Famous Moonlight Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Moonlight poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous moonlight poems. These examples illustrate what a famous moonlight poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In broad daylight, and at noon,
Yesterday I saw the moon
Sailing high, but faint and white,
As a schoolboy's paper kite.
In broad daylight, yesterday,
I read a poet's mystic lay;
And it seemed to me at most
As a phantom, or a ghost.
But at length the feverish day
Like a passion died away,
And the night, serene and still,
Fell on village, vale, and hill.
Then the moon,...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves...Read more of this...
by
Matsuo Basho
Moonlight slanting
through the bamboo grove;
a cuckoo crying....Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
Swift, o'er the wild and dreary waste
A NUT-BROWN GIRL was seen to haste;
Wide waving was her unbound hair,
And sun-scorch'd was her bosom bare;
For Summer's noon had shed its beams
While she lay wrapp'd in fev'rish dreams;
While, on the wither'd hedge-row's side,
By turns she slept, by turns she cried,
"Ah ! where lies hid the balsam sweet,
"To heal the wounds of MARGUERITE?"
Dark...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
[What the Man of Faith said]
The dew, the rain and moonlight
All prove our Father's mind.
The dew, the rain and moonlight
Descend to bless mankind.
Come, let us see that all men
Have land to catch the rain,
Have grass to snare the spheres of dew,
And fields spread for the grain.
Yea, we would give to each...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The King has called for priest and cup,
The King has taken spur and blade
To dub True Thomas a belted knight,
And all for the sake o' the songs he made.
They have sought him high, they have sought him low,
They have sought him over down and lea;
They have found him by the milk-white thorn
That guards the gates...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I THINK of thee, whene'er the sun his beams
O'er ocean flings;
I think of thee, whene'er the moonlight gleams
In silv'ry springs.
I see thee, when upon the distant ridge
The dust awakes;
At midnight's hour, when on the fragile bridge
The wanderer quakes.
I hear thee, when yon billows rise on high,
With murmur deep.
To tread the silent grove oft wander I,
When all's asleep.
I'm near thee,...Read more of this...
by
Charlotte Bronte
THE human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
And days may pass in gay confusion,
And nights in rosy riot fly,
While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,
The memory of the Past may die.
But, there are hours of lonely musing,...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
As a pale phantom with a lamp
Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,
So glides the moon along the damp
Mysterious chambers of the air.
Now hidden in cloud, and now revealed,
As if this phantom, full of pain,
Were by the crumbling walls concealed,
And at the windows seen again.
Until at last, serene and proud
In all the...Read more of this...
by
Russell Edson
In sleep when an old man's body is no longer
aware of his boundaries, and lies flattened by
gravity like a mere of wax in its bed . . . It drips
down to the floor and moves there like a tear down a
cheek . . . Under the back door into the silver meadow,
like a pool...Read more of this...
by
Matsuo Basho
Autumn moonlight--
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut....Read more of this...
by
Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
Oh, what so subtle as the spell
The silvery moonlight weaves?
Oh, what so sad and what so glad,
And what so soon deceives.
A vision of the long ago—
Long years of pain between;
A mocking dream of happier days—
A veil of silver sheen.
A passing gleam of falling stars—
An idle summer's dream;
The sudden waking of...Read more of this...
by
Robert Seymour Bridges
In autumn moonlight, when the white air wan
Is fragrant in the wake of summer hence,
'Tis sweet to sit entranced, and muse thereon
In melancholy and godlike indolence:
When the proud spirit, lull'd by mortal prime
To fond pretence of immortality,
Vieweth all moments from the birth of time,
All things whate'er have been or yet shall be....Read more of this...
by
Galway Kinnell
1
You scream, waking from a nightmare.
When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.
2
I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
An unwrapped icon, too potent to touch,
she freed my breasts from the camp Empire dress.
Now one of them's the shadow of a breast
with a lost object's half-life, with as much
life as an anecdotal photograph:
me, Kim and Iva, all stripped to the waist,
hiking near Russian River on June first
'79: Iva's five-and-a-half.
While she was almost twenty, wearing black
T-shirts in D.C., where...Read more of this...
by
Vita Sackville-West
What time the meanest brick and stone
Take on a beauty not their own,
And past the flaw of builded wood
Shines the intention whole and good,
And all the little homes of man
Rise to a dimmer, nobler span;
When colour's absence gives escape
To the deeper spirit of the shape,
-- Then earth's great architecture swells
Among her mountains and her fells
Under the moon to amplitude
Massive...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Barton Paterson
'Twas the horse thief, Andy Regan, that was hunted like a dog
By the troopers of the upper Murray side,
They had searched in every gully -- they had looked in every log,
But never sight or track of him they spied,
Till the priest at Kiley's Crossing heard a knocking very late
And a whisper "Father Riley --...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
OVER the sea our galleys went,
With cleaving prows in order brave
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave--
A gallant armament:
Each bark built out of a forest-tree
Left leafy and rough as first it grew,
And nail'd all over the gaping sides,
Within and without, with black bull-hides,
Seethed in fat and suppled in...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
"O lonely workman, standing there
In a dream, why do you stare and stare
At her grave, as no other grave where there?"
"If your great gaunt eyes so importune
Her soul by the shine of this corpse-cold moon,
Maybe you'll raise her phantom soon!"
"Why, fool, it is what I would rather see
Than all the living folk there be;
But alas, there is...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
He thinks her little feet should pass
Where dandelions star thickly grass;
Her hands should lift in sunlit air
Sea-wind should tangle up her hair.
Green leaves, he says, have never heard
A sweeter ragtime mockingbird,
Nor has the moon-man ever seen,
Or man in the spotlight, leering green,
Such a beguiling, smiling queen.
Her eyes, he says, are stars...Read more of this...
by
Emily Brontë
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head....Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
'Tis eve on the hillside, the bagpipes are distantly wailing,
Flocks going homewards, and stars o'er the firmament sailing,
Sound of the bubbling spring sorrow's legend narrating,
And beneath a tall willow for me, dear one, you are waiting.
The wandering moon up the heavens her journey is wending,
Big-eyed you watch through the boughs her gold lantern ascending, ...Read more of this...
by
Victor Hugo
("La lune était sereine.")
{X., September, 1828.}
Bright shone the merry moonbeams dancing o'er the wave;
At the cool casement, to the evening breeze flung wide,
Leans the Sultana, and delights to watch the tide,
With surge of silvery sheen, yon sleeping islets lave.
From her hand, as it falls, vibrates...Read more of this...
by
Emily Brontë
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,
But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.
And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head....Read more of this...
by
James Lee Jobe
I planted my grief
in freshly turned earth
A tree grows there now
You should see the size of it
I filled my wheel-barrow
with all my pointless regrets
I put them out by the curb
A truck will pick them up on Thursday
I spent some time following my cat
She led me all around our yard
stopping to rub her face in mint
I rubbed my face in...Read more of this...
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