Famous Moorland Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Moorland poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous moorland poems. These examples illustrate what a famous moorland poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Burns, Robert
...rom the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar’s mossy fountains boil;
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course.
Or haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,
Aroused by blustering winds an’ spotting thowes,
In mony a torrent down the snaw-broo rowes;
While crashing ice, borne on the rolling spate,
Sweeps dams, an’ mills, an’ brigs, a’ to the gate;
And from Glenbuck, 6 down to the Ratton-key, 7
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen’d, tumbling sea—
Then down ...Read more of this...
by
Burns, Robert
...ill him, owre the knowe,
For bits o’ bread;
An’ down the briny pearls rowe
For Mailie dead.
She was nae get o’ moorland tips,
Wi’ tauted ket, an’ hairy hips;
For her forbears were brought in ships,
Frae ’yont the Tweed.
A bonier fleesh ne’er cross’d the clips
Than Mailie’s dead.
Wae worth the man wha first did shape
That vile, wanchancie thing—a raip!
It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape,
Wi’ chokin dread;
An’ Robin’s bonnet wave wi’ crape
For Mailie dea...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...orm abated
Extremes demand those verbs so antiquated
Archaic and abhorred and second-rated
Yet still they stand like moorland rocks in mist
And wait as I do till the storm has passed
Buy postcards at the parsonage museum shop
Sit half an hour in the tea room drying off
And pen a word or two to my three muses
Who after all presented their excuses
But nonetheless the three all have their uses....Read more of this...
by
Poe, Edgar Allan
...in is sleeping
Full many a maid-
Some have left the cool glade, and
Have slept with the bee-
Arouse them, my maiden,
On moorland and lea-
Go! breathe on their slumber,
All softly in ear,
Thy musical number
They slumbered to hear-
For what can awaken
An angel so soon,
Whose sleep hath been taken
Beneath the cold moon,
As the spell which no slumber
Of witchery may test,
The rhythmical number
Which lull'd him to rest?"
Spirits in wing, and angels to the view,
A thousand seraphs...Read more of this...
by
Huchel, Peter
...a child limps by
Skirting the frozen pools: our way is lost:
Our hearts sink utterly.
But from the snow-patched moorland chill and drear,
Lifting our eyes beyond the spirëd height,
With white-fire lips apart the dawn breathes clear
Its soundless hymn of light.
Out of the vast the voice of one replies
Whose words are clouds and stars and night and day,
When for the light the anguished spirit cries
Deep in its house of clay....Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...
As I sip my tea, list calls to make,
Sigh in frustration at unread books.
For solace I look at cards of Haworth
Moorland vistas of unending paths
Cloudscapes only a Constable could paint
High Withens in a gale, the sloping village street.
How? When? Why?
‘The truth’ - if such an entity exists -
Is that I want to run away....Read more of this...
by
Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...f valleys;
The palm tree casts a shadow not its own;
Down the long architrave of temple or palace
Blows a cool air from moorland scarps of stone.
And day by day the whisper of love grows stronger;
That delicate voice, more urgent with despair,
Custom and fear constraining her no longer,
Drives her at last on the waste leagues of air.
A vanishing speck in those inane dominions,
Single and frail, uncertain of her place,
Alone in the bright host of her companions,
Lost...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...goes home:
A great wind grapples
The wave, and dapples
The dead green floor of the sea with foam.
Through fell and moorland,
And salt-sea foreland,
Our noisy norland
Resounds and rings;
Waste waves thereunder
Are blown in sunder,
And winds make thunder
With cloudwide wings;
Sea-drift makes dimmer
The beacon's glimmer;
Nor sail nor swimmer
Can try the tides;
And snowdrifts thicken
Where, when leaves quicken,
Under the heather the sundew hides.
Green land and red land...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
....'
'Comfort thyself,' said Arthur. 'I nor mine
Rest: so my knighthood keep the vows they swore,
The wastest moorland of our realm shall be
Safe, damsel, as the centre of this hall.
What is thy name? thy need?'
'My name?' she said--
'Lynette my name; noble; my need, a knight
To combat for my sister, Lyonors,
A lady of high lineage, of great lands,
And comely, yea, and comelier than myself.
She lives in Castle Perilous: a river
Runs in three loops ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...oded glades,
Air conditioned with more staff than patients-
When visiting times are readily extended to encompass
My moorland walks and journeys to the capital
When I visit Brenda Williams, England’s leading protest poet.
In an Eden garden which spreads its lawned sleeves
To envelop my tobacco smoke which irritates everyone
Or is it a displacement onto the smoker
As I ecstasise the red and yellow splendour of the red hot poker
Defiantly erect among the flowering...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...und upon the bugle-horn.
'T is the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,
Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;
Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,
And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.
Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.
Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade,
Glitter like a s...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...Night is on the downland, on the lonely moorland,
On the hills where the wind goes over sheep-bitten turf,
Where the bent grass beats upon the unplowed poorland
And the pine-woods roar like the surf.
Here the Roman lived on the wind-barren lonely,
Dark now and haunted by the moorland fowl;
None comes here now but the peewit only,
And moth-like death in the owl.
Beauty was here in on this...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...fire that sears
Slowly the hopes of the fruit that life amasses
Years upon years.
Pale as the glimmer of stars on moorland meres
Lighten the shadows reverberate from the glasses
Held in their hands as they pass among their peers.
Lights that are shadows, as ghosts on graveyard grasses,
Moving on paths that the moon of memory cheers,
Shew but as mists over cloudy mountain passes
Years upon years....Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...Sometimes in morning sunlights by the river
Where in the early fall long grasses wave,
Light winds from over the moorland sink and shiver
And sigh as if just blown across a grave.
And then I pause and listen to this sighing.
I look with strange eyes on the well-known stream.
I hear wild birth-cries uttered by the dying.
I know men waking who appear to dream.
Then from the water-lilies slow uprises
The still vast face of all the life I know,
Change...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...heart
In shoots of agony.
Their footsteps died as she leant there,
Lit by the morning star
Hanging above the moorland, where
The aged elm-rows are;
And, as o'ernight, from Pummery Ridge
To Maembury Ring and Standfast Bridge
No life stirred, near or far.
Though inner mischief worked amain,
She reached her husband's side;
Where, toil-weary, as he had lain
Beneath the patchwork pied
When yestereve she'd forthward crept,
And as unwitting, still he sl...Read more of this...
by
Benet, Stephen Vincent
...eam chokes in the sands.
"Pleached calms shall not await you,
Peace you shall never find;
Nought but the living moorland
Scourged naked by the wind.
"Nought but the living moorland,
And your love's hand in yours;
The strength more sure than surety,
The mercy that endures.
"Then, though they give you to be burned,
And slay you like a stoat,
You have found the world's heart in the turn of a cheek,
Heaven in the lift of a throat.
"Although they b...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...dred guests had lain,
And dreamed their forest sports again.
But vainly did the heath-flower shed
Its moorland fragrance round his head;
Not Ellen's spell had lulled to rest
The fever of his troubled breast.
In broken dreams the image rose
Of varied perils, pains, and woes:
His steed now flounders in the brake,
Now sinks his barge upon the lake;
Now leader of a broken host,
His standard falls, his honor's lost...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ather
Might die opportunely and without succour in a hill-top hospital,
Lonely as a scarecrow and inaccessible on the moorland midnight,
Beyond the reach of all but death standing at the bed-head.
Similarly your own father blundering ‘into the Selby Road, high on morphine’
Could but end in the same way.
These griefs were only too normal, as was my mother’s death you wrote of
With such sad eloquence as you shared my vigil: nothing could be added
To your lin...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...f the fiddler who at Tara
Played all night to ghosts of kings;
Of the brown dwarfs, and the fairies
Dancing in their moorland rings!
Jolliest of our birds of singing
Best he loved the Bob-o-link.
"Hush!" he'd say, "the tipsy fairies!
Hear the little folks in drink!"
Merry-faced, with spade and fiddle,
Singing through the ancient town,
Only this, of poor Hugh Tallant
Hath Tradtion handed down.
Not a stone his grave discloses;
But if yet his spirit walks...Read more of this...
by
Verhaeren, Emile
...Crossing the infinite length of the moorland,
Here comes the wind,
The wind with his trumpet that Heralds November;
Endless and infinite, crossing the downs,
Here comes the wind
That teareth himself and doth fiercely dismember;
Which heavy breaths turbulent smiting the towns,
The savage wind comes, the fierce wind of November!
Each bucket of iron at the wells of the farmyards,
Eac...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Moorland poems.