Famous Move Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Hero And Leander

by Friedrich von Schiller
 See you the towers, that, gray and old,
Frown through the sunlight's liquid gold,
Steep sternly fronting steep?
The Hellespont beneath them swells,
And roaring cleaves the Dardanelles,
The rock-gates of the deep!
Hear you the sea, whose stormy wave,
From Asia, Europe clove in thunder?
That sea which rent a world, cannot
Rend love from love asunder!

In Hero's, in Leander's heart,
Thrills the sweet anguish of the dart
Whose...Read more of this...

Our Eunuch Dreams

by Dylan Thomas
 I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boys' limbs,
And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
By...Read more of this...

American Feuillage

by Walt Whitman
 AMERICA always! 
Always our own feuillage! 
Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the
 cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas! 
Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New
 Mexico!
 Always soft-breath’d Cuba! 
Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes
 drain’d
 by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the...Read more of this...

Friendship

by Henry David Thoreau
 I think awhile of Love, and while I think, 
Love is to me a world, 
Sole meat and sweetest drink, 
And close connecting link 
Tween heaven and earth. 
I only know it is, not how or why, 
My greatest happiness; 
However hard I try, 
Not if I were to die, 
Can I explain. 

I fain would ask my friend...Read more of this...

A Mien to move a Queen

by Emily Dickinson
 A Mien to move a Queen --
Half Child -- Half Heroine --
An Orleans in the Eye
That puts its manner by
For humbler Company
When none are near
Even a Tear --
Its frequent Visitor --

A Bonnet like a Duke --
And yet a Wren's Peruke
Were not so shy
Of Goer by --
And Hands -- so slight --
They would elate a Sprite
With Merriment --

A Voice that...Read more of this...

The Hymn

by John Milton
 I

It was the Winter wilde,
While the Heav'n-born-childe, 
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies;
Nature in aw to him
Had doff't her gawdy trim,
With her great Master so to sympathize:
It was no season then for her
To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour.

II

Only with speeches fair
She woo'd the gentle Air
To hide her guilty front with innocent Snow,
And on her naked...Read more of this...

In Memory of Walter Savage Landor

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Back to the flower-town, side by side,
The bright months bring,
New-born, the bridegroom and the bride,
Freedom and spring.
The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free;
All things but one.
In many a tender wheaten plot
Flowers that were dead
Live, and old suns revive; but not
That holier head.

By this white wandering waste of sea,
Far...Read more of this...

The Dreamer

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Temples he built and palaces of air,
And, with the artist's parent-pride aglow,
His fancy saw his vague ideals grow
Into creations marvellously fair;
He set his foot upon Fame's nether stair.
But ah, his dream,—it had entranced him so
He could not move. He could no farther go;
But paused in joy that he was even there!
He did not wake until one day there gleamed
Thro' his...Read more of this...

With the Cattle

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The drought is down on field and flock, 
The river-bed is dry; 
And we must shift the starving stock 
Before the cattle die. 
We muster up with weary hearts 
At breaking of the day, 
And turn our heads to foreign parts, 
To take the stock away. 
And it’s hunt ‘em up and dog ‘em, 
And it’s get the whip...Read more of this...

Grace

by George Herbert
 My stock lies dead and no increase
Doth my dull husbandry improve: 
O let thy graces without cease
Drop from above! 

If still the sun should hide his face, 
Thy house would but a dungeon prove, 
Thy works, night's captives: O let grace
Drop from above! 

The dew doth ev'ry morning fall; 
And shall the dew outstrip thy dove? 
The dew, for...Read more of this...

The Flaming Circle

by Louis Untermeyer
Though for fifteen years you have chaffed me across the table,
Slept in my arms and fingered my plunging heart,
I scarcely know you; we have not known each other.
For all the fierce and casual contacts, something keeps us apart.
Are you struggling, perhaps, in a world that I see only dimly,
Except as it sweeps toward the star on which I stand alone?
Are...Read more of this...

Voices Of the Night

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 PRELUDE.

Pleasant it was, when woods were green,
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene,
Where, the long drooping boughs between
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go;

Or where the denser grove receives
No sunlight from above
But the dark foliage interweaves
In one unbroken roof of leaves,
Underneath whose sloping eaves
The shadows hardly move.

Beneath some patriarchal tree
I lay upon the ground;
His...Read more of this...

Move Eastward Happy Earth

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 
Yon orange sunset waning slow: 
From fringes of the faded eve, 
O, happy planet, eastward go: 
Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
Thy silver sister world, and rise 
To glass herself in dewey eyes 
That watch me from the glen below. 

Ah, bear me with thee, lightly borne, 
Dip forward under starry light,...Read more of this...

For Lucy Who Came First

by Marilyn L Taylor
 She simply settled down in one piece right where she was,
    in the sand of a long-vanished lake edge or stream--and died.
       —Donald C. Johanson, paleoanthropologist


When I put my hand up to my face
I can trace her heavy jawbone and the sockets
of her eyes under my skin. And in the...Read more of this...

Farewell To The Muse

by George (Lord) Byron
 Thou Power! who hast ruled me through Infancy's days,
Young offspring of Fancy, 'tis time we should part;
Then rise on the gale this the last of my lays,
The coldest effusion which springs from my heart.

This bosom, responsive to rapture no more,
Shall hush thy wild notes, nor implore thee to sing;
The feelings of childhood, which taught thee to soar,
Are wafted far...Read more of this...

An Elegy

by Ben Jonson
THOUGH beauty be the mark of praise  
And yours of whom I sing be such 
As not the world can praise too much  
Yet 'tis your Virtue now I raise. 

A virtue like allay so gone 5 
Throughout your form as though that move 
And draw and conquer all men's love  
This subjects you to love of...Read more of this...

On The Move Man You Gotta Go

by Thom Gunn
 The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows 
Some hidden purpose, and the gush of birds 
That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows, 
Have nested in the trees and undergrowth. 
Seeking their instinct, or their pose, or both, 
One moves with an uncertain violence 
Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense 
Or the dull thunder of approximate...Read more of this...

For Johnny Pole On The Forgotten Beach

by Anne Sexton
 In his tenth July some instinct
taught him to arm the waiting wave,
a giant where its mouth hung open.
He rode on the lip that buoyed him there
and buckled him under. The beach was strung
with children paddling their ages in,
under the glare od noon chipping
its light out. He stood up, anonymous
and straight among them, between
their sand pails and nursery crafts.
The breakers...Read more of this...

Arhan

by Aleister Crowley
 When the chill of earth black-breasted is uplifted at the
glance
Of the red sun million-crested, and the forest blossoms
dance
With the light that stirs and lustres of the dawn, and with
the bloom
Of the wind’s cheek as it clusters from the hidden valley’s
gloom :
Then I walk in woodland spaces, musing on the solemn
ways
Of the immemorial places shut behind the starry rays
Of the...Read more of this...

Night Journey

by Theodore Roethke
 Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I...Read more of this...

I Have Longed To Move Away

by Dylan Thomas
 I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away...Read more of this...

Sonnet XIV: Come Soft Aeolian Harp

by Mary Darby Robinson
 Come, soft Aeolian harp, while zephyr plays
Along the meek vibration of thy strings,
As twilight's hand her modest mantle brings,
Blending with sober grey, the western blaze!
O! prompt my Phaon's dreams with tend'rest lays,
Ere night o'er shade thee with its humid wings,
While the lorn Philomel his sorrow sings
In leafy cradle, red with parting rays!
Slow let thy dulcet tones on ether glide,
So...Read more of this...

Elizabeth

by Michael Ondaatje
 Catch, my Uncle Jack said
and oh I caught this huge apple
red as Mrs Kelly's bum.
It's red as Mrs Kelly's bum, I said
and Daddy roared
and swung me on his stomach with a heave.
Then I hid the apple in my room
till it shrunk like a face
growing eyes and teeth ribs.

Then Daddy took me to the zoo
he knew the man there
they put...Read more of this...

No Coward Soul Is Mine

by Emily Brontë
 No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life—that in me has rest,
As I—undying Life—have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men's hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one
Holding...Read more of this...

Never Seek to Tell thy Love

by William Blake
 Never seek to tell thy love 
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears--
Ah, she doth depart.

Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently, invisibly--
O, was no deny....Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Move poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace