Famous Moonlit Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Thinking of My Brothers on a Moonlit Night

by Du Fu
Garrison drum cut person movement
Autumn border one goose sound
Dew from today night white
Moon is homeland bright
Have brother all disperse
No home ask die life
Send letter all not reach
Particularly as not stop fighting

The army drums cut off human travel,
A lone goose sounds on the borderland in autumn.
Tonight we start the season of White Dew,
The moon is just as bright as in my...Read more of this...

Spirits

by Robert Seymour Bridges
 Angel spirits of sleep, 
White-robed, with silver hair, 
In your meadows fair, 
Where the willows weep, 
And the sad moonbeam 
On the gliding stream 
Writes her scatter'd dream: 

Angel spirits of sleep, 
Dancing to the weir 
In the hollow roar 
Of its waters deep; 
Know ye how men say 
That ye haunt no more 
Isle and grassy shore 
With...Read more of this...

The Burghers

by Thomas Hardy
 THE sun had wheeled from Grey's to Dammer's Crest,
And still I mused on that Thing imminent:
At length I sought the High-street to the West.

The level flare raked pane and pediment
And my wrecked face, and shaped my nearing friend
Like one of those the Furnace held unshent.

"I've news concerning her," he said. "Attend.
They fly to-night at the late moon's first gleam:
Watch...Read more of this...

Sonnet VII

by Alan Seeger
 To me, a pilgrim on that journey bound 
Whose stations Beauty's bright examples are, 
As of a silken city famed afar 
Over the sands for wealth and holy ground, 
Came the report of one -- a woman crowned 
With all perfection, blemishless and high, 
As the full moon amid the moonlit sky, 
With the world's praise and wonder clad...Read more of this...

The Cat And The Moon

by William Butler Yeats
 The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred...Read more of this...

The Violet Pressed in a Copy of Shakespeare

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Here in the inmost of the master's heart
This violet crisp with early dew
Has come to leave her beauty and to part
With all her vivid hue.

And while in hollow glades and dells of musk,
Her fellows will reflower in bands,
Clasping the deeps of shade and emerald dusk,
With sweet inviolate hands,

She will lie here, a ghost of their delight,
Their lucent stems all...Read more of this...

A New World

by George William Russell
 I WHO had sought afar from earth
 The faery land to meet,
Now find content within its girth
 And wonder nigh my feet.


To-day a nearer love I choose
 And seek no distant sphere;
For aureoled by faery dews
 The dear brown breasts appear.


With rainbow radiance come and go
 The airy breaths of day;
And eve is all a pearly glow
 With moonlit...Read more of this...

Nocturne Of Remembered Spring

by Conrad Aiken
 I. 

Moonlight silvers the tops of trees,
Moonlight whitens the lilac shadowed wall
And through the evening fall,
Clearly, as if through enchanted seas,
Footsteps passing, an infinite distance away,
In another world and another day.
Moonlight turns the purple lilacs blue,
Moonlight leaves the fountain hoar and old,
And the boughs of elms grow green and cold,
Our footsteps echo on gleaming stones,
The leaves are stirred to...Read more of this...

Burning Drift-Wood

by John Greenleaf Whittier
Before my drift-wood fire I sit, 
And see, with every waif I burn, 
Old dreams and fancies coloring it, 
And folly's unlaid ghosts return. 

O ships of mine, whose swift keels cleft 
The enchanted sea on which they sailed, 
Are these poor fragments only left 
Of vain desires and hopes that failed? 

Did I not watch from them the light...Read more of this...

Moonlit Night

by Du Fu
 This night Fuzhou moon Woman's chamber in only alone watch Far pity little boy girl Not understand remember Chang'an Fragrant mist cloud dressed hair wet Clear brightness jade arm cold What time lean on empty curtain Pair shine tears trace dry  The moon shines in Fuzhou tonight, In her chamber, she watches alone. I pity...Read more of this...

Turns And Movies: Rose And Murray

by Conrad Aiken
 After the movie, when the lights come up, 
He takes her powdered hand behind the wings; 
She, all in yellow, like a buttercup, 
Lifts her white face, yearns up to him, and clings; 
And with a silent, gliding step they move 
Over the footlights, in familiar glare, 
Panther-like in the Tango whirl of love, 
He fawning close on her...Read more of this...

The Double Vision Of Michael Robartes

by William Butler Yeats
 I

On the grey rock of Cashel the mind's eye
Has called up the cold spirits that are born
When the old moon is vanished from the sky
And the new still hides her horn.

Under blank eyes and fingers never still
The particular is pounded till it is man.
When had I my own will?
O not since life began.

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent
By these...Read more of this...

The Haunted Oak

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
 Pray why are you so bare, so bare, 
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?
My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I say in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's pains.

They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And...Read more of this...

The House Of Clouds

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 I would build a cloudy House
For my thoughts to live in;
When for earth too fancy-loose
And too low for Heaven!
Hush! I talk my dream aloud---
I build it bright to see,---
I build it on the moonlit cloud,
To which I looked with thee.

Cloud-walls of the morning's grey,
Faced with amber column,---
Crowned with crimson cupola
From a sunset solemn!
May mists, for the casements, fetch,
Pale and...Read more of this...

Babette

by Robert William Service
 My Lady is dancing so lightly,
The belle of the Embassy Ball;
I lied as I kissed her politely,
And hurried away from it all.
I'm taxiing up to Montmartre,
With never a pang of regret,
To toy for awhile with the garter
Of her whom I know as Babette.

My Lady's an exquisite creature,
As rare as a queen on a throne;
She's faultless in form and in...Read more of this...

The Raft

by Vachel Lindsay
 The whole world on a raft! A King is here,
The record of his grandeur but a smear.
Is it his deacon-beard, or old bald pate
That makes the band upon his whims to wait?
Loot and mud-honey have his soul defiled.
Quack, pig, and priest, he drives camp-meetings wild
Until they shower their pennies like spring rain
That he may preach upon the Spanish main.
What...Read more of this...

Fairy Song

by Louisa May Alcott
 The moonlight fades from flower and rose 
And the stars dim one by one; 
The tale is told, the song is sung, 
And the Fairy feast is done. 
The night-wind rocks the sleeping flowers, 
And sings to them, soft and low. 
The early birds erelong will wake: 
'T is time for the Elves to go. 

O'er the sleeping earth...Read more of this...

Self-Abandonment

by Li Po
 I sat srinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few....Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

The Chinese Nightingale

by Vachel Lindsay
 A Song in Chinese Tapestries


"How, how," he said. "Friend Chang," I said,
"San Francisco sleeps as the dead—
Ended license, lust and play:
Why do you iron the night away?
Your big clock speaks with a deadly sound,
With a tick and a wail till dawn comes round.
While the monster shadows glower and creep,
What can be better for man than sleep?"

"I will tell you...Read more of this...

The Sycamores

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 In the outskirts of the village 
On the river's winding shores 
Stand the Occidental plane-trees, 
Stand the ancient sycamores. 

One long century hath been numbered, 
And another half-way told 
Since the rustic Irish gleeman 
Broke for them the virgin mould. 

Deftly set to Celtic music 
At his violin's sound they grew, 
Through the moonlit eves of summer, 
Making Amphion's...Read more of this...

On Moonlit Heath and Lonesome Bank

by A E Housman
 On moonlit heath and lonesome bank 
The sheep beside me graze; 
And yon the gallows used to clank 
Fast by the four cross ways. 

A careless shepherd once would keep 
The flocks by moonlight there, * 
And high amongst the glimmering sheep 
The dead man stood on air. 

They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail: 
The whistles blow forlorn,...Read more of this...

The Philanderer

by Robert William Service
 Oh, have you forgotten those afternoons
With riot of roses and amber skies,
When we thrilled to the joy of a million Junes,
And I sought for your soul in the deeps of your eyes?
I would love you, I promised, forever and aye,
And I meant it too; yet, oh, isn't it odd?
When we met in the Underground to-day
I addressed you as Mary...Read more of this...

An Answer

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 If all the year was summer-time,
And all the aim of life
Was just to lilt on like a rhyme –
Then I would be your wife.

If all the days were August days,
And crowned with golden weather,
How happy then through green-clad ways
We two could stray together!

If all the nights were moonlit nights,
And we had naught to do
But just to sit and plan...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...

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