Famous On The Ground Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Wife a-Lost

by William Barnes
 Since I noo mwore do zee your feace,
Up steairs or down below,
I’ll zit me in the lwonesome pleace,
Where flat-bough’d beech do grow;
Below the beeches’ bough, my love,
Where you did never come,
An’ I don’t look to meet ye now,
As I do look at hwome.

Since you noo mwore be at my zide,
In walks in zummer het,
I’ll goo alwone where mist do...Read more of this...

Friend your white beard sweeps the ground

by Stephen Crane
 Friend, your white beard sweeps the ground.
Why do you stand, expectant?
Do you hope to see it
In one of your withered days?
With your old eyes
Do you hope to see
The triumphal march of justice?
Do not wait, friend!
Take your white beard
And your old eyes
To more tender lands....Read more of this...

Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 LIKE souls that balance joy and pain, 
With tears and smiles from heaven again 
The maiden Spring upon the plain 
Came in a sun-lit fall of rain. 
In crystal vapour everywhere 
Blue isles of heaven laugh'd between, 
And far, in forest-deeps unseen, 
The topmost elm-tree gather'd green 
From draughts of balmy air. 

Sometimes the linnet piped his song: 
Sometimes...Read more of this...

Dream Song 43: Oyez oyez! The Man Who Did Not Deliver

by John Berryman
 'Oyez, oyez!' The Man Who Did Not Deliver
is before you for his deliverance, my lords.
He stands, as charged
for This by banks, That cops, by lawyers, by
publishingers for Them. I doubt he'll make
old bones.

Be.
I warned him, of a summer night: consist,
consist. Ex-wives roar.
Further, the Crown holds that they split himself,
splitting his manward chances, to his shame,
my lords, & our horror.

Behind,...Read more of this...

The War Films

by Sir Henry Newbolt
 O living pictures of the dead, 
O songs without a sound, 
O fellowship whose phantom tread 
Hallows a phantom ground -- 
How in a gleam have these revealed 
The faith we had not found. 

We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven, 
We have passed by God on earth: 
His seven sins and his sorrows seven, 
His wayworn mood...Read more of this...

Fair is the leisure of life's garden-ground

by Hafez
Fair is the leisure of life’s garden-ground:
Pleasant is friendship’s voice & mirth’s soft sound.

Sweet are the perfumed flowers; yea, yea, what bliss
Sootheth like hope’s fresh scent of loveliness?

Lovely, O nightingale, is thy lament;
Ever to listening love thy plaint is dear;
In the fond thought of love thy life is spent.

Though in this world joy’s goal is but a name,
Fair is thy...Read more of this...

Toms Garland

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 upon the Unemployed


Tom—garlanded with squat and surly steel
Tom; then Tom's fallowbootfellow piles pick
By him and rips out rockfire homeforth—sturdy Dick;
Tom Heart-at-ease, Tom Navvy: he is all for his meal
Sure, 's bed now. Low be it: lustily he his low lot (feel
That ne'er need hunger, Tom; Tom seldom sick,
Seldomer heartsore; that treads through, prickproof, thick
Thousands of thorns, thoughts) swings though....Read more of this...

The Indian Burying Ground

by Philip Freneau
 In spite of all the learn'd have said;
I still my old opinion keep,
The posture, that we give the dead,
Points out the soul's eternal sleep.

Not so the ancients of these lands --
The Indian, when from life releas'd
Again is seated with his friends,
And shares gain the joyous feast.

His imag'd birds, and painted bowl,
And ven'son, for a journey dress'd,
Bespeak the nature of...Read more of this...

Dedication For A Plot Of Ground

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 This plot of ground 
facing the waters of this inlet 
is dedicated to the living presence of 
Emily Dickinson Wellcome 
who was born in England; married; 
lost her husband and with 
her five year old son 
sailed for New York in a two-master; 
was driven to the Azores; 
ran adrift on Fire Island shoal, 
met her second husband 
in...Read more of this...

Off to the Fishing Ground

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 There's a piping wind from a sunrise shore
Blowing over a silver sea,
There's a joyous voice in the lapsing tide
That calls enticingly;
The mist of dawn has taken flight
To the dim horizon's bound,
And with wide sails set and eager hearts 
We're off to the fishing ground. 

Ho, comrades mine, how that brave wind sings
Like a great sea-harp afar!
We whistle its wild...Read more of this...

The First Surveyor

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 'The man who brought the railway through -- our friend the engineer.' 
They cheer his pluck and enterprise and engineering skill! 
'Twas my old husband found the pass behind that big red hill. 
Before the engineer was born we'd settled with our stock 
Behind that great big mountain chain, a line of range and rock -- 
A line that...Read more of this...

Whispers of Immortality

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 WEBSTER was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin;
And breastless creatures under ground
Leaned backward with a lipless grin.

Daffodil bulbs instead of balls
Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
He knew that thought clings round dead limbs
Tightening its lusts and luxuries.

Donne, I suppose, was such another
Who found no substitute for sense,
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience,

He...Read more of this...

The Violent Space (Or When Your Sister Sleeps Around For Money)

by Etheridge Knight
 Exchange in greed the ungraceful signs. Thrust
The thick notes between green apple breasts.
Then the shadow of the devil descends,
The violent space cries and angel eyes,
Large and dark, retreat in innocence and in ice. 
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)

The violent space cries silently,
Like you cried wide years ago
In another space, speckled by the sun
And the leaves of a green...Read more of this...

Ode To a Chestnut on the Ground

by Pablo Neruda
 From bristly foliage
you fell
complete, polished wood, gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.
In the heights you abandoned
the sea-urchin burr
that parted its spines
in the light of the chestnut tree;
through that...Read more of this...

From the Roof

by Denise Levertov
 This wild night, gathering the washing as if it were flowers animal vines twisting over the line and
slapping my face lightly, soundless merriment
in the gesticulations of shirtsleeves,
I recall out of my joy a night of misery

walking in the dark and the wind over broken earth,
halfmade foundations and unfinished drainage trenches and the spaced-out circles of glaring light marking streets...Read more of this...

On The Death Of Sir Thomas Lea

by William Strode
 You that affright with lamentable notes
The servants from their beef, whose hungry throats
Vex the grume porter's surly conscience:
That blesse the mint for coyning lesse than pence:
You whose unknown and meanly payd desarts
Begge silently within, and knocke at hearts:
You whose commanding worth makes men beleeve
That you a kindnesse give when you receave:
All sorts of them that want, your tears now...Read more of this...

Electra On Azalea Path

by Sylvia Plath
 The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering --
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had...Read more of this...

When The Snow Is On The Ground

by Mother Goose
The little robin grieves
    When the snow is on the ground,
For the trees have no leaves,
    And no berries can be found.

The air is cold, the worms are hid;
    For robin here what can be done?
Let's strow around some crumbs of bread,
    And then he'll live till snow...Read more of this...

Gangrene

by Philip Levine
 Vous êtes sorti sain et sauf des basses 
calomnies, vous avey conquis les coeurs. 

Zola, J'accuse


One was kicked in the stomach 
until he vomited, then 
 made to put back 
into his mouth what they had 
brought forth; when he tried to drown 
 in his own stew 
he was recovered. "You are 
worse than a ****** or Jew,"...Read more of this...

She dwelleth in the Ground --

by Emily Dickinson
 She dwelleth in the Ground --
Where Daffodils -- abide --
Her Maker -- Her Metropolis --
The Universe -- Her Maid --

To fetch Her Grace -- and Hue --
And Fairness -- and Renown --
The Firmament's -- To Pluck Her --
And fetch Her Thee -- be mine --...Read more of this...

Turtle Swan

by Mark Doty
 Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool

and Die Company, a swan;
the word doesn't convey the shock
of the thing, white architecture
rippling like a pond's rain-pocked skin,
beak lifting to hiss at my approach.
Magisterial, set down in elegant...Read more of this...

About The Sheltered Garden Ground

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 ABOUT the sheltered garden ground
The trees stand strangely still.
The vale ne'er seemed so deep before,
Nor yet so high the hill.

An awful sense of quietness,
A fulness of repose,
Breathes from the dewy garden-lawns,
The silent garden rows.

As the hoof-beats of a troop of horse
Heard far across a plain,
A nearer knowledge of great thoughts
Thrills vaguely through my brain.

I lean my head upon my...Read more of this...

Off the Ground

by Walter de la Mare
 Three jolly Farmers 
Once bet a pound 
Each dance the others would 
Off the ground. 
Out of their coats 
They slipped right soon, 
And neat and nicesome 
Put each his shoon. 
One--Two--Three! 
And away they go, 
Not too fast, 
And not too slow; 
Out from the elm-tree's 
Noonday shadow, 
Into the sun 
And across the meadow. 
Past the schoolroom,...Read more of this...

The Surprise

by Ingeborg Bachmann
 As there I left the road in May,
And took my way along a ground,
I found a glade with girls at play,
By leafy boughs close-hemmed around,
And there, with stores of harmless joys,
They plied their tongues, in merry noise:
Though little did they seem to fear
So ***** a stranger might be near;
Teeh-hee! Look here! Hah! ha! Look there!
And oh! so playsome, oh!...Read more of this...

Angel Or Demon

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 You call me an angel of love and of light,
A being of goodness and heavenly fire,
Sent out from God’s kingdom to guide you aright,
In paths where your spirits may mount and aspire.
You say that I glow like a star on its course,
Like a ray from the alter, a spark from the source.

Now list to my answer; let all the...Read more of this...

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