Famous Northwest Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Northwest poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous northwest poems. These examples illustrate what a famous northwest poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
announces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.
Somewhere beyond the Gorge Li Po is gone,
looking for friendship or an old love's sleeve
or writing letters to his children, lost,
and to his children's children, and to us.
What was his light? of lamp or moon or sun?
Say that it changed, for better or f...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...ells of song.
Railroad brakemen taking trains across Nebraska prairies, lumbermen jaunting in pine and tamarack of the Northwest, stock ranchers in the middle west, mayors of southern cities
Say to their pals and wives now: I see by the papers Anna Held is dead....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...arie,
And on to where the Pictured Rocks are hung,
And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue
Moulding her mighty fates,
The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen;
And like a larger sea, the vital green
Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung
Over Dakota and the prairie states.
By desert people immemorial
On Arizonan mesas shall be done
Dim rites unto the thunder and the su...Read more of this...
by
Moody, William Vaughn
...tion
Where the caller was calling, “All a-board,
All a-board for .. Blaa-blaa .. Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa .. and all points northwest .. all a-board.”
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...ornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...y want—they are empty too.
And the harring booming bass drums—they are hungriest of all.. . .
The howling spears of the Northwest die down.
The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother song.
A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag top of the sky....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...of Pauguk
Glare upon you in the darkness,
I will share my kingdom with you,
Ruler shall you be thenceforward
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin,
Of the home-wind, the Keewaydin."
Thus was fought that famous battle
In the dreadful days of Shah-shah,
In the days long since departed,
In the kingdom of the West-Wind.
Still the hunter sees its traces
Scattered far o'er hill and valley;
Sees the giant bulrush growing
By the ponds and water-courses,
Sees the masses of the ...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...going, O Nokomis,
On a long and distant journey,
To the portals of the Sunset.
To the regions of the home-wind,
Of the Northwest-Wind, Keewaydin.
But these guests I leave behind me,
In your watch and ward I leave them;
See that never harm comes near them,
See that never fear molests them,
Never danger nor suspicion,
Never want of food or shelter,
In the lodge of Hiawatha!"
Forth into the village went he,
Bade farewell to all the warriors,
Bade farewell to all the young men,
...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...l be remembered there, for men
Will say, "This river and this isle were found
By Henry Hudson, on his way to seek
The Northwest Passage into Farthest Inde."
Yes! yes! I sought it then, I seek it still, --
My great adventure and my guiding star!
For look ye, friends, our voyage is not done;
We hold by hope as long as life endures!
Somewhere among these floating fields of ice,
Somewhere along this westward widening bay,
Somewhere beneath this luminous northern night,
...Read more of this...
by
Dyke, Henry Van
...forty of her soft-eyed Jersey cows; through the newspapers she wept over her loss for millions of readers in the Great Northwest.
SEVENSThe lady who has had seven lawful husbands has written seven years for a famous newspaper telling how to find love and keep it: seven thousand hungry girls in the Mississippi Valley have read the instructions seven years and found neither illicit loves nor lawful husbands.
PROFITEERI who saw ten strong young men die anonymously, I who saw ...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...the race—almost a winner—one toe frozen, feet blistered
and frost-bitten.
And I know why a thousand young men of the Northwest meet him in the finishing miles and
yell cheers—I know why judges of the race call him a winner and give him a special prize
even though he is a loser.
I know he kept under his shirt and around his thudding heart amid the blizzards of five
hundred miles that one last wonder-cry of Childe Roland—and I told the six-year-old girl
all about it.
A...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...-warmed flatiron slid under
the covers, mornings a damascene-
sealed bizarrerie of fernwork
decades ago now
waking in northwest London, tea
brought up steaming, a Peak Frean
biscuit alongside to be nibbled
as blue gas leaps up singing
decades ago now
damp sheets in Dorset, fog-hung
habitat of bronchitis, of long
hot soaks in the bathtub, of nothing
quite drying out till next summer:
delicious to think of
hassocks pulled in close, toasting-
forks held to coal-glow, stron...Read more of this...
by
Clampitt, Amy
...water bugs were my field. I remember that childhood
spring when I studied the winter-long mud puddles of the
Pacific Northwest. I had a fellowship.
My books were a pair of Sears Roebuck boots, ones with
green rubber pages. Most of my classrooms were close to
the shore. That's where the important things were happen-
ing and that's where the good things were happening.
Sometimes as experiments I laid boards out into the mud
puddles, so I could look into the deeper wa...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...rld traveler, visiting exotic places
in Southern Mexico. Once I was just a kid working for anold
woman in the Pacific Northwest. She was in her nineties and
I worked for her on Saturdays and after school and duringthe
summer.
Sometimes she would make me lunch, little egg sandwich-
es with the crusts cut off as if by a surgeon, and she'd give
me slices of banana dunked in mayonnaise.
The old woman lived by herself in a house that was like a
twin sister to her. The h...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ightier cities;
Something for us is pouring now, more than Niagara pouring;
Torrents of men, (sources and rills of the Northwest, are you indeed inexhaustible?)
What, to pavements and homesteads here—what were those storms of the mountains and
sea?
What, to passions I witness around me to-day? Was the sea risen?
Was the wind piping the pipe of death under the black clouds?
Lo! from deeps more unfathomable, something more deadly and savage;
Manhattan, rising, advancing w...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...f those
sweet-air’d interminable plateaus!
Land of the herd, the garden, the healthy house of adobie!
Lands where the northwest Columbia winds, and where the southwest Colorado
winds!
Land of the eastern Chesapeake! Land of the Delaware!
Land of Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan!
Land of the Old Thirteen! Massachusetts land! Land of Vermont and Connecticut!
Land of the ocean shores! Land of sierras and peaks!
Land of boatmen and sailors! Fishermen’s land!
Inextricable la...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ON my northwest coast in the midst of the night, a fishermen’s group stands watching;
Out on the lake, that expands before them, others are spearing salmon;
The canoe, a dim shadowy thing, moves across the black water,
Bearing a Torch a-blaze at the prow....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
to the Interstate and caught a meat truck
heading west, and came to over beer,
hashbrowns, and fried eggs in a cafe
northwest of Omaha. I could write
how the radio spoke of war, how
the century was half its age, how
dark clouds gathered in the passes
up ahead, the dispossessed had clogged
the roads, but none the less I alone
made my way to the western waters,
a foreign ship, another life, and disappeared
from all Id known. In fact I
come home every year, I walk t...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...e—decently in Philadelphia or Baltimore.
Cinders—these—hissing in a marl and lime of Chicago—also these—the howling of northwest winds across North and South Dakota—or the spatter of winter spray on sea rocks of Kamchatka....Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...If Ezra Pound were alive today
(and he is)
he'd be teaching
at a small college in the Pacific Northwest
and attending the annual convention
of writing instructors in St. Louis
and railing against tenure,
saying tenure
is a ladder whose rungs slip out
from under the scholar as he climbs
upwards to empty heaven
by the angels abandoned
for tenure killeth the spirit
(with tenure no man becomes master)
Texts are unwritten with tenure,
under the microscope...Read more of this...
by
Lehman, David
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