Famous Privet Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Le Jardin

by Oscar Wilde
 The lily's withered chalice falls
Around its rod of dusty gold,
And from the beech-trees on the wold
The last wood-pigeon coos and calls.

The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter, - hour by hour.

Pale privet-petals white as milk
Are blown into a snowy mass:
The roses lie upon the grass
Like little shreds of...Read more of this...

The Genesis of the Butterfly

by Victor Hugo
 The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers 
The tearful roses; lo, the little lovers 
That kiss the buds, and all the flutterings 
In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings, 
That go and come, and fly, and peep and hide, 
With muffled music, murmured far and wide. 
Ah, the Spring time, when we think of all the...Read more of this...

The Shadowy Waters: Introductory Lines

by William Butler Yeats
 I walked among the seven woods of Coole:
Shan-walla, where a willow-hordered pond
Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;
Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,
Where many hundred squirrels are as happy
As though they had been hidden hy green houghs
Where old age cannot find them; Paire-na-lee,
Where hazel and ash and privet hlind the paths:
Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling
Their sudden fragrances on...Read more of this...

Beloved Let Us Once More Praise The Rain

by Conrad Aiken
 Beloved, let us once more praise the rain. 
Let us discover some new alphabet, 
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves, 
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf, 
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone, 
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,—
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion, 
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain...Read more of this...

How Butterflies Are Born

by Victor Hugo
 ("Comme le matin rit sur les roses.") 
 
 {Bk. I. xii.} 


 The dawn is smiling on the dew that covers 
 The tearful roses—lo, the little lovers— 
 That kiss the buds and all the flutterings 
 In jasmine bloom, and privet, of white wings 
 That go and come, and fly, and peep, and hide 
...Read more of this...

Paragraphs from a Day-Book

by Marilyn Hacker
 Cherry-ripe: dark sweet burlats, scarlet reverchons
firm-fleshed and tart in the mouth
bigarreaux, peach-and-white napoléons
as the harvest moves north
from Provence to the banks of the Yonne
(they grow napoléons in Washington
State now). Before that, garriguettes,
from Périgord, in wooden punnets
afterwards, peaches: yellow-fleshed, white,
moss-skinned ruby pêches de vigne.
The vendors cry out "Taste," my appetite
does, too.. Birdsong, from an unseen
source on this street-island, too close...Read more of this...

Freedom of Love

by Andre Breton
 (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white...Read more of this...

Westgate-On-Sea

by John Betjeman
 Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate,
I will tell you what they sigh,
Where those minarets and steeples
Prick the open Thanet sky.

Happy bells of eighteen-ninety,
Bursting from your freestone tower!
Recalling laurel, shrubs and privet,
Red geraniums in flower.

Feet that scamper on the asphalt
Through the Borough Council grass,
Till they hide inside the shelter
Bright with ironwork and glass,

Striving chains of ordered children
Purple by the...Read more of this...

The Holy War

by Rudyard Kipling
 "For here lay the excellent wisdom of him that built Mansoul, thatthe
walls could never be broken down nor hurt by the most mighty adverse
potentate unless the townsmen gave consent thereto."--Bunyan's Holy War.)


A tinker out of Bedford,
A vagrant oft in quod,
A privet under Fairfax,
A minister of God--


Two hundred years and thirty
 Ere Armageddon came
His single hand portrayed it,
 And Bunyan...Read more of this...

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