Famous Ploughs Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Abel Melveny

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I bought every kind of machine that's known --
Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers,
Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers --
And all of them stood in the rain and sun,
Getting rusted, warped and battered,
For I had no sheds to store them in,
And no use for most of them.
And toward the last, when I thought it over,
There by my window, growing clearer
About...Read more of this...

Jonah

by Robert Graves
 A purple whale 
Proudly sweeps his tail 
Towards Nineveh; 
Glassy green 
Surges between
A mile of roaring sea. 

“O town of gold, 
Of splendour multifold, 
Lucre and lust, 
Leviathan’s eye
Can surely spy 
Thy doom of death and dust.” 

On curving sands 
Vengeful Jonah stands. 
“Yet forty days,
Then down, down, 
Tumbles the town 
In flaming ruin ablaze.” 

With swift lament 
Those...Read more of this...

Drinking Song

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 INSCRIPTION FOR AN ANTIQUE PITCHER

Come, old friend! sit down and listen!
From the pitcher, placed between us,
How the waters laugh and glisten
In the head of old Silenus!

Old Silenus, bloated, drunken,
Led by his inebriate Satyrs;
On his breast his head is sunken,
Vacantly he leers and chatters.

Fauns with youthful Bacchus follow;
Ivy crowns that brow supernal
As the forehead of Apollo,
And possessing youth eternal.

Round about...Read more of this...

403. The Soldier's Return: A Ballad

by Robert Burns
 WHEN wild war’s deadly blast was blawn,
 And gentle peace returning,
Wi’ mony a sweet babe fatherless,
 And mony a widow mourning;
I left the lines and tented field,
 Where lang I’d been a lodger,
My humble knapsack a’ my wealth,
 A poor and honest sodger.


A leal, light heart was in my breast,
 My hand unstain’d wi’ plunder;
And for fair Scotia hame...Read more of this...

The Legend of Evil

by Rudyard Kipling
 I
This is the sorrowful story
 Told when the twilight fails
And the monkeys walk together
 Holding their neighbours' tails: --

"Our fathers lived in the forest,
 Foolish people were they,
They went down to the cornland
 To teach the farmers to play.

"Our fathers frisked in the millet,
 Our fathers skipped in the wheat,
Our fathers hung from the branches,
 Our fathers danced in...Read more of this...

The Wassail

by Robert Herrick
 Give way, give way, ye gates, and win
An easy blessing to your bin
And basket, by our entering in.

May both with manchet stand replete;
Your larders, too, so hung with meat,
That though a thousand, thousand eat,

Yet, ere twelve moons shall whirl about
Their silv'ry spheres, there's none may doubt
But more's sent in than was served out.

Next, may your dairies prosper so,
As that...Read more of this...

In Hilly-Wood

by John Clare
 How sweet to be thus nestling deep in boughs,
Upon an ashen stoven pillowing me;
Faintly are heard the ploughmen at their ploughs,
But not an eye can find its way to see.
The sunbeams scarce molest me with a smile,
So thick the leafy armies gather round;
And where they do, the breeze blows cool the while,
Their leafy shadows dancing on the ground.
Full many...Read more of this...

During Wind And Rain

by Thomas Hardy
 They sing their dearest songs --
He, she, all of them -- yea,
Treble and tenor and bass,
And one to play;
With the candles mooning each face....
Ah, no; the years O!
How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

They clear the creeping moss --
Elders and juniors -- aye,
Making the pathways neat
And the garden gay;
And they build a shady seat....
Ah, no; the years, the...Read more of this...

Ode to the Memory of Burns

by Thomas Campbell
 Soul of the Poet ! wheresoe'er,
Reclaimed from earth, thy genius plume
Her wings of immortality ;
Suspend thy harp in happier sphere,
And with thine influence illume
The gladness of our jubilee.

And fly like fiends from secret spell,
Discord and Strife, at Burn's name,
Exorcised by his memory ;
For he was chief of bards that swell
The heart with songs of social flame,
And high delicious revelry.

And...Read more of this...

When the Children Come Home

by Henry Lawson
 On a lonely selection far out in the West 
An old woman works all the day without rest, 
And she croons, as she toils 'neath the sky's glassy dome, 
`Sure I'll keep the ould place till the childer come home.' 

She mends all the fences, she grubs, and she ploughs, 
She drives the old horse and she milks all...Read more of this...

90. Epistle to James Smith

by Robert Burns
 DEAR SMITH, the slee’st, pawkie thief,
That e’er attempted stealth or rief!
Ye surely hae some warlock-brief
 Owre human hearts;
For ne’er a bosom yet was prief
 Against your arts.


For me, I swear by sun an’ moon,
An’ ev’ry star that blinks aboon,
Ye’ve cost me twenty pair o’ shoon,
 Just gaun to see you;
An’ ev’ry ither pair that’s done,
 Mair taen I’m wi’...Read more of this...

Death, In Life

by Victor Hugo
 ("Ceux-ci partent.") 
 
 {Bk. III. v., February, 1843.} 


 We pass—these sleep 
 Beneath the shade where deep-leaved boughs 
 Bend o'er the furrows the Great Reaper ploughs, 
 And gentle summer winds in many sweep 
 Whirl in eddying waves 
 The dead leaves o'er the graves. 
 
 And the living sigh: 
 Forgotten ones, so...Read more of this...

Work chapter VII

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then a ploughman said, "Speak to us of Work." 

And he answered, saying: 

You work that you may keep pace with the earth and the soul of the earth. 

For to be idle is to become a stranger unto the seasons, and to step out of life's procession, that marches in majesty and proud submission towards the infinite. 

When...Read more of this...

The Harvest Bow

by Seamus Heaney
 As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I...Read more of this...

When the Children Come Home

by Henry Lawson
 On a lonely selection far out in the West 
An old woman works all the day without rest, 
And she croons, as she toils 'neath the sky's glassy dome, 
`Sure I'll keep the ould place till the childer come home.' 

She mends all the fences, she grubs, and she ploughs, 
She drives the old horse and she milks all...Read more of this...

The Further Bank

by Rabindranath Tagore
 I long to go over there to the further bank of the river.
Where those boats are tied to the bamboo poles in a line;
Where men cross over in their boats in the morning with
ploughs on their shoulders to till their far-away fields;
Where the cowherds make their lowing cattle swim across to the
riverside pasture;
Whence they all come back home in...Read more of this...

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