Famous Oak Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Oak poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous oak poems. These examples illustrate what a famous oak poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
...ongly from the shore, blackening the waves.
Following his eager soul, the wanderer
Leaped in the boat; he spread his cloak aloft
On the bare mast, and took his lonely seat,
And felt the boat speed o'er the tranquil sea
Like a torn cloud before the hurricane.
As one that in a silver vision floats
Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds
Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly
Along the dark and ruffled waters fled
The straining boat. A whirlwind swept it on,
With fierce gusts and...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...st, and touching whatever is between them,
Growths growing from him to offset the growth of pine, cedar, hemlock, live-oak, locust,
chestnut, hickory, cottonwood, orange, magnolia,
Tangles as tangled in him as any cane-brake or swamp,
He likening sides and peaks of mountains, forests coated with northern transparent ice,
Off him pasturage, sweet and natural as savanna, upland, prairie,
Through him flights, whirls, screams, answering those of the fish-hawk, mocking-bird,
...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...atyrs! whence came ye!
So many, and so many, and such glee?
Why have ye left your forest haunts, why left
Your nuts in oak-tree cleft?--
‘For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath, and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;
For wine we follow Bacchus through the earth;
Great God of breathless cups and chirping mirth!--
Come hither, lady fair, and joined be
To our mad minstrelsy!'
"Over wide streams and mountains great we went,
And, save when Bacchu...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...descended
There, in the midst of its farms, reposed the Acadian village.
Strongly built were the houses, with frames of oak and of hemlock,
Such as the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the Henries.
Thatched were the roofs, with dormer-windows; and gables projecting
Over the basement below protected and shaded the doorway.
There in the tranquil evenings of summer, when brightly the sunset
Lighted the village street and gilded the vanes on the chimneys,
Matrons and ma...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...he frown of the great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dread thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid for...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...blindly in his face. Beating it off, 35
He screeched in terror, and straightway something clambered
Heavily from an oak, and dropped, bent double,
To shamble at him zigzag, squat and bestial.
Headlong he charges down the wood, and falls
With roaring brain¡ªagony¡ªthe snap¡¯t spark¡ª 40
And blots of green and purple in his eyes.
Then the slow fingers groping on his neck,
And at his heart the strangling clasp of death. ...Read more of this...
by
Sassoon, Siegfried
...ak and easy prey,
For whose strong bulk earth scarce could timber find,
The ocean water, or the heavens wind--
Those oaken giants of the ancient race,
That ruled all seas and did our Channel grace.
The conscious stag so, once the forest's dread,
Flies to the wood and hides his armless head.
Ruyter forthwith a squadron does untack;
They sail securely through the river's track.
An English pilot too (O shame, O sin!)
Cheated of pay, was he that showed them in.
Our wre...Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...rain orchards—to graft the trees—to gather apples in the fall.
O the pleasure with trees!
The orchard—the forest—the oak, cedar, pine, pekan-tree,
The honey-locust, black-walnut, cottonwood, and magnolia.
12
O Death! the voyage of Death!
The beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, for reasons;
Myself, discharging my excrementitious body, to be burn’d, or render’d to
powder, or
buried,
My real body doubtless left to me for other spheres,
My vo...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...mist shone.
No church-bell lent its Christian tone
To the savage air, no social smoke
Curled over woods of snow-hung oak.
A solitude made more intense
By dreary-voicëd elements,
The shrieking of the mindless wind,
The moaning tree-boughs swaying blind,
And on the glass the unmeaning beat
Of ghostly finger-tips of sleet.
Beyond the circle of our hearth
No welcome sound of toil or mirth
Unbound the spell, and testified
Of human life and thought outside.
We minded ...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...e you!
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me, it shall be you!
Broad, muscular fields! branches of live oak! loving lounger in my winding
paths! it shall be you!
Hands I have taken—face I have kiss’d—mortal I have ever
touch’d! it shall be you.
I dote on myself—there is that lot of me, and all so luscious;
Each moment, and whatever happens, thrills me with joy.
O I am wonderful!
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my fain...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...o over the keys of the great organ.
2
Welcome are all earth’s lands, each for its kind;
Welcome are lands of pine and oak;
Welcome are lands of the lemon and fig;
Welcome are lands of gold;
Welcome are lands of wheat and maize—welcome those of the grape;
Welcome are lands of sugar and rice;
Welcome the cotton-lands—welcome those of the white potato and sweet potato;
Welcome are mountains, flats, sands, forests, prairies;
Welcome the rich borders of rivers, table-lands...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...Franklin by the sea,
And Mark, the man from Italy,
And Colan of the Sacred Tree,
From the old tribe on Usk.
The rook croaked homeward heavily,
The west was clear and warm,
The smoke of evening food and ease
Rose like a blue tree in the trees
When he came to Eldred's farm.
But Eldred's farm was fallen awry,
Like an old cripple's bones,
And Eldred's tools were red with rust,
And on his well was a green crust,
And purple thistles upward thrust,
Between the kitchen stones.
But...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...hat shall fetch the hernshaw,
He bade me take the Gipsy mother
And set her telling some story or other
Of hill or dale, oak-wood or fernshaw,
To wile away a weary hour
For the lady left alone in her bower,
Whose mind and body craved exertion
And yet shrank from all better diversion.
XIV.
Then clapping heel to his horse, the mere curveter,
Out rode the Duke, and after his hollo
Horses and hounds swept, huntsman and servitor,
And back I turned and bade the crone follow.
And w...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...her doctor nor his guide. "Oh saints! what is become of him? Perhaps he's climbed into an oak, Where he will stay till he is dead; Or sadly he has been misled, And joined the wandering gypsey-folk." "Or him that wicked pony's carried To the dark cave, the goblins' hall, Or in the castle he's pursuing, Among the ghosts, his own undoing; Or playing with ...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...iercely
The brighte swordes wente to and fro
So hideously, that with the leaste stroke
It seemed that it woulde fell an oak,
But what they were, nothing yet he wote*. *knew
This Duke his courser with his spurres smote,
*And at a start* he was betwixt them two, *suddenly*
And pulled out a sword and cried, "Ho!
No more, on pain of losing of your head.
By mighty Mars, he shall anon be dead
That smiteth any stroke, that I may see!
But tell to me what mister* men ye be, *manner, k...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...With boughs that quaked at every breath,
Gray birch and aspen wept beneath;
Aloft, the ash and warrior oak
Cast anchor in the rifted rock;
And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung
His shattered trunk, and frequent flung,
Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high,
His boughs athwart the narrowed sky.
Highest of all, where white peaks glanced,
Where glistening streamers waved and danced,
The wanderer's eye could barely v...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...ot which will soon appear when the
darkness passes away
So I remaind with him sitting in the twisted [PL 18] root of
an oak. he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head
downward into the deep:
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke
of a burning city; beneath us at an immense distance was the sun,
black but shining[;] round it were fiery tracks on which revolv'd
vast spiders, crawling after their prey; which flew or rather
swum in the infinite d...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...of nothingness.
I never thought it would be the experience it was-
How could anything be more banal than a visit to Oakes?
Twenty two Georgian semis from the sixties, brass coach-lamps
By glass front doors, irreproachable gardens,
The estate lodge’s great oak doors opening to vistas
Of street on street, the fields and cows gone.
We peered through the polished windows at the hearth
We’d sat around, our hearts numb, all hope gone; but then
A quiet came we had not fel...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...w grown so dear— so dear.
Strange to remember long ago
When a friend was almost a foe.
XVIII
I saw the house with its oaken stair,
And the Tudor Rose on the newel post,
The panelled upper gallery where
They told me you heard the family ghost—
'A gentle unhappy ghost who sighs
Outside one's door on the night one dies.'
'Not,' Lady Jean explained, 'at all
Like the ghost at my father's place, St. Kitts,
That clanks and screams in the great West Hall
And frightens stra...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...x x
Immortelle's dry and pink. On the fresh heaven
The clouds are roughly pasted, almost dark.
The leaves of only oak within the park
Are still colorless and thin.
The rays of dusk are burning until midnight.
How nice it is inside my cramped abode!
Today with me converse many-a-bird
About the most tender, in delight.
I'm happy. But the way,
Forest and smooth, is to me most dear,
The crippled bridge, curved a bit here,
And that remain only several days.
...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Oak poems.