Famous New Moon Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Late September

by Amy Lowell
 Tang of fruitage in the air;
Red boughs bursting everywhere;
Shimmering of seeded grass;
Hooded gentians all a'mass.
Warmth of earth, and cloudless wind
Tearing off the husky rind,
Blowing feathered seeds to fall
By the sun-baked, sheltering wall.
Beech trees in a golden haze;
Hardy sumachs all ablaze,
Glowing through the silver birches.
How that pine tree shouts and lurches!
From the sunny door-jamb high,
Swings the shell of a butterfly.
Scrape...Read more of this...

Miracles

by Walt Whitman
 WHY! who makes much of a miracle? 
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, 
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, 
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, 
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods, 
Or talk...Read more of this...

The Hard Times In Elfland

by Sidney Lanier
 A Story of Christmas Eve.

Strange that the termagant winds should scold
The Christmas Eve so bitterly!
But Wife, and Harry the four-year-old,
Big Charley, Nimblewits, and I,

Blithe as the wind was bitter, drew
More frontward of the mighty fire,
Where wise Newfoundland Fan foreknew
The heaven that Christian dogs desire --

Stretched o'er the rug, serene and grave,
Huge nose on heavy paws reclined,
With never a drowning...Read more of this...

The Illinois Village

by Vachel Lindsay
 O you who lose the art of hope, 
Whose temples seem to shrine a lie, 
Whose sidewalks are but stones of fear, 
Who weep that Liberty must die, 
Turn to the little prairie towns, 
Your higher hope shall yet begin. 
On every side awaits you there 
Some gate where glory enters in. 

Yet when I see the flocks of...Read more of this...

Betrothed

by Louise Bogan
 You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,

My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, "You...Read more of this...

Spensers Ireland

by Marianne Moore
 has not altered;--
a place as kind as it is green,
the greenest place I've never seen.
Every name is a tune.
Denunciations do not affect
the culprit; nor blows, but it
is torture to him to not be spoken to.
They're natural,--
the coat, like Venus'
mantle lined with stars,
buttoned close at the neck,-the sleeves new from disuse.

If in Ireland
they play the harp backward at need,
and gather...Read more of this...

The Moons the North Winds Cooky

by Vachel Lindsay
 The Moon's the North Wind's cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there's but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.

The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den,
And bakes a crisp new moon that . . . greedy 
North . . . Wind . . . eats . . . again!...Read more of this...

Godmother

by Dorothy Parker
 The day that I was christened-
It's a hundred years, and more!-
A hag came and listened
At the white church door,
A-hearing her that bore me
And all my kith and kin
Considerately, for me,
Renouncing sin.
While some gave me corals,
And some gave me gold,
And porringers, with morals
Agreeably scrolled,
The hag stood, buckled
In a dim gray cloak;
Stood there and chuckled,
Spat, and spoke:
"There's few enough in life'll
Be...Read more of this...

Meditations In Time Of Civil War

by William Butler Yeats
 I. Ancestral Houses

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had...Read more of this...

Luna Lake Haiku

by Adrian Green
 New moon on the lake.
Your voice and the nightingale 
serenade springtime. 
Full moon on the lake. 
Your voice and the waterbirds 
celebrate summer. 
Old moon on the lake. 
Owls hunting autumnal food -
your voice still singing....Read more of this...

In the Home Stretch

by Robert Frost
 SHE stood against the kitchen sink, and looked
Over the sink out through a dusty window
At weeds the water from the sink made tall.
She wore her cape; her hat was in her hand.
Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has—parlor, bed-room,
And...Read more of this...

The Fool Rings His Bells

by Walter de la Mare
 Come, Death, I'd have a word with thee; 
And thou, poor Innocency; 
And Love -- a lad with broken wing; 
Apnd Pity, too; 
The Fool shall sing to you, 
As Fools will sing. 

Ay, music hath small sense, 
And a tune's soon told, 
And Earth is old, 
And my poor wits are dense; 
Yet have I secrets, -- dar,...Read more of this...

two thursdays

by Rg Gregory
 when the doctor came on a monday
he looked at my mother and said
there's something seriously wrong here -
she's had a stroke - she's almost dead

it must have happened on thursday
why wasn't i told before
the busy rest home shook its head
we thought she was drowsy - nothing more

she only came to us a week ago
she was angry and violent and...Read more of this...

Memento

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
 Like a reminder of this life 
of trams, sun, sparrows, 
and the flighty uncontrolledness 
of streams leaping like thermometers, 
and because ducks are quacking somewhere 
above the crackling of the last, paper-thin ice, 
and because children are crying bitterly 
(remember children's lives are so sweet!) 
and because in the drunken, shimmering starlight 
the new moon whoops it up, 
and...Read more of this...

At Galway Races

by William Butler Yeats
 There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind:
We, too, had good attendance once,
Hearers and hearteners of the work;
Aye, horsemen for companions,
Before the merchant and the clerk
Breathed on the world with timid breath.
Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,
We'll learn that sleeping is not death,
Hearing the whole...Read more of this...

To A Child

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Dear child! how radiant on thy mother's knee,
With merry-making eyes and jocund smiles,
Thou gazest at the painted tiles,
Whose figures grace,
With many a grotesque form and face.
The ancient chimney of thy nursery!
The lady with the gay macaw,
The dancing girl, the grave bashaw
With bearded lip and chin;
And, leaning idly o'er his gate,
Beneath the imperial fan of state,
The Chinese mandarin.

With what a...Read more of this...

Leudemans-on-the-River

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Toward even when the day leans down, 
To kiss the upturned face of night, 
Out just beyond the loud-voiced town 
I know a spot of calm delight. 
Like crimson arrows from a quiver 
The red rays pierce the water flowing, 
While we go dreaming, singing, rowing, 
To Leudeman's-on-the-River.

The hills, like some glad mocking-bird, 
Send back our laughter and our...Read more of this...

The Cocoon

by Robert Frost
 As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both way,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
And pours the elm-tree meadow full of blue,
Is all the smoke from one poor house alone
With but one chimney it can call its own;
So close it will not light an early light,
Keeping its life so close and...Read more of this...

Song at Sunset

by Walt Whitman
 SPLENDOR of ended day, floating and filling me! 
Hour prophetic—hour resuming the past! 
Inflating my throat—you, divine average! 
You, Earth and Life, till the last ray gleams, I sing. 

Open mouth of my Soul, uttering gladness,
Eyes of my Soul, seeing perfection, 
Natural life of me, faithfully praising things; 
Corroborating forever the triumph of things. 

Illustrious every one! 
Illustrious what...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXX: Whether the Turkish New Moon

by Sir Philip Sidney
 Whether the Turkish new moon minded be 
To fill his horns this year on Christian coast; 
How Poles' right king means, with leave of host, 
To warm with ill-made fire cold Muscovy; 

If French can yet three parts in one agree; 
What now the Dutch in their full diets boast; 
How Holland hearts, now so good towns be lost,...Read more of this...

Do You Remember Once . .

by Alan Seeger
 Do you remember once, in Paris of glad faces, 
The night we wandered off under the third moon's rays 
And, leaving far behind bright streets and busy places, 
Stood where the Seine flowed down between its quiet quais? 


The city's voice was hushed; the placid, lustrous waters 
Mirrored the walls across where orange windows burned. 
Out of the starry...Read more of this...

Fear Is What Quickens Me

by James Wright
 1
Many animals that our fathers killed in America
Had quick eyes.
They stared about wildly,
When the moon went dark.
The new moon falls into the freight yards
Of cities in the south,
But the loss of the moon to the dark hands of Chicago
Does not matter to the deer
In this northern field.

 2
What is that tall woman doing
There, in the trees?
I can hear rabbits...Read more of this...

Potomac River Mist

by Carl Sandburg
 ALL the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo knew Bern Dailey; secretary ten years when Whitlock was mayor.
Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flit from zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters, scavengers.

The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for us and a gang from over the river...Read more of this...

Tennessee Claflin Shope

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I was the laughing-stock of the village,
Chiefly of the people of good sense, as they call themselves --
Also of the learned, like Rev. Peet, who read Greek
The same as English.
For instead of talking free trade,
Or preaching some form of baptism;
Instead of believing in the efficacy
Of walking cracks -- picking up pins the right way,
Seeing the new moon over the...Read more of this...

your tiger

by Rg Gregory
 (in china it is symbolic
of darkness and the new moon)

in your night's hollow
the tiger stalks
black grasses have licked 
it into nothingness

hooked by moon
i hover on your hollow's lip
i feel the smell of fire
the leap of a bright cat-fur

my eye is dumb
asking to be devoured
i am trembled over
(a bag of fear-bones)

there is a whoosh of flame
streaking but static at
your night's...Read more of this...

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