Famous Perfumed Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Carol of Harvest for 1867

...es of sheep and swine, 
And many a stately river flowing, and many a jocund brook,
And healthy uplands with their herby-perfumed breezes, 
And the good green grass—that delicate miracle, the ever-recurring grass. 

12
Toil on, Heroes! harvest the products! 
Not alone on those warlike fields, the Mother of All, 
With dilated form and lambent eyes, watch’d you.

Toil on, Heroes! toil well! Handle the weapons well! 
The Mother of All—yet here, as ever, she watches you. 

Well-pl...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt


A Dead Rose

...ure edges, after heat,---
If lighting now,---would coldly overrun thee.

The bee that once did suck thee,
And build thy perfumed ambers up his hive,
And swoon in thee for joy, till scarce alive,---
If passing now,---would blindly overlook thee.

The heart doth recognise thee,
Alone, alone! The heart doth smell thee sweet,
Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete,---
Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.

Yes, and the heart doth owe thee
More love, dead...Read more of this...
by Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

A Former Life

...yes. 

And there I lived amid voluptuous calms, 
In splendours of blue sky and wandering wave, 
Tended by many a naked, perfumed slave, 

Who fanned my languid brow with waving palms. 
They were my slaves--the only care they had 
To know what secret grief had made me sad....Read more of this...
by Baudelaire, Charles

Alastor: or the Spirit of Solitude

...ness, mutable
As shapes in the weird clouds. Soft mossy lawns
Beneath these canopies extend their swells,
Fragrant with perfumed herbs, and eyed with blooms 
Minute yet beautiful. One darkest glen
Sends from its woods of musk-rose twined with jasmine
A soul-dissolving odor to invite
To some more lovely mystery. Through the dell
Silence and Twilight here, twin-sisters, keep
Their noonday watch, and sail among the shades,
Like vaporous shapes half-seen; beyond, a well,
Dark, gl...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Apology

...light,
So bright,
It seems a myriad suns are strown
About the town.
Around me is the sound of steepled bells,
And rich perfumed smells
Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,
And shroud
Me from close contact with the world.
I dwell impearled.
You blazon me with jewelled insignia.
A flaming nebula
Rims in my life. And yet
You set
The word upon me, unconfessed
To go unguessed....Read more of this...
by Lowell, Amy


Celestial Love

...cate
In their innermost estate;
When each the other shall avoid,
Shall each by each be most enjoyed.
Not with scarfs or perfumed gloves
Do these celebrate their loves,
Not by jewels, feasts, and savors,
Not by ribbons or by favors,
But by the sun-spark on the sea,
And the cloud-shadow on the lea,
The soothing lapse of morn to mirk,
And the cheerful round of work.
Their cords of love so public are,
They intertwine the farthest star.
The throbbing sea, the quaking earth,
Yield ...Read more of this...
by Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Colors Passing Through Us

...he roses tumbling on the arbor 
their weight bending the wood 
the red of the syrup I make from petals. 

Orange as the perfumed fruit 
hanging their globes on the glossy tree, 
orange as pumpkins in the field, 
orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs 
who come to eat it, orange as my 
cat running lithe through the high grass. 

Yellow as a goat's wise and wicked eyes, 
yellow as a hill of daffodils, 
yellow as dandelions by the highway, 
yellow as butter and egg yolks, 
yel...Read more of this...
by Piercy, Marge

Columbus

...isunderstood one,
Because if her husband thinks something is a terrible idea she is bound to think it a good one,
So he perfumed his handkerchief with bay rum and citronella,
And he went to see Isabella,
And he looked wonderful but he had never felt sillier,
And she said, I can't place the face but the aroma is familiar,
And Columbus didn't say a word,
All he said was, I am Columbus, the fifteenth-century Admiral Byrd,
And, just as he thought, her disposition was very malleab...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden

Inspiration

...my couch it makes, 
More rich than are Arabian drugs, 
That my soul scents its life and wakes 
The body up beneath its perfumed rugs. 

Such is the Muse, the heavenly maid, 
The star that guides our mortal course, 
Which shows where life's true kernel's laid, 
Its wheat's fine flour, and its undying force. 

She with one breath attunes the spheres, 
And also my poor human heart, 
With one impulse propels the years 
Around, and gives my throbbing pulse its start. 

I will not...Read more of this...
by Thoreau, Henry David

Isabella or The Pot of Basil

...human fears,
From the fast mouldering head there shut from view:
So that the jewel, safely casketed,
Came forth, and in perfumed leafits spread.

LV.
O Melancholy, linger here awhile!
O Music, Music, breathe despondingly!
O Echo, Echo, from some sombre isle,
Unknown, Lethean, sigh to us--O sigh!
Spirits in grief, lift up your heads, and smile;
Lift up your heads, sweet Spirits, heavily,
And make a pale light in your cypress glooms,
Tinting with silver wan your marble tombs.

...Read more of this...
by Keats, John

Morituri Salutamus: Poem for the Fiftieth Anniversary

...et better the excess 
Than the defect; better the more than less; 
Better like Hector in the field to die, 
Than like a perfumed Paris turn and fly. 


And now, my classmates; ye remaining few 
That number not the half of those we knew, 
Ye, against whose familiar names not yet 
The fatal asterisk of death is set, 
Ye I salute! The horologe of Time 
Strikes the half-century with a solemn chime, 
And summons us together once again, 
The joy of meeting not unmixed with pain. 

...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Paris

...wing lives that clasp and cling. 


Lithe limbs relaxed, exalted eyes fastened on vacancy, they seem 
To float upon the perfumed stream of some voluptuous Paradise, 


Or, rapt in some Arabian Night, to rock there, cradled and subdued, 
In a luxurious lassitude of rhythm and sensual delight. 


And only when the measures cease and terminate the flowing dance 
They waken from their magic trance and join the cries that clamor "Bis!" . . . 


Midnight adjourns the festival. The ...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

Song of Solomon

...love, till he please.

22:003:006 Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of
           smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders
           of the merchant?

22:003:007 Behold his bed, which is Solomon's; threescore valiant men are
           about it, of the valiant of Israel.

22:003:008 They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his
           sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.

22:003:00...Read more of this...
by Bible, The

The Deserted Garden

...re heliotrope and weedy mignonette,
With vines in bloom and flower-bearing trees,
Mingle their incense all to swell the perfumed breeze,

That sprung like Hermes from his natal cave
In some blue rampart of the curving West,
Comes up the valleys where green cornfields wave,
Ravels the cloud about the mountain crest,
Breathes on the lake till gentle ripples pave
Its placid floor; at length a long-loved guest,
He steals across this plot of pleasant ground,
Waking the vocal leave...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

The Easter Flower

...ign, 
And some called it the resurrection flower; 
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine, 
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power....Read more of this...
by McKay, Claude

The Jacquerie A Fragment

...And cooed across unto her dove-mate Death,
Brooding, pathetic, by a river, lone.
Oh, sharper tangs pierced through this perfumed May.
Strange aches sailed by with odors on the wind
As when we kneel in flowers that grow on graves
Of friends who died unworthy of our love.
King John of France was proving such an ache
In English prisons wide and fair and grand,
Whose long expanses of green park and chace
Did ape large liberty with such success
As smiles of irony ape smiles of lov...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

The Raven

...the lamp-light gloating o’er,
            She shall press, ah, nevermore!

    Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
    “Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
    Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
            Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

    “Pro...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan

The Scholar Gypsy

...ng stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

And near me on the grass lies Glanvil's book— 
Come, let me read the oft-read tale again!
The story of the Oxford scholar poor,
Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,
Who, tired of knocking at prefermen...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew

To Helen

...Helen thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore 
That gently o'er a perfumed sea 
The weary wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam 
Thy hyacinth hair thy classic face 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand 
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah P...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan

Upon Appleton House to My Lord Fairfax

...in Amazons do fight.
"And our chast Lamps we hourly trim,
"Lest the great Bridegroom find them dim.
"Our Orient Breaths perfumed are
"With insense of incessant Pray'r.
"And Holy-water of our Tears
"Most strangly our complexion clears.

"Not Tears of Grief; but such as those
"With which calm Pleasure overflows;
"Or Pity, when we look on you
"That live without this happy Vow.
"How should we grieve that must be seen
"Each one a Spouse, and each a Queen;
"And can in Heaven hence ...Read more of this...
by Marvell, Andrew

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