Famous Pane Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Black Cottage

by Robert Frost
 We chanced in passing by that afternoon 
To catch it in a sort of special picture 
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees, 
Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass, 
The little cottage we were speaking of, 
A front with just a door between two windows, 
Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black. 
We paused, the minister...Read more of this...

Compass Rose

by Jennifer Reeser
 I’d buy you a Babushka doll, my heart,
and brush your ash-blonde hair until it gleams,
were Russia and our land not laid apart
by ocean so much deeper than it seems.

I have an oval pin, though -- glossy lacquer
hand-made in Moscow, after glasnost came,
with fine, deft roses on a background blacker
perhaps, than history’s collective shame.

I’ve done my best to compass you...Read more of this...

Alms

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go;
But it is winter with your love,
The sashes are beset with snow.

I light the lamp and lay the cloth,
I blow the coals to blaze again;
But it is winter with your love,
The frost is thick upon the pane..

I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on...Read more of this...

On Fayrford Windowes

by William Strode
 I know no paynt of poetry
Can mend such colourd Imag'ry
In sullen inke: yet Fayrford, I
May relish thy fayre memory.


Such is the Ecchoes faynter sound,
Such is the light when sunne is drownd;
So did the fancy looke upon
The worke before it was begunne:
Yet when those shewes are out of sight
My weaker colours may delight.


Those Images so faythfully
Report true feature to the...Read more of this...

Changing Time

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
The cloud looked in at the window,
And said to the day, "Be dark!"
And the roguish rain tapped hard on the pane,
To stifle the song of the lark.
[Pg 73]The wind sprang up in the tree tops
And shrieked with a voice of death,
But the rough-voiced breeze, that shook the trees,
Was touched with a violet's breath.
...Read more of this...

Drying Their Wings

by Vachel Lindsay
 What the Carpenter Said

THE moon's a cottage with a door. 
Some folks can see it plain. 
Look, you may catch a glint of light, 
A sparkle through the pane, 
Showing the place is brighter still 
Within, though bright without. 
There, at a cosy open fire 
Strange babes are grouped about. 
The children of the wind and tide-- 
The urchins...Read more of this...

The Low-Down White

by Robert William Service
 This is the pay-day up at the mines, when the bearded brutes come down;
There's money to burn in the streets to-night, so I've sent my klooch to town,
With a haggard face and a ribband of red entwined in her hair of brown.

And I know at the dawn she'll come reeling home with the bottles, one, two, three --
One for...Read more of this...

Rain In Summer

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

How it clatters along the roofs,
Like the tramp of hoofs
How it gushes and struggles out
From the throat of the overflowing spout!

Across the window-pane
It pours and pours;
And swift and wide,
With a muddy tide,
Like a river down the gutter roars
The rain,...Read more of this...

The Frost of Death was on the Pane --

by Emily Dickinson
 The Frost of Death was on the Pane --
"Secure your Flower" said he.
Like Sailors fighting with a Leak
We fought Mortality.

Our passive Flower we held to Sea --
To Mountain -- To the Sun --
Yet even on his Scarlet shelf
To crawl the Frost begun --

We pried him back
Ourselves we wedged
Himself and her between,
Yet easy as the narrow Snake
He forked his way...Read more of this...

Discipline

by D. H. Lawrence
 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...Read more of this...

On A Flemish Window-pane

by Victor Hugo
 ("J'aime le carillon dans tes cités antiques.") 
 
 {XVIII., August, 1837.} 


 Within thy cities of the olden time 
 Dearly I love to list the ringing chime, 
 Thou faithful guardian of domestic worth, 
 Noble old Flanders! where the rigid North 
 A flush of rich meridian glow doth feel, 
 Caught from reflected suns of...Read more of this...

Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have A Problem With Time

by Nick Flynn
 He reads my latest attempt at a poem
and is silent for a long time, until it feels
like that night we waited for Apollo,
my mother wandering in and out of her bedroom, asking,
Haven't they landed yet? At last
Dugan throws it on the table and says,
This reads like a cheap detective novel
and I've got nothing to say about it. It sits,
naked...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Ice-Worm Cocktail

by Robert William Service
 To Dawson Town came Percy Brown from London on the Thames.
A pane of glass was in his eye, and stockings on his stems.
Upon the shoulder of his coat a leather pad he wore,
To rest his deadly rifle when it wasn't seeking gore;
The which it must have often been, for Major Percy Brown,
According to his story was a hunter of...Read more of this...

An Aquarium

by Amy Lowell
 Streaks of green and yellow iridescence,
Silver shiftings,
Rings veering out of rings,
Silver -- gold --
Grey-green opaqueness sliding down,
With sharp white bubbles
Shooting and dancing,
Flinging quickly outward.
Nosing the bubbles,
Swallowing them,
Fish.
Blue shadows against silver-saffron water,
The light rippling over them
In steel-bright tremors.
Outspread translucent fins
Flute, fold, and relapse;
The threaded light prints through them on the pebbles
In scarcely tarnished twinklings.
Curving of spotted spines,
Slow up-shifts,
Lazy convolutions:
Then a...Read more of this...

An Old Mans Winter Night

by Robert Frost
 All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him...Read more of this...

The Dead Robin

by Anonymous
All through the win-ter, long and cold,
  Dear Minnie ev-ery morn-ing fed
The little spar-rows, pert and bold,
  And ro-bins, with their breasts so red.

She lov-ed to see the lit-tle birds
  Come flut-ter-ing to the win-dow pane,
In answer to the gen-tle words
  With which she scat-ter-ed crumbs and grain.

One ro-bin, bol-der than the rest,
  Would perch...Read more of this...

At First. To Charlotte Cushman

by Sidney Lanier
 My crippled sense fares bow'd along
His uncompanioned way,
And wronged by death pays life with wrong
And I wake by night and dream by day.

And the Morning seems but fatigued Night
That hath wept his visage pale,
And the healthy mark 'twixt dark and light
In sickly sameness out doth fail.

And the woods stare strange, and the wind is dumb,
-- O Wind, pray talk...Read more of this...

The Bombardment

by Amy Lowell
 Slowly, without force, the rain drops into the 
city. It stops a moment
on the carved head of Saint John, then slides on again, slipping 
and trickling
over his stone cloak. It splashes from the lead conduit 
of a gargoyle,
and falls from it in turmoil on the stones in the Cathedral square.
Where are the people, and why does the fretted steeple...Read more of this...

The Nostomaniac

by Robert William Service
 On the ragged edge of the world I'll roam,
And the home of the wolf shall be my home,
And a bunch of bones on the boundless snows
The end of my trail . . . who knows, who knows!

I'm dreaming to-night in the fire-glow, alone in my study tower,
My books battalioned around me, my Kipling flat on my knee;
But I'm not...Read more of this...

My Little March Girl

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
 Come to the pane, draw the curtain apart, 
There she is passing, the girl of my heart; 
See where she walks like a queen in the street, 
Weather-defying, calm, placid and sweet.
Tripping along with impetuous grace, 
Joy of her life beaming out of her face, 
Tresses all truant-like, curl upon curl, 
Wind-blown and rosy, my little March girl.

Hint of...Read more of this...

Hobo

by Robert William Service
 A father's pride I used to know,
A mother's love was mine;
For swinish husks I let them go,
And bedded with the swine.
Since then I've come on evil days
And most of life is hell;
But even swine have winsome ways
When once you know them well.

One time I guessed I'd cease to roam,
And greet the folks again;
And so I rode the rods to...Read more of this...

The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux

by A E Housman
 The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers 
Stream from the hawthorn on the wind away, 
The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers. 
Pass me the can, lad; there's an end of May. 

There's one spoilt spring to scant our mortal lot, 
One season ruined of your little store. 
May will be fine next year as...Read more of this...

The Rain Was Ending And Light

by Laurence Binyon
 The rain was ending, and light
Lifting the leaden skies.
It shone upon ceiling and floor
And dazzled a child's eyes.

Pale after fever, a captive
Apart from his schoolfellows,
He stood at the high room's window
With face to the pane pressed close,

And beheld an immense glory
Flooding with fire the drops
Spilled on miraculous leaves
Of the fresh green lime-tree tops.

Washed gravel glittered red
To a wall, and...Read more of this...

Verses on Sir Joshua Reynolds Painted Window at New College Oxford

by Thomas Warton
 Ah, stay thy treacherous hand, forbear to trace
Those faultless forms of elegance and grace!
Ah, cease to spread the bright transparent mass,
With Titian's pencil, o'er the speaking glass!
Nor steal, by strokes of art with truth combin'd,
The fond illusions of my wayward mind!
For long, enamour'd of a barbarous age,
A faithless truant to the classic page;
Long have I lov'd to catch the...Read more of this...

Mariana

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
WITH BLACKEST moss the flower-plots 
Were thickly crusted, one and all: 
The rusted nails fell from the knots 
That held the pear to the gable-wall. 
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange: 
Unlifted was the clinking latch; 
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
Upon the lonely moated grange. 
She only said, "My life is dreary, 
He cometh not," she said;...Read more of this...

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