Famous Planet Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Move Eastward Happy Earth

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Move eastward, happy earth, and leave 
Yon orange sunset waning slow: 
From fringes of the faded eve, 
O, happy planet, eastward go: 
Till over thy dark shoulder glow 
Thy silver sister world, and rise 
To glass herself in dewey eyes 
That watch me from the glen below. 

Ah, bear me with thee, lightly borne, 
Dip forward under starry light,...Read more of this...

Pineapples And Pomegranates

by Paul Muldoon
 To think that, as a boy of thirteen, I would grapple 
with my first pineapple, 
its exposed breast 
setting itself as another test 
of my will-power, knowing in my bones 
that it stood for something other than itself alone 
while having absolutely no sense 
of its being a world-wide symbol of munificence. 
Munificence—right? Not munitions, if you understand 
where...Read more of this...

Indian Song

by George William Russell
 SHADOWY-PETALLED, like the lotus, loom the mountains with their snows:
Through the sapphire Soma rising such a flood of glory throws
As when first in yellow splendour Brahma from the Lotus rose.


High above the darkening mounds where fade the fairy lights of day,
All the tiny planet folk are waving us from far away;
Thrilled by Brahma’s breath they sparkle with the magic...Read more of this...

Music To Me Is Like Days

by Les Murray
 Once played to attentive faces 
music has broken its frame 
its bodice of always-weak laces 
the entirely promiscuous art 
pours out in public spaces 
accompanying everything, the selections 
of sex and war, the rejections. 
To jeans-wearers in zipped sporrans 
it transmits an ideal body 
continuously as theirs age. Warrens 
of plastic tiles and mesh throats 
dispense this aural money...Read more of this...

Boldness in Love

by Thomas Carew
 Mark how the bashful morn in vain
Courts the amorous marigold,
With sighing blasts and weeping rain,
Yet she refuses to unfold.
But when the planet of the day
Approacheth with his powerful ray,
The she spreads, then she receives
His warmer beams into her virgin leaves.

So shalt thou thrive in love, fond boy;
If thy tears and sighs discover
Thy grief, thou never shalt enjoy
The just reward...Read more of this...

Sonnet CXXXIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CXXXIII. S' io fossi stato fermo alla spelunca. TO ONE WHO DESIRED LATIN VERSE OF HIM.  Still had I sojourn'd in that Delphic caveWhere young Apollo prophet first became,Verona, Mantua were not sole in fame,But Florence, too, her poet now might have:But since the waters of that spring no moreRead more of this...

Sonnet XVI: Who Shall Invoke Her

by Alan Seeger
 Who shall invoke her, who shall be her priest,
With single rites the common debt to pay?
On some green headland fronting to the East
Our fairest boy shall kneel at break of day.
Naked, uplifting in a laden tray
New milk and honey and sweet-tinctured wine,
Not without twigs of clustering apple-spray
To wreath a garland for Our Lady's shrine.
The morning planet poised above the...Read more of this...

Fantasy

by George William Russell
 OVER all the dream-built margin, flushed with grey and hoary light,
Glint the bubble planets tossing in the dead black sea of night.
Immemorial face, how many faces look from out thy skies,
Now with ghostly eyes of wonder rimmed around with rainbow dyes:
Now the secrets of the future trail along the silent spheres:
Ah, how often have I followed filled with phantom...Read more of this...

End Of The World

by Robinson Jeffers
 When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His...Read more of this...

Lucifer in Starlight

by George Meredith
 On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o'er Afric's sands careened,
Now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones...Read more of this...

A Sign-Seeker

by Thomas Hardy
 I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.

I view the evening bonfires of the sun
On hills where morning rains have hissed;
The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.

I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,
The caldrons of...Read more of this...

Good-By Now or Pardon My Gauntlet

by Ogden Nash
 Bring down the moon for genteel Janet;
She's too refined for this gross planet.
She wears garments and you wear clothes,
You buy stockings, she purchases hose.
She say That is correct, and you say Yes,
And she disrobes and you undress.
Confronted by a mouse or moose,
You turn green, she turns chartroose.
Her speech is new-minted, freshly quarried;
She has a fore-head, you have a forehead.
Nor...Read more of this...

Distichs

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 CHORDS are touch'd by Apollo,--the death-laden 
bow, too, he bendeth;

While he the shepherdess charms, Python he lays 
in the dust.

WHAT is merciful censure? To make thy faults appear 
smaller?

May be to veil them? No, no! O'er them to raise 
thee on high!

DEMOCRATIC food soon cloys on the multitude's stomach;
But I'll wager, ere long, other thou'lt give them instead.

WHAT in...Read more of this...

Smoky the Bear Sutra

by Gary Snyder
Smokey the Bear Sutra

Once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago,
 the Great Sun Buddha in this corner of the Infinite
 Void gave a Discourse to all the assembled elements
 and energies: to the standing beings, the walking beings,
 the flying beings, and the sitting beings -- even grasses,
 to the number of thirteen billion, each one born from...Read more of this...

Ignorance

by Robert William Service
 Oh happy he who cannot see
 With scientific eyes;
Who does not know how flowers grow,
 And is not planet wise;
Content to find with simple mind
 Joys as they are:
To whom a rose is just a rose,
 A star--a star.

It is not good, I deem, to brood
 On things beyond our ken;
A rustic I would live and die,
 Aloof from...Read more of this...

Stepping Backward

by Adrienne Rich
 Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily...Read more of this...

The Planet On The Table

by Wallace Stevens
 Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they...Read more of this...

A Florida Ghost

by Sidney Lanier
 Down mildest shores of milk-white sand,
By cape and fair Floridian bay,
Twixt billowy pines -- a surf asleep on land --
And the great Gulf at play,

Past far-off palms that filmed to nought,
Or in and out the cunning keys
That laced the land like fragile patterns wrought
To edge old broideries,

The sail sighed on all day for joy,
The prow each pouting wave did...Read more of this...

Hillcrest

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 (To Mrs. Edward MacDowell)


No sound of any storm that shakes 
Old island walls with older seas 
Comes here where now September makes 
An island in a sea of trees. 

Between the sunlight and the shade
A man may learn till he forgets 
The roaring of a world remade, 
And all his ruins and regrets; 

And if he still remembers here...Read more of this...

Sonnet IX

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET IX. Quando 'l pianeta che distingue l' ore. WITH A PRESENT OF FRUIT IN SPRING.  When the great planet which directs the hoursTo dwell with Taurus from the North is borne,Such virtue rays from each enkindled horn,Rare beauty instantly all nature dowers;Nor this alone, which meets our sight, that flowersRead more of this...

Skyscraper

by Carl Sandburg
 BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul...Read more of this...

The day when the celestial war-horse of the golden

by Omar Khayyam
The day when the celestial war-horse of the golden
stars was saddled, when the planet Jupiter and the
Pleiades were created, from that day the Divan [Chief
Justice] of destiny fixed our lot. In what respect, then,
are we guilty, since such is the part that was made
for us?...Read more of this...

The Disquieting Muses

by Sylvia Plath
 Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always
Got baked into...Read more of this...

Child of Europe

by Czeslaw Milosz
 1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day.
Who in May admire trees flowering
Are better than those who perished.

We, who taste of exotic dishes,
And enjoy fully the delights of love,
Are better than those who were buried.

We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared...Read more of this...

Morning Song Of Senlin

by Conrad Aiken
 from Senlin: A Biography 


It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, 
I arise, I face the sunrise, 
And do the things my fathers learned to do. 
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops 
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, 
And I myself on...Read more of this...

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