Famous Night Time Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Night Time 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 time poems. These examples illustrate what a famous night time poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...I have been reading Pomfret's "Choice" this spring,
A pretty kind of--sort of--kind of thing,
Not much a verse, and poem none at all,
Yet, as they say, extremely natural.
And yet I know not. There's an art in pies,
In raising crusts as well as galleries;
And he's the poet, more or less, who knows
The charm that hallows the least truth from prose,
A...Read more of this...
by
Hunt, James Henry Leigh
...Sent to a friend who had complained that I was glad enough to see
him when he came, but didn't seem to miss him if he stayed away.
And cannot pleasures, while they last,
Be actual unless, when past,
They leave us shuddering and aghast,
With anguish smarting?
And cannot friends be firm and fast,
And yet bear parting?
And must I then, at Friendship's call...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...Watchman, what of the night? -
Storm and thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Leaving the watchfires unlit.
Only the balefires are bright,
And the flash of the lamps now and then
From a palace where spoilers sit,
Trampling the children of men.
Prophet, what of the night? -
I stand by the verge of the sea,
Banished, uncomforted, free,
Hea...Read more of this...
by
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
...ds, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice
Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and ho...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...DEATH, to the dead for evermore
A King, a God, the last, the best of friends -
Whene'er this mortal journey ends
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;
Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shore
Where neither piping bird nor peeping dawn
Disturbs the eternal sleep,
But in the stillness far withdrawn
Our dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
For ...Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
...It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane,
The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves;
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves.
It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too long:
I have pushed m...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
..., that he had a friend!
Somebody to come when he called them,
Somebody to catch by the hand,
Somebody to sleep with at night time,
Somebody who'd quite understand.
One night in the middle of Winter
He lay wide awake on his bed,
Outside there was fury of tempest
And calling of wolves to be fed--
Thin wolves, grey and silent as shadows;
And Olaf was frightened to death.
He had peeped through a crack in the doorpost,
He had seen the white smoke of their breath.
But suddenly ...Read more of this...
by
Mansfield, Katherine
...Farewell! but whenever you welcome the hour
That awakens the night-song of mirth in your bower,
Then think of the friend who once welcomed it too,
And forgot his own griefs to be happy with you.
His griefs may return, not a hope may remain
Of the few that have brighten'd his pathway of pain,
But he ne'er will forget the short vision, that threw
Its ...Read more of this...
by
Moore, Thomas
...ames,
And how, like leaves, they have changed and blown
And will lie, at last, forgotten,
Under the snow.
X
It is night time, and cold, and snow is falling,
And no wind grieves the walls.
In the small world of light around the arc-lamp
A swarm of snowflakes falls and falls.
The street grows silent. The last stranger passes.
The sound of his feet, in the snow, is indistinct.
What forgotten sadness is it, on a night like this,
Takes possession of my heart?
Why do ...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...I
In the depths of the Greyhound Terminal
sitting dumbly on a baggage truck looking at the sky
waiting for the Los Angeles Express to depart
worrying about eternity over the Post Office roof in
the night-time red downtown heaven
staring through my eyeglasses I realized shuddering
these thoughts were not eternity, nor the poverty
of our lives, i...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...is it of a thought
The unembodied essence, and no more
That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass
As dew of the night time, o'er the summer grass?
III.
Doth o'er us pass, when as th' expanding eye
To the loved object - so the tear to the lid
Will start, which lately slept in apathy?
And yet it need not be - (that object) hid
From us in life - but common - which doth lie
Each hour before us - but then only bid
With a strange sound, as of a harpstring broken
...Read more of this...
by
Poe, Edgar Allan
...IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
One of these days…
they will need winding.
Rabelais in red boards,
Walt Whitman in green,
Hugo in ten-cent paper covers,
Here they stand on shelves
In the cool of the night time
And there is nothing…
To be said against them…
Or for them…
In the cool of the night t...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...In those days said Hiawatha,
"Lo! how all things fade and perish!
From the memory of the old men
Pass away the great traditions,
The achievements of the warriors,
The adventures of the hunters,
All the wisdom of the Medas,
All the craft of the Wabenos,
All the marvellous dreams and visions
Of the Jossakeeds, the Prophets!
"Great men die and are forgotten,
...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around by lifting winds forgot
Resignedly beneath the sky
...Read more of this...
by
Poe, Edgar Allan
...WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot*, *sweet
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such licour,
Of which virtue engender'd is the flower;
When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath
Inspired hath in every holt* and heath *grove, forest
The tender croppes* and the younge sun *twigs, boughs
Hath in the Ram his halfe c...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...1
A yellow band of light upon the street
Pours from an open door, and makes a wide
Pathway of bright gold across a sheet
Of calm and liquid moonshine. From inside
Come shouts and streams of laughter, and a snatch
Of song, soon drowned and lost again in mirth,
The clip of tankards on a table top,
And stir of booted heels. Against the patch
Of candle-light a...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ACROSS the shimmering meadows--
Ah, when he came to me!
In the spring-time,
In the night-time,
In the starlight,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
Up from the misty marsh-land--
Ah, when he climbed to me!
To my white bower,
To my sweet rest,
To my warm breast,
Beneath the hawthorn tree.
Ask of me what the birds sang,
High in the hawthorn tree;
Wha...Read more of this...
by
Cather, Willa
...A chant to which it is intended a group of children shall dance and improvise pantomime led by their dancing-teacher.
I
A master deep-eyed
Ere his manhood was ripe,
He sang like a thrush,
He could play any pipe.
So dull in the school
That he scarcely could spell,
He read but a bit,
And he figured not well.
A bare-footed fool,
Shod only with grace;
Long ...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...When mid-autumn's moan shook the night-time,
And sedges were horny,
And summer's green wonderwork faltered
On leaze and in lane,
I fared Yell'ham-Firs way, where dimly
Came wheeling around me
Those phantoms obscure and insistent
That shadows unchain.
Till airs from the needle-thicks brought me
A low lamentation,
As 'twere of a tree-god dis...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many
years, or
stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
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