Famous Muffled Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Prelude To "the Songs Of Twilight."

by Victor Hugo
 ("De quel non te nommer?") 
 
 {PRELUDE, a, Oct. 20, 1835.} 


 How shall I note thee, line of troubled years, 
 Which mark existence in our little span? 
 One constant twilight in the heaven appears— 
 One constant twilight in the mind of man! 
 
 Creed, hope, anticipation and despair, 
 Are but a mingling,...Read more of this...

The First Snowfall

by James Russell Lowell
The snow had begun in the gloaming,
   And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
   With a silence deep and white.

Every pine and fir and hemlock
   Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
   Was ridged inch deep with pearl.

From sheds new-roofed with Carrara
 ...Read more of this...

Casey At The Bat

by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day, 
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play. 

And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same, 
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game. 

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. 
The rest clung to that...Read more of this...

The Genesis of the Butterfly

by Victor Hugo
 The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers 
The tearful roses; lo, the little lovers 
That kiss the buds, and all the flutterings 
In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings, 
That go and come, and fly, and peep and hide, 
With muffled music, murmured far and wide. 
Ah, the Spring time, when we think of all the...Read more of this...

Days

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
DAUGHTERS of Time the hypocritic Days  
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes  
And marching single in an endless file  
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands. 
To each they offer gifts after his will 5 
Bread kingdoms stars and sky that holds them all. 
I in my pleach¨¨d garden watched the pomp  
Forgot my morning wishes...Read more of this...

I Will Sing You One-O

by Robert Frost
 It was long I lay
Awake that night
Wishing that night
Would name the hour
And tell me whether
To call it day
(Though not yet light)
And give up sleep.
The snow fell deep
With the hiss of spray;
Two winds would meet,
One down one street,
One down another,
And fight in a smother
Of dust and feather.
I could not say,
But feared the cold
Had checked the pace
Of the tower clock
By tying...Read more of this...

306. Election Ballad at close of Contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs 1790

by Robert Burns
 FINTRY, my stay in wordly strife,
Friend o’ my muse, friend o’ my life,
 Are ye as idle’s I am?
Come then, wi’ uncouth kintra fleg,
O’er Pegasus I’ll fling my leg,
 And ye shall see me try him.


But where shall I go rin a ride,
That I may splatter nane beside?
 I wad na be uncivil:
In manhood’s various paths and ways
There’s aye...Read more of this...

The Destroyers

by Rudyard Kipling
 The strength of twice three thousand horse
 That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
 The hate that swings the whole;
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
 At gaze and gone again --
The Brides of Death that wait the groom --
 The Choosers of the Slain!

Offshore where sea and skyline blend
 In rain, the daylight dies;
The...Read more of this...

The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

by Rupert Brooke
 The Day that Youth had died,
There came to his grave-side, 
In decent mourning, from the country’s ends, 
Those scatter’d friends 
Who had lived the boon companions of his prime,
And laughed with him and sung with him and wasted, 
In feast and wine and many-crown’d carouse, 
The days and nights and dawnings of the time 
When Youth kept open house,...Read more of this...

Snake

by John Burnside
 As cats bring their smiling
mouse-kills and hypnotised birds, 
slinking home under the light 
of a summer's morning
to offer the gift of a corpse,

you carry home the snake you thought 
was sunning itself on a rock
at the river's edge: 
sun-fretted, gracile,
it shimmies and sways in your hands 
like a muscle of light,
and you gather it up like a braid 
for...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of How Macpherson Held The Floor

by Robert William Service
 Said President MacConnachie to Treasurer MacCall:
"We ought to have a piper for our next Saint Andrew's Ball.
Yon squakin' saxophone gives me the syncopated gripes.
I'm sick of jazz, I want to hear the skirling of the pipes."
"Alas! it's true," said Tam MacCall. "The young folk of to-day
Are fox-trot mad and dinna ken a reel from Strathspey.
Now, what we want's a...Read more of this...

The Child and the Mariner

by William Henry Davies
 A dear old couple my grandparents were, 
And kind to all dumb things; they saw in Heaven 
The lamb that Jesus petted when a child; 
Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to them 
Death was a rainbow in Eternity, 
That promised everlasting brightness soon. 
An old seafaring man was he; a rough 
Old man, but kind; and hairy,...Read more of this...

Dire Cure

by William Matthews
 "First, do no harm," the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalous
in its behavior that at first they mis-
diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it
within a year." But in ten days or so
I sat beside her bed with hot-and-sour
soup and heard an intern congratulate
her...Read more of this...

Modern Love: I

by George Meredith
 By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory...Read more of this...

Miss Loo

by Walter de la Mare
 When thin-strewn memory I look through, 
I see most clearly poor Miss Loo, 
Her tabby cat, her cage of birds, 
Her nose, her hair -- her muffled words, 
And how she'd open her green eyes, 
As if in some immense surprise, 
Whenever as we sat at tea, 
She made some small remark to me. 

It's always drowsy summer when...Read more of this...

Wirers

by Siegfried Sassoon
 ‘Pass it along, the wiring party’s going out’— 
And yawning sentries mumble, ‘Wirers going out.’ 
Unravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud, 
They toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood. 

The Boche sends up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there,
Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts 
Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching...Read more of this...

Whereas At Morning In A Jeweled Crown

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Whereas at morning in a Jeweled Crown
I bit my fingers and was hard to please,
Having shook disaster till the fruit fell down
I feel tonight more happy and at ease:
Feet running in the corridors, men quick— 
Buckling their sword-belts, bumping down the stair,
Challenge, and rattling bridge-chain, and the click
Of hooves on pavement—this will clear the air.
Private this chamber as it...Read more of this...

The Landlords Tale; Paul Reveres Ride

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal...Read more of this...

The Mutes

by Denise Levertov
 Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such...Read more of this...

How Butterflies Are Born

by Victor Hugo
 ("Comme le matin rit sur les roses.") 
 
 {Bk. I. xii.} 


 The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers 
 The tearful roses—lo, the little lovers— 
 That kiss the buds and all the flutterings 
 In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings 
 That go and come, and fly, and peep, and hide 
...Read more of this...

Paul Revere's Ride

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear 
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, 
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: 
Hardly a man is now alive 
Who remembers that famous day and year. 

He said to his friend, "If the British march 
By land or sea from the town to-night, 
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch 
Of the...Read more of this...

Modern Love I: By This He Knew She Wept

by George Meredith
 By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:
That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,
The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory...Read more of this...

Let Them Alone

by Robinson Jeffers
 If God has been good enough to give you a poet
Then listen to him. But for God's sake let him alone until he is dead; 
no prizes, no ceremony,
They kill the man. A poet is one who listens
To nature and his own heart; and if the noise of the world grows up 
around him, and if he is tough...Read more of this...

A Parody on 'A Psalm of Life'

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 Life is real, life is earnest, 
And the shell is not its pen –
“Egg thou art, and egg remainest”
Was not spoken of the hen.

Art is long and Time is fleeting, 
Be our bills then sharpened well, 
And not like muffled drums be beating
On the inside of the shell.

In the world’s broad field of battle, 
In the great barnyard of...Read more of this...

Madam La Maquise

by Robert William Service
 Said Hongray de la Glaciere unto his proud Papa:
"I want to take a wife mon Père," The Marquis laughed: "Ha! Ha!
And whose, my son?" he slyly said; but Hongray with a frown
Cried, "Fi! Papa, I mean - to wed, I want to settle down."
The Marquis de la Glaciere responded with a smile;
"You're young my boy; I much prefer that...Read more of this...

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