Famous November Poems by Famous Poets

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

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November

by William Cullen Bryant
 Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun! 
One mellow smile through the soft vapoury air, 
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds ran, 
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare. 
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees, 
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast, 
And the blue Gentian flower, that, in the breeze,...Read more of this...

November

by Thomas Hood
 No sun - no moon! 
No morn - no noon - 
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day. 
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, 
No comfortable feel in any member - 
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, 
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! - 
November!...Read more of this...

Autumn: A Dirge

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling,...Read more of this...

Chattanooga

by Herman Melville
 (November, 1863)

A kindling impulse seized the host
Inspired by heaven's elastic air;
Their hearts outran their General's plan,
Though Grant commanded there - 
Grant, who without reserve can dare;
And, "Well, go on and do your will,"
He said, and measured the mountain then:
So master-riders fling the rein - 
But you must know your men.

On yester-morn in grayish mist,
Armies like ghosts on hills had...Read more of this...

November

by William Cullen Bryant
 There is wind where the rose was, 
Cold rain where sweet grass was, 
And clouds like sheep 
Stream o'er the steep 
Grey skies where the lark was. 

Nought warm where your hand was, 
Nought gold where your hair was, 
But phantom, forlorn, 
Beneath the thorn, 
Your ghost where your face was. 

Cold wind where your voice was, 
Tears, tears...Read more of this...

November Song

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 To the great archer--not to him

To meet whom flies the sun,
And who is wont his features dim

With clouds to overrun--

But to the boy be vow'd these rhymes,

Who 'mongst the roses plays,
Who hear us, and at proper times

To pierce fair hearts essays.

Through him the gloomy winter night,

Of yore so cold and drear,
Brings many a loved friend to our sight,

And many...Read more of this...

A November Night

by Sara Teasdale
 There! See the line of lights,
A chain of stars down either side the street --
Why can't you lift the chain and give it to me,
A necklace for my throat? I'd twist it round
And you could play with it. You smile at me
As though I were a little dreamy child
Behind whose eyes the fairies live. . . . And see,
The...Read more of this...

November Cotton Flower

by Jean Toomer
 Boll-weevil's coming, and the winter's cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground--
Such was the season when the...Read more of this...

Letter In November

by Sylvia Plath
 Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching...Read more of this...

November 1968

by Adrienne Rich
 Stripped
you're beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won't hold you
nor the radar aerials

You're what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment
I know nothing about it
my ignorance of you amazes me
now that I watch...Read more of this...

The Fallen Angels

by Anne Sexton
 They come on to my clean
sheet of paper and leave a Rorschach blot.
They do not do this to be mean,
they do it to give me a sign
they want me, as Aubrey Beardsley once said,
to shove it around till something comes.
Clumsy as I am,
I do it.
For I am like them -
both saved and lost,
tumbling downward like Humpty Dumpty
off the alphabet.

Each...Read more of this...

A Calendar of Sonnets: November

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 This is the treacherous month when autumn days 
With summer's voice come bearing summer's gifts. 
Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts 
Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze 
Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways, 
And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts, 
The violet returns. Snow noiseless sifts 
Ere night, an icy shroud,...Read more of this...

November

by William Cullen Bryant
 The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.
For days the shepherds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky— blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem...Read more of this...

Cool Tombs

by Carl Sandburg
 WHEN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin … in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes … in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November...Read more of this...

November Night

by Adelaide Crapsey
Listen. .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall. ...Read more of this...

November Evening

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 Come, for the dusk is our own; let us fare forth together,
With a quiet delight in our hearts for the ripe, still, autumn weather,
Through the rustling valley and wood and over the crisping meadow,
Under a high-sprung sky, winnowed of mist and shadow. 

Sharp is the frosty air, and through the far hill-gaps showing
Lucent sunset lakes of crocus and green...Read more of this...

My November Guest

by Robert Frost
 My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grady
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate,...Read more of this...

Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest

by Sylvia Plath
 In the rectory garden on his evening walk
Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was
In black November. After a sliding rain
Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk,
Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze
Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron.

Hauled sudden from solitude,
Hair prickling on his head,
Father Shawn perceived a ghost
Shaping...Read more of this...

Noormahal The Fair.{1}

by Victor Hugo
 ("Entre deux rocs d'un noir d'ébène.") 
 
 {XXVII., November, 1828.} 


 Between two ebon rocks 
 Behold yon sombre den, 
 Where brambles bristle like the locks 
 Of wool between the horns of scapegoat banned by men! 
 
 Remote in ruddy fog 
 Still hear the tiger growl 
 At the lion and stripèd dog 
...Read more of this...

The Day grew small surrounded tight

by Emily Dickinson
 The Day grew small, surrounded tight
By early, stooping Night --
The Afternoon in Evening deep
Its Yellow shortness dropt --
The Winds went out their martial ways
The Leaves obtained excuse --
November hung his Granite Hat
Upon a nail of Plush --...Read more of this...

Ben apfelgarten

by Eugene Field
 There was a certain gentleman, Ben Apfelgarten called,
Who lived way off in Germany a many years ago,
And he was very fortunate in being very bald
And so was very happy he was so.
He warbled all the day
Such songs as only they
Who are very, very circumspect and very happy may;
The people wondered why,
As the years went gliding by,
They never heard him...Read more of this...

1926

by Weldon Kees
 The porchlight coming on again,
Early November, the dead leaves
Raked in piles, the wicker swing
Creaking. Across the lots
A phonograph is playing Ja-Da.

An orange moon. I see the lives
Of neighbors, mapped and marred
Like all the wars ahead, and R.
Insane, B. with his throat cut,
Fifteen years from now, in Omaha.

I did not know them then.
My airedale scratches at the door.
And I am...Read more of this...

310. Tam o' Shanter: A Tale

by Robert Burns
 WHEN chapman billies leave the street,
And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet;
As market days are wearing late,
And folk begin to tak the gate,
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
An’ getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering...Read more of this...

November 6

by David Lehman
 Remember when Khrushchev said
"We will bury you!"
on the cover
of Time
I thought he was
employing a metaphor
as in "Braves Scalp Giants!"
on the back page
of the Daily News
I pictured the Russians
burying us under a mound
of all the rubble
that rubles could buy
when what he meant was
he had come not to praise Caesar
but to bury him...Read more of this...

Autumn Valentine

by Dorothy Parker
 In May my heart was breaking-
Oh, wide the wound, and deep!
And bitter it beat at waking,
And sore it split in sleep.

And when it came November,
I sought my heart, and sighed,
"Poor thing, do you remember?"
"What heart was that?" it cried....Read more of this...

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