Famous Petal Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Petal poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous petal poems. These examples illustrate what a famous petal poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Parker, Dorothy
...words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:
Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree-
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity-
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...ke an argent shield
High in the sapphire heavens hung the moon,
Did no strange dream or evil memory make
Each tremulous petal of its blossoms shake?
Ah no! to this bright flower a thousand years
Seemed but the lingering of a summer's day,
It never knew the tide of cankering fears
Which turn a boy's gold hair to withered grey,
The dread desire of death it never knew,
Or how all folk that they were born must rue.
For we to death with pipe and dancing go,
Nor would we pass...Read more of this...
by
Brooke, Rupert
...e like a sleep.
Light glinted on the eyes I loved.
The cup was filled. The bodies moved.
The drifting petal came to ground.
The laughter chimed its perfect round.
The broken syllable was ended.
And I, so certain and so friended,
How could I cloud, or how distress,
The heaven of your unconsciousness?
Or shake at Time’s sufficient spell,
Stammering of lights unutterable?
The eternal holiness of you,
The timeless end, you never knew,
The pea...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure,
and among the blood-colored grapes time has made the
petal
hard and shiny, made the jellyfish full of light
and untied its knot, letting its musical threads fall
from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead
of human eyes, dead in those darknesses,
of fingers accustomed to the triangle, longitudes
on the timid globe of an orange.
...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...nd a brow
May-blossom, and a cheek of apple-blossom,
Hawk-eyes; and lightly was her slender nose
Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower;
She into hall past with her page and cried,
'O King, for thou hast driven the foe without,
See to the foe within! bridge, ford, beset
By bandits, everyone that owns a tower
The Lord for half a league. Why sit ye there?
Rest would I not, Sir King, an I were king,
Till even the lonest hold were all as free
From cursd bloodshed, ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...to John of the wicked thumb?
IX.
Ha ha, John plucketh now at his rose
To rid himself of a sorrow at heart!
Lo,---petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils
Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!
CHORUS.
What maketh heaven, That maketh hell.
X.
So, as John called now, through the fire amain.
On the Na...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...Onion,
luminous flask,
your beauty formed
petal by petal,
crystal scales expanded you
and in the secrecy of the dark earth
your belly grew round with dew.
Under the earth
the miracle
happened
and when your clumsy
green stem appeared,
and your leaves were born
like swords
in the garden,
the earth heaped up her power
showing your naked transparency,
and as the remote sea
in lifting the breasts of ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...e hundreds of them.
Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were sudden-
ly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and
the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that
smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When
the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased
like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the
sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like
a clap of thunder i...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...the path. Her
soul was listless; even the morning breeze
Fluttering the trees and strewing a light swath Of fallen petals
on the grass, could please
Her not at all. She brushed a hair aside With a
swift move, and a half-angry frown.
She stopped to pull a daffodil or two, And
held them to her gown
To test the colours; put them at her side,
Then at her breast, then loosened them and tried
Some new arrangement, but it would not do.
III
A lady in a Manor-hous...Read more of this...
by
Cummings, Edward Estlin (E E)
...ey are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose ...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...r the tongue and sword
At battle on the deck, and the wild mutineers are bold!
"The dewdrop morn may fall from off the petal of the sky,
But all the deck is wet with blood and stains the crystal red.
A pilot, GOD, a pilot! for the helm is left awry,
And the best sailors in the ship lie there among the dead!"
____
Prattville, Alabama, 1868.
III. How Love Looked for Hell.
"To heal his heart of long-time pain
One day Prince Love for to travel was fain
With...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...NOW sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.
Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, 5
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.
Now lies the Earth all Dana? to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.
Now sli...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...y give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man's despair.
So never will wine-red rose or white,
Petal by petal, fall
On that stretch of mud and sand that lies
By the hideous prison-wall,
To tell the men who tramp the yard
That God's Son died for all.
Yet though the hideous prison-wall
Still hems him round and round,
And a spirit may not walk by night
That is with fetters bound,
And a spirit may but weep that lies
In such unholy ground,
He is at ...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...orner of the skies
Where behind sunset hills a stately city lies.
Here, among trees whose overhanging shade
Strews petals on the little droves below,
Pattering townward in the morning weighed
With greens from many an upland garden-row,
Runs an old wall; long centuries have frayed
Its scalloped edge, and passers to and fro
Heard never from beyond its crumbling height
Sweet laughter ring at noon or plaintive song at night.
But here where little lizards bask and blink
...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
petal that brings nausea.
Between the coconut palms the graves are full
of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
The delicate dictator is talking
with top hats, gold braid, and collars.
The tiny palace gleams like a watch
and the rapid laughs with gloves on
cross the corridors at times
and join the dead voices
and the blue mouths freshly bur...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...g leaves; I hurry after;
She dances in dreams over white-waved water;
Her body is white and fragrant and cool,
Magnolia petals that float on a white-starred pool . . .
I have dreamed of her, dreaming for many nights
Of a broken music and golden lights,
Of broken webs of silver, heavily falling
Between my hands and their white desire:
And dark-leaved boughs, edged with a golden radiance,
Dipping to screen a fire . . .
I dream that I walk with her beneat...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...her side; nor stranger seemed that hears
So gentle, so employed, should close in love,
Than when two dewdrops on the petals shake
To the same sweet air, and tremble deeper down,
And slip at once all-fragrant into one.
Less prosperously the second suit obtained
At first with Psyche. Not though Blanche had sworn
That after that dark night among the fields
She needs must wed him for her own good name;
Not though he built upon the babe restored;
Nor though she...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...lling to live the flare
Of a lighted instant and have it gone."
A bee in the laurels began to drone.
A loosened petal fluttered prone.
"Man grows by eating, if you eat
You will be filled with our life, sweet
Will be our planet in your mouth.
If not, I must parch in death's wide drouth
Until I gain to where you are,
And give you myself in whatever star
May happen. O You Beloved of Me!
Is it not ordered cleverly?"
The Shadow, bloomed like a plum, and clear,
...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...tly
A velvet flute-note fell down pleasantly
Upon the bosom of that harmony,
And sailed and sailed incessantly,
As if a petal from a wild-rose blown
Had fluttered down upon that pool of tone
And boatwise dropped o' the convex side
And floated down the glassy tide
And clarified and glorified
The solemn spaces where the shadows bide.
From the warm concave of that fluted note
Somewhat, half song, half odor, forth did float,
As if a rose might somehow be a throat:
"When Natur...Read more of this...
by
Padel, Ruth
...finger your silk throat inside your collar,
Tomorrow there'll be Olga, Sally, Jane. But then I'd whisper
Go for it, petal. Nothing's as real as what you write.
His funeral, if he's not up to it. What we feel
Is mortal, and won't come again.
*
So cut, weeks later, to an outside shot: the same girl
Taking cover ("Dear God, he's here, he's come!")
Under fat red gooseberries, glimmering hairy stars:
The old, rude bushes she has hide-and-seeked in all
Her life...Read more of this...
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