Famous Night Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Night poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous night poems. These examples illustrate what a famous night poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...
(O mother! O sisters dear!
If we are lost, no victor else has destroy’d us;
It is by ourselves we go down to eternal night.)
3
Have you thought there could be but a single Supreme?
There can be any number of Supremes—One does not countervail another, any more than
one
eyesight countervails another, or one life countervails another.
All is eligible to all,
All is for individuals—All is for you,
No condition is prohibited—not God’s, or any.
All comes by...Read more of this...
by
Tagore, Rabindranath
...Art thou abroad on this stormy night
on thy journey of love, my friend?
The sky groans like one in despair.
I have no sleep tonight.
Ever and again I open my door and look out on
the darkness, my friend!
I can see nothing before me.
I wonder where lies thy path!
By what dim shore of the ink-black river,
by what far edge of the frowning forest,
through what mazy de...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...y fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...at mirrored all eternity,
Rest in their own Colonos, an eclipse
Hath come on Wisdom, and Mnemosyne
Is childless; in the night which she had made
For lofty secure flight Athena's owl itself hath strayed.
Nor much with Science do I care to climb,
Although by strange and subtle witchery
She drew the moon from heaven: the Muse Time
Unrolls her gorgeous-coloured tapestry
To no less eager eyes; often indeed
In the great epic of Polymnia's scroll I love to read
How Asia sent h...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...Why should I ope thy melancholy eyes?
Saturn, sleep on! while at thy feet I weep."
As when, upon a tranced summer-night,
Those green-rob'd senators of mighty woods,
Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir,
Save from one gradual solitary gust
Which comes upon the silence, and dies off,
As if the ebbing air had but one wave;
So came these words and went; the while in tears
She touch'd her fair large forehead to the grou...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...CANTO I
ONE night, when half my life behind me lay,
I wandered from the straight lost path afar.
Through the great dark was no releasing way;
Above that dark was no relieving star.
If yet that terrored night I think or say,
As death's cold hands its fears resuming are.
Gladly the dreads I felt, too dire to tell,
The hopeless, pathless, lightle...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...My own dear Genevieve! She lean'd against the Armed Man, The Statue of the Armed Knight: She stood and listen'd to my Harp Amid the ling'ring Light. Few Sorrows hath she of her own, My Hope, my Joy, my Genevieve! She loves me best, whene'er I sing The Songs, that make her grieve. I play'd a soft ...Read more of this...
by
Giovanni, Nikki
...Some people forget that love is
tucking you in and kissing you
"Good night"
no matter how young or old you are
Some people don't remember that
love is
listening and laughing and asking
questions
no matter what your age
Few recognize that love is
commitment, responsibility
no fun at all
unless
Love is
You and me ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Stop this day and night with me, and you shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun—(there are millions of suns
left;)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the
eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me:
You s...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...DEDICATION
Of great limbs gone to chaos,
A great face turned to night--
Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?
Where seven sunken Englands
Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?
In cloud of clay so cast to heaven
What shape shall man discern?
These lords may light the myste...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...pirit of the Universe
He held his dialogues: and they did teach
To him the magic of their mysteries;
To him the book of Night was opened wide,
And voices from the deep abyss revealed
A marvel and a secret.—Be it so.
IX
My dream is past; it had no further change.
It was of a strange order, that the doom
Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality—the one
To end in madness—both in misery....Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...f youth
Mantling thy cheek its happy home possest,
And sterner sport by day put strength to test,
And custom's feast at night gave tongue to truth
Or say hath flaunting summer a device
To match our midnight revelry, that rang
With steel and flame along the snow-girt ice?
Or when we hark't to nightingales that sang
On dewy eves in spring, did they entice
To gentler love than winter's icy fang?
11
There's many a would-be poet at this hour,
Rhymes of a love that he hath never...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...that tenderest joy,
The heart-love of a child!
Away, fond thoughts, and vex my soul no more!
Work claims my wakeful nights, my busy days--
Albeit bright memories of that sunlit shore
Yet haunt my dreaming gaze!
PREFACE
If--and the thing is wildly possible--the charge of writing nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line (in p.18)
"Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder ...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...The IDIOT BOY. 'Tis eight o'clock,—a clear March night, The moon is up—the sky is blue, The owlet in the moonlight air, He shouts from nobody knows where; He lengthens out his lonely shout, Halloo! halloo! a long halloo! —Why bustle thus about your door, What means this bustle, Betty Foy?&nb...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...imself. but God provides for the lion.
Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep
in the night.
He who has sufferd you to impose on him knows you.
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than
enough.
Listen to the fools reproach! it is a kingly title!
...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...dusky glare?
"The meadows breathing amber light,
The darkness toppling from the height,
The feathery train of granite Night?
"Shall he, grown gray among his peers,
Through the thick curtain of his tears
Catch glimpses of his earlier years,
"And hear the sounds he knew of yore,
Old shufflings on the sanded floor,
Old knuckles tapping at the door?
"Yet still before him as he flies
One pallid form shall ever rise,
And, bodying forth in glassy eyes
"The vision of a vani...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...en imposed on them;
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold
Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem
Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine: before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep
Was at my feet, & Heaven above my head
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread
Was so transparent that t...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...s from some world-o'erthrowing fight:
My poor comparisons must needs be teeming
With earthly likenesses, for here the night
Of clay obscures our best conceptions, saving
Johanna Southcote, or Bob Southey raving.
XXIX
'Twas the archangel Michael; all men know
The make of angels and archangels, since
There's scarce a scribbler has not one to show,
From the fiends' leader to the angels' prince;
There also are some altar-pieces, though
I really can't say that the...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
..., Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red roc...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...e of stone.
x x x
Every evening I receive
A letter like a bride
To my friend I give
Response late at night.
"I'll be guest of the white death
On my journey down.
You, my tender one, don't do
Harm to anyone."
And there stands a giant star
Between two wood beams,
With such calmness promising
To fulfil your dreams.
x x x
Divine angel, who betrothed us
Secretly on winter morn,
From our sadness-free existence
Does not t...Read more of this...
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