Famous Pond Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Pond poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous pond poems. These examples illustrate what a famous pond poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Thomas, Dylan
...h us. And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not
to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp,
except why."
"Go on the Useless Presents."
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and
a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a
little ha...Read more of this...
by
Basho, Matsuo
...An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again. ...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...kes the turn to a range beyond,
Is the chapel reached by the one-arched bridge
Where the water is stopped in a stagnant pond
Danced over by the midge.
XV.
The chapel and bridge are of stone alike,
Blackish-grey and mostly wet;
Cut hemp-stalks steep in the narrow dyke.
See here again, how the lichens fret
And the roots of the ivy strike!
XVI.
Poor little place, where its one priest comes
On a festa-day, if he comes at all,
To the dozen folk from their scatt...Read more of this...
by
Aldington, Richard
...beds of geraniums no one was allowed to pick,
And its clipped lawns you weren't allowed to walk on,
And the gold-fish pond you mustn't paddle in,
And the gate made out of a whale's jaw-bones,
And the swings, which were for "Board-School children,"
And its gravel paths.
And on Sundays they rang the bells,
From Baptist and Evangelical and Catholic churches.
They had a Salvation Army.
I was taken to a High Church;
The parson's name was Mowbray,
"Which is ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...me, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no ear...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...mber 14th, 1972.
I live in Weston, Mass., Middlesex County,
U.S.A., and it rains steadily
in the pond like white puppy eyes.
The pond is waiting for its skin.
the pond is waiting for its leather.
The pond is waiting for December and its Novocain.
It begins:
Interrogator:
What can you say of your last seven days?
Anne:
They were tired.
Interrogator:
One day is enough to perfect a man.
Anne:
I watered and fed the p...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...boiling, and a way,
Dark, narrow, and steep, that down beside it goes,
By which we clambered. Purple-black the pond
Beneath it, widening to a marsh that spreads
Far out, and struggling in that slime malign
Were muddied shades, that not with hands, heads,
And teeth and feet besides, contending tore,
And maimed each other in beast-like rage.
My guide
Expounded, "Those whom anger overbore
On earth, behold ye. Mark the further sign
Of bubbles c...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...d goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field
Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.
A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.
The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. ...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...g and blazing with delusive light,
Misleads the amazed night-wanderer from his way
To bogs and mires, and oft through pond or pool;
There swallowed up and lost, from succour far.
So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud
Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree
Of prohibition, root of all our woe;
Which when she saw, thus to her guide she spake.
Serpent, we might have spared our coming hither,
Fruitless to me, though fruit be here to excess,
The credit o...Read more of this...
by
Whittier, John Greenleaf
...White of Selborne's loving view, --
He told how teal and loon he shot,
And how the eagle's eggs he got,
The feats on pond and river done,
The prodigies of rod and gun;
Till, warming with the tales he told,
Forgotten was the outside cold,
The bitter wind unheeded blew,
From ripening corn the pigeons flew,
The partridge drummed i' the wood, the mink
Went fishing down the river-brink.
The woodchuck, like a hermit gray,
Peered from the doorway of his cell;
The mu...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...breasts, it shall be you!
My brain, it shall be your occult convolutions.
Root of wash’d sweet flag! timorous pond-snipe! nest of guarded duplicate
eggs! it shall be you!
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you!
Trickling sap of maple! fibre of manly wheat! it shall be you!
Sun so generous, it shall be you!
Vapors lighting and shading my face, it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews, it shall be you!
Winds whose soft-tickling geni...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...
and it is safe,
safe far too long!
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.
I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...rink
By those clean cots of carven stone
Where the clear water sings alone.
Then down, past that white-blossomed pond,
And past the chestnut trees beyond,
And past the bridge the fishers knew,
Where yellow flag flowers once grew,
Where we'd go gathering cops of clover,
In sunny June times long since over.
O clover-cops half white, half red,
O beauty from beyond the dead.
O blossom, key to earth and heaven,
O souls that Christ has new forgiven.
The...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...g,
When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
A drinking-hole out of the fresh tender ice
That covered the pond till the sun, in a trice,
Loosening it, let out a ripple of gold,
And another and another, and faster and faster,
Till, dimpling to blindness, the wide water rolled:
Then it so chanced that the Duke our master
Asked himself what were the pleasures in season,
And found, since the calendar bade him be hearty,
He should do the Middle Age no treason
In reso...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...br>
Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain.
Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water.
And soon the pond must freeze.
The light wind blows to his ears a sound of laughter,
Young men shuffle their feet, loaf in the sunlight;
A girl's laugh rings like a silver bell.
But clearer than all these sounds is a sound he hears
More in his secret heart than in his ears,—
A hammer's steady crescendo, like a knell.
He hears the snarl of pineboards under th...Read more of this...
by
Eluard, Paul
...s deep as the silence
Of a corpse under ground
With nothing but darkness in mind
As dull and deaf
As autumn by the pond
Covered with stale shame
Poison, deprived of its flower
And of its golden beasts
out its night onto man
IV. Patience
You, my patient one
My patience
My parent
Head held high and proudly
Organ of the sluggish night
Bow down
Concealing all of heaven
And its favor
Prepare for vengeance
A bed where I'll be born
V. First march, th...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...nbsp;Poor Betty now has lost all hope, Her thoughts are bent on deadly sin; A green-grown pond she just has pass'd, And from the brink she hurries fast, Lest she should drown herself therein. And now she sits her down and weeps; Such tears she never shed before; "Oh dear, dear pony! my sweet joy! Oh carry back my idiot boy! And we will...Read more of this...
by
Basho, Matsuo
...Following are several translations
of the 'Old Pond' poem, which may be
the most famous of all haiku:
Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
-- Basho
Literal Translation
Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya,
ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into)
mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound)
The old pond--
a frog jumps in,
sound of water.
Translated by Robert Hass
Old pond...
a frog jum...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...thorn you on your left espy; And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy pond Of water, never dry; I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. IV. And close beside this aged thorn, There is a fresh and lovely sight, A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in heig...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...r
And I don't fear to recall
Anything - even the final hour.
Village of the Tsar Statue
Upon the swan pond maple leaves
Are gathered already, you see,
And bloodied are the branches dark
Of slowly blooming quicken-tree.
Blindingly elegant is she,
Crossing her legs that don't feel cold
Upon the northern stone sits she
And calmly looks upon the road.
I felt the gloomy, dusky fear
Before this woman of delight
As on her shoulders played alon...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Pond poems.