Famous Pigeons Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Apollo Musagetes

by Matthew Arnold
 Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,
Thick breaks the red flame;
All Etna heaves fiercely
Her forest-clothed frame. 

Not here, O Apollo!
Are haunts meet for thee.
But, where Helicon breaks down
In cliff to the sea, 

Where the moon-silver'd inlets
Send far their light voice
Up the still vale of Thisbe,
O speed, and rejoice! 

On the sward at the cliff-top
Lie strewn the white flocks,
On the cliff-side the...Read more of this...

Providence

by George Herbert
 O Sacred Providence, who from end to end
Strongly and sweetly movest! shall I write,
And not of thee, through whom my fingers bend
To hold my quill? shall they not do thee right?

Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Onely to Man thou hast made known thy wayes,
And put the penne alone into his hand, 
And made him Secretarie of...Read more of this...

A Tale of Starvation

by Amy Lowell
 There once was a man whom the gods didn't love,
And a disagreeable man was he.
He loathed his neighbours, and his neighbours hated him,
And he cursed eternally.
He damned the sun, and he damned the stars,
And he blasted the winds in the sky.
He sent to Hell every green, growing thing,
And he raved at the birds as they fly.
His oaths were many,...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 02: 05: Retrospect

by Conrad Aiken
 Round white clouds roll slowly above the housetops,
Over the clear red roofs they flow and pass.
A flock of pigeons rises with blue wings flashing,
Rises with whistle of wings, hovers an instant,
And settles slowly again on the tarnished grass.

And one old man looks down from a dusty window
And sees the pigeons circling about the fountain
And desires once more to walk...Read more of this...

O the splendour of our joy

by Emile Verhaeren
O the splendour of our joy, woven of gold in the silken air!
Here is our pleasant house and its airy gables, and the garden and the orchard.
Here is the bench beneath the apple-trees, whence the white spring is shed in slow, caressing petals.
Here flights of luminous wood-pigeons, like harbingers, soar in the clear sky of the countryside.
Here, kisses fallen upon...Read more of this...

Three Spring Notations on Bipeds

by Carl Sandburg
 1THE DOWN drop of the blackbird,
The wing catch of arrested flight,
The stop midway and then off: off for triangles, circles, loops of new hieroglyphs—
This is April’s way: a woman:
“O yes, I’m here again and your heart
 knows I was coming.”

2White pigeons rush at the sun,
A marathon of wing feats is on:
“Who most loves danger? Who most loves wings? Who...Read more of this...

The Tourist From Syracuse

by Donald Justice
 One of those men who can be a car salesman or a tourist from Syracuse or a
hired assassin.
-- John D. MacDonald

You would not recognize me.
Mine is the face which blooms in
The dank mirrors of washrooms
As you grope for the light switch.

My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered,

And I...Read more of this...

March

by Boris Pasternak
 The sun is hotter than the top ledge in a steam bath;
The ravine, crazed, is rampaging below.
Spring -- that corn-fed, husky milkmaid --
Is busy at her chores with never a letup.

The snow is wasting (pernicious anemia --
See those branching veinlets of impotent blue?)
Yet in the cowbarn life is burbling, steaming,
And the tines of pitchforks simply glow with health.

These days...Read more of this...

The Happy Couple

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 AFTER these vernal rains

That we so warmly sought,
Dear wife, see how our plains

With blessings sweet are fraught!
We cast our distant gaze

Far in the misty blue;
Here gentle love still strays,

Here dwells still rapture true.

Thou seest whither go

Yon pair of pigeons white,
Where swelling violets blow

Round sunny foliage bright.
'Twas there we gather'd first

A nosegay as we roved;
There into flame first burst

The passion...Read more of this...

The Carrier Pigeon

by Victor Hugo
 ("Oh! qu'est-ce que c'est donc que l'Inconnu.") 
 
 {January, 1871.} 


 Who then—oh, who, is like our God so great, 
 Who makes the seed expand beneath the mountain's weight; 
 Who for a swallow's nest leaves one old castle wall, 
 Who lets for famished beetles savory apples fall, 
 Who bids a pigmy win where Titans...Read more of this...

Sky Harbor

by Norman Dubie
 The flock of pigeons rises over the roof,
and just beyond them, the shimmering asphalt fields
gather their dull colored airliners.

It is the very early night,
a young brunette sits before the long
darkening glass of the airport's west wall.

She smells coffee burning
and something else-- her old mother's
bureau filled with mothballs.

Her nearly silver blouse smells of anise
and the heat of an iron.
She suddenly...Read more of this...

Pigeon

by Carl Sandburg
 THE FLUTTER of blue pigeon’s wings
Under a river bridge
Hunting a clean dry arch,
A corner for a sleep—
This flutters here in a woman’s hand.

A singing sleep cry,
A drunken poignant two lines of song,
Somebody looking clean into yesterday
And remembering, or looking clean into
To-morrow, and reading,—
This sings here as a woman’s sleep cry sings.

Pigeon friend of mine,
Fly on, sing on....Read more of this...

The Pigeon Shooting

by Robert William Service
 They say that Monte Carlo is
A sunny place for shady people;
But I'm not in the gambling biz,
And sober as a parish steeple.
so though this paradisal spot
The devil's playground of the rich is,
I love it and I love it not,
As men may sometimes fall for bitches.

I lazed beneath the sky's blue bliss,
The sea swooned with a sequin glimmer;
The breeze was...Read more of this...

On The Skeleton Of A Hound

by James Wright
 Nightfall, that saw the morning-glories float
Tendril and string against the crumbling wall,
Nurses him now, his skeleton for grief,
His locks for comfort curled among the leaf.
Shuttles of moonlight weave his shadow tall,
Milkweed and dew flow upward to his throat.
Now catbird feathers plume the apple mound,
And starlings drowse to winter up the ground.
thickened away from speech by fear, I move
Around the...Read more of this...

Fourth Floor Dawn Up All Night Writing Letters

by Allen Ginsberg
 Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought! Now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

...Read more of this...

The Woman At The Washington Zoo

by Randall Jarrell
 The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. 
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
 this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my...Read more of this...

Renascence

by D. H. Lawrence
We have bit no forbidden apple,
    Eve and I,
Yet the splashes of day and night
Falling round us no longer dapple
The same Eden with purple and white.

This is our own still valley
    Our Eden, our home,
But day shows it vivid with feeling
And the pallor of night does not tally
With dark sleep that once covered its...Read more of this...

Nightfall In The City Of Hyderabad

by Sarojini Naidu
 SEE how the speckled sky burns like a pigeon's throat, 
Jewelled with embers of opal and peridote. 


See the white river that flashes and scintillates, 
Curved like a tusk from the mouth of the city-gates. 


Hark, from the minaret, how the muezzin's call 
Floats like a battle-flag over the city wall. 


From trellised balconies, languid and luminous 
Faces gleam,...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 03: 08: Coffins: Interlude

by Conrad Aiken
 Wind blows. Snow falls. The great clock in its tower
Ticks with reverberant coil and tolls the hour:
At the deep sudden stroke the pigeons fly . . .
The fine snow flutes the cracks between the flagstones.
We close our coats, and hurry, and search the sky.

We are like music, each voice of it pursuing
A golden separate dream, remote, persistent,
Climbing to fire,...Read more of this...

Improvisations: Light And Snow

by Conrad Aiken
 I

The girl in the room beneath 
Before going to bed 
Strums on a mandolin 
The three simple tunes she knows. 
How inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels! 
When she has finished them several times 
She thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails 
And smiles, and thinks happily of many things.

II

I stood for a long while before...Read more of this...

The Manor Farm

by Edward Thomas
 THE rock-like mud unfroze a little, and rills 
Ran and sparkled down each side of the road 
Under the catkins wagging in the hedge. 
But earth would have her sleep out, spite of the sun; 
Nor did I value that thin gliding beam 
More than a pretty February thing 
Till I came down to the old manor farm, 
And...Read more of this...

The Destroyers

by Rudyard Kipling
 The strength of twice three thousand horse
 That seeks the single goal;
The line that holds the rending course,
 The hate that swings the whole;
The stripped hulls, slinking through the gloom,
 At gaze and gone again --
The Brides of Death that wait the groom --
 The Choosers of the Slain!

Offshore where sea and skyline blend
 In rain, the daylight dies;
The...Read more of this...

R.t.s.l. (1917-1977)

by Derek Walcott
 As for that other thing
which comes when the eyelid is glazed
and the wax gleam
from the unwrinkled forehead
asks no more questions
of the dry mouth,

whether they open the heart like a shirt
to release a rage of swallows,
whether the brain
is a library for worms,
on the instant of that knowledge
of the moment
when everything became so stiff,

so formal with ironical adieux,
organ and choir,
and I...Read more of this...

Two Pigeons

by Mother Goose
I had two pigeons bright and gay,
They flew from me the other day.
What was the reason they did go?
I cannot tell, for I do not know....Read more of this...

The Pigeons Of St. Marks

by Robert William Service
 Something's wrong in Pigeon-land;
'Tisn't as it used to be,
When the pilgrim, corn in hand,
Courted us with laughing glee;
When we crooned with pinions furled,
Tamest pigeons in the world.

When we packed each arm and shoulder,
Never deeming man a menace;
Surly birds were never bolder
Than our dainty doves of Venice:
Who would have believed a pigeon
Could become wild as a widgeon.

Well, juts blame it...Read more of this...

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