
 Struggling, and faint, and fainter didst thou wane,
O Moon! and round thee all thy starry train
Came forth to help thee, with half-open eyes,
And trembled every one with still surprise,
That the black Spectre should have dared assail
Their beauteous queen and seize her sacred veil...Read more of this...

The Moon

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
AND, like a dying lady lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil, 
Out of her chamber, led by the insane 
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, 
The mood arose up in the murky east, 5 
A white and shapeless mass. 

II
Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, 
Wandering companionless 
Among the...Read more of this...

The Man In The Moon

by Mother Goose
The Man in the Moon came tumbling down,
  And asked the way to Norwich;
He went by the south, and burnt his mouth
  With eating cold pease porridge....Read more of this...

The Freedom of the Moon

by Robert Frost
 I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And...Read more of this...

Listening to the moon

by Yosa Buson
 Listening to the moon,
gazing at the croaking of frogs
in a field of ripe rice....Read more of this...

The Moon of Other Days

by Rudyard Kipling
 Beneath the deep veranda's shade,
 When bats begin to fly,
I sit me down and watch -- alas! --
 Another evening die.
Blood-red behind the sere ferash
 She rises through the haze.
Sainted Diana! can that be
 The Moon of Other Days?

Ah! shade of little Kitty Smith,
 Sweet Saint of Kensington!
Say, was it ever thus at Home
 The Moon of August shone,
When...Read more of this...

Phases of the Moon

by Elinor Wylie
 Once upon a time I heard 
That the flying moon was a Phoenix bird; 
Thus she sails through windy skies, 
Thus in the willow's arms she lies; 
Turn to the East or turn to the West 
In many trees she makes her nest. 
When she's but a pearly thread 
Look among birch leaves overhead; 
When she dies in yellow...Read more of this...

The Moon Maidens Song

by Ernest Dowson
 Sleep! Cast thy canopy 
 Over this sleeper's brain, 
Dim grow his memory, 
 When he wake again. 

Love stays a summer night, 
 Till lights of morning come; 
Then takes her winged flight 
 Back to her starry home. 

Sleep! Yet thy days are mine; 
 Love's seal is over thee: 
Far though my ways from thine, 
...Read more of this...

The Light o the Moon

by Vachel Lindsay
 [How different people and different animals look upon the moon: showing that each creature finds in it his own mood and disposition]


The Old Horse in the City

The moon's a peck of corn. It lies 
Heaped up for me to eat. 
I wish that I might climb the path 
And taste that supper sweet. 

Men feed me straw and scanty...Read more of this...

Children of the Moon

by W. E. B. Du Bois
I am dead;
Yet somehow, somewhere,
In Time's weird contradiction, I
May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
I brought to Children of the Moon
Freedom and vast salvation.
I was a woman born,
And trod the streaming street,
That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills,
Through caves and cañons limned in light,
Down to the twisting sea.
That night of nights,
I stood alone and at the End,
Until the sudden highway...Read more of this...

Ode to the Moon

by Mary Darby Robinson
 PALE GODDESS of the witching hour;
Blest Contemplation's placid friend; 
Oft in my solitary bow'r,
I mark thy lucid beam
From thy crystal car descend,
Whitening the spangled heath, and limpid sapphire stream. 

And oft, amidst the shades of night
I court thy undulating light;
When Fairies dance around the verdant ring,
Or frisk beside the bubbling spring,
When the thoughtless SHEPHERD'S song
Echoes thro' the silent air,
As...Read more of this...

Mrs Moon

by Roger McGough
 Mrs Moon
sitting up in the sky
little old lady
rock-a-bye
with a ball of fading light
and silvery needles
knitting the night...Read more of this...

The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon

by J R R Tolkien
 There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he saws his bow
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps...Read more of this...

Blood And The Moon

by William Butler Yeats
 I

Blessed be this place,
More blessed still this tower;
A bloody, arrogant power
Rose out of the race
Uttering, mastering it,
Rose like these walls from these
Storm-beaten cottages -
In mockery I have set
A powerful emblem up,
And sing it rhyme upon rhyme
In mockery of a time
Half dead at the top.

II

Alexandria's was a beacon tower, and Babylon's
An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the...Read more of this...

Moon-Lover

by Robert William Service
 I

The Moon is like a ping-pong ball;
I lean against the orchard wall,
And see it soar into the void,
A silky sphere of celluloid.

Then fairy fire enkindles it,
Like gossamer by taper lit,
Until it glows above the trees
As mellow as a Cheddar cheese.

And up and up I watch it press
Into appalling loneliness;
Like realms of ice without a stain,
A corpse Moon come to...Read more of this...

Thief of the Moon

by Kenneth Slessor
 Thief of the moon, thou robber of old delight, 
Thy charms have stolen the star-gold, quenched the moon- 
Cold, cold are the birds that, bubbling out of night, 
Cried once to my ears their unremembered tune- 
Dark are those orchards, their leaves no longer shine, 
No orange's gold is globed like moonrise there- 
O thief of the earth's old...Read more of this...

Moon In Virgo

by James Lee Jobe
 You are not beaten. The simple music rises up,

children's voices in the air, sound floating out

across the land and on to the river beyond,

over the valley's floor. No, you cannot go back

for those things you lost, the parts of yourself

that were taken, often by force. Like an animal

in the forest you must weep it all away at once,

violently, and...Read more of this...

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