Famous Quietude Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Hermit

by Aleister Crowley
 NOW the quietude of earth
Nestles deep my heart within;
Friendships new and strange have birth
Since I left the city’s din.


Here the tempest stays its guile,
Like a big kind brother plays,
Romps and pauses here awhile
From its immemorial ways.


Now the silver light of dawn,
Slipping through the leaves that fleck
My one window, hurries on,
Throws its arms around my neck.


Darkness to my doorway hies,
Lays...Read more of this...

Pearls

by Bernadette Geyer
 And so I look back
still thinking of her
with painful heart,
this clench of inner flesh.

 —Kakinomoto Hitomaro
 from Manyoshu



*

Praise the irritant, that genesis,
implanted within the soft
and malleable animal that bore you.

*

Your brethren strung around my neck,
dangling from my earlobes.
The imperfections the jeweler slights, I praise.

*

Artifact of a biological process,
why do we expect
symmetry from a grain of sand?

*

Praise the oblong beauty
of...Read more of this...

An English Wood

by Robert Graves
 This valley wood is pledged
To the set shape of things,
And reasonably hedged:
Here are no harpies fledged,
No rocs may clap their wings,
Nor gryphons wave their stings.
Here, poised in quietude,
Calm elementals brood
On the set shape of things:
They fend away alarms
From this green wood.
Here nothing is that harms -
No bulls with lungs of brass,
No toothed or spiny grass,
No tree whose clutching arms
Drink...Read more of this...

Busy Heart The

by Rupert Brooke
 Now that we've done our best and worst, and parted,
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend.
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted)
I'll think of Love in books, Love without end;
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain;
And babes that weep, and so forget their weeping;
And the young...Read more of this...

Imagination

by Robert William Service
 A gaunt and hoary slab of stone
 I found in desert place,
And wondered why it lay alone
 In that abandoned place.
Said I: 'Maybe a Palace stood
 Where now the lizards crawl,
With courts of musky quietude
 And turrets tall.

Maybe where low the vultures wing
 'Mid mosque and minaret,
The proud pavilion of a King
 Was luminously set.
'Mid fairy fountains, alcoves dim,
...Read more of this...

Colors

by Stephen Vincent Benet
 (For D. M. C.) 

The little man with the vague beard and guise 
Pulled at the wicket. "Come inside!" he said, 
"I'll show you all we've got now -- it was size 
You wanted? -- oh, dry colors! Well" -- he led 
To a dim alley lined with musty bins, 
And pulled one fiercely. Violent and bold 
A sudden...Read more of this...

To Helen 2

by Edgar Allan Poe
 I saw thee once- once only- years ago: 
I must not say how many- but not many. 
It was a July midnight; and from out 
A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring, 
Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven, 
There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, 
With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber, 
Upon the upturned faces of...Read more of this...

Sabbaths 2001

by Wendell Berry
 I

He wakes in darkness. All around
are sounds of stones shifting, locks
unlocking. As if some one had lifted
away a great weight, light
falls on him. He has been asleep or simply
gone. He has known a long suffering
of himself, himself sharpen by the pain
of his wound of separation he now
no longer minds, for the pain is only himself
now, grown small, become a...Read more of this...

A Summer Day

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I 

The dawn laughs out on orient hills 
And dances with the diamond rills; 
The ambrosial wind but faintly stirs 
The silken, beaded gossamers; 
In the wide valleys, lone and fair, 
Lyrics are piped from limpid air, 
And, far above, the pine trees free 
Voice ancient lore of sky and sea. 
Come, let us fill our hearts straightway 
With...Read more of this...

Ode for the Keats Centenary

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 The Muse is stern unto her favoured sons,
Giving to some the keys of all the joy
Of the green earth, but holding even that joy
Back from their life;
Bidding them feed on hope,
A plant of bitter growth,
Deep-rooted in the past;
Truth, 'tis a doubtful art
To make Hope sweeten
Time as it flows;
For no man knows
Until the very last,
Whether it be a sovereign herb...Read more of this...

Hauntings

by Rupert Brooke
 In the grey tumult of these after years
Oft silence falls; the incessant wranglers part;
And less-than-echoes of remembered tears
Hush all the loud confusion of the heart;
And a shade, through the toss'd ranks of mirth and crying
Hungers, and pains, and each dull passionate mood, --
Quite lost, and all but all forgot, undying,
Comes back the ecstasy of your quietude.

So a poor ghost,...Read more of this...

Cuchulans Fight With The Sea

by William Butler Yeats
 A man came slowly from the setting sun,
To Emer, raddling raiment in her dun,
And said, 'I am that swineherd whom you bid
Go watch the road between the wood and tide,
But now I have no need to watch it more.'

Then Emer cast the web upon the floor,
And raising arms all raddled with the dye,
Parted her lips with a loud sudden...Read more of this...

Brotherhood

by George William Russell
 TWILIGHT, a blossom grey in shadowy valleys dwells:
Under the radiant dark the deep blue-tinted bells
In quietness reïmage heaven within their blooms,
Sapphire and gold and mystery. What strange perfumes,
Out of what deeps arising, all the flower-bells fling,
Unknowing the enchanted odorous song they sing!
Oh, never was an eve so living yet: the wood
Stirs not but breathes enraptured quietude.
Here in these shades...Read more of this...

Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France

by Alan Seeger
 I

Ay, it is fitting on this holiday, 
Commemorative of our soldier dead, 
When -- with sweet flowers of our New England May 
Hiding the lichened stones by fifty years made gray -- 
Their graves in every town are garlanded, 
That pious tribute should be given too 
To our intrepid few 
Obscurely fallen here beyond the seas. 
Those to preserve...Read more of this...

The Busy Heart

by Rupert Brooke
 Now that we’ve done our best and worst, and parted, 
I would fill my mind with thoughts that will not rend. 
(O heart, I do not dare go empty-hearted) 
I’ll think of Love in books, Love without end; 
Women with child, content; and old men sleeping;
And wet strong ploughlands, scarred for certain grain; 
And babes that weep, and so...Read more of this...

By the Margin of the Great Deep

by George William Russell
 WHEN the breath of twilight blows to flame the misty skies,
All its vaporous sapphire, violet glow and silver gleam
With their magic flood me through the gateway of the eyes;
 I am one with the twilight’s dream.


When the trees and skies and fields are one in dusky mood,
Every heart of man is rapt within the mother’s breast:
Full of peace and...Read more of this...

If thou drinkest wine, drink it with intelligent people,

by Omar Khayyam
If thou drinkest wine, drink it with intelligent people,
drink it in company with thy ravishing idols, with smiles
upon their lips and their cheeks tinted with the colors of
the tulip. Drink not too much or speak boastingly of
it; make it not a refrain, but drink a little from time
to time in quietude.
332...Read more of this...

Little Puddleton

by Robert William Service
 I

Let others sing of Empire and of pomp beyond the sea,
A song of Little Puddleton is good enough for me,
A song of kindly living, and of coming home to tea.

I seldom read the papers, so I don't know what goes on.
I go to bed at sunset, and I leap alert at dawn,
To gossip with my garden, which I'll have...Read more of this...

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