Famous Rapturous Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Christmas treasures

by Eugene Field
 I count my treasures o'er with care.--
The little toy my darling knew,
A little sock of faded hue,
A little lock of golden hair.

Long years ago this holy time,
My little one--my all to me--
Sat robed in white upon my knee
And heard the merry Christmas chime.

"Tell me, my little golden-head,
If Santa Claus should come to-night,
What shall he bring my baby bright,--
What treasure...Read more of this...

Belated Bard

by Robert William Service
 The songs I made from joy of earth
 In wanton wandering,
Are rapturous with Maytime mirth
 And ectasy of Spring.
But all the songs I sing today
 Take tediously the ear:
Novemberishly dark are they
 With mortuary fear.

For half a century has gone
 Since first I rang a rhyme;
And that is long to linger on
 The tolerance of Time.
This blue-veined hand with...Read more of this...

The Organ-Blower

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 DEVOUTEST of my Sunday friends,
The patient Organ-blower bends;
I see his figure sink and rise,
(Forgive me, Heaven, my wandering eyes!)
A moment lost, the next half seen,
His head above the scanty screen,
Still measuring out his deep salaams
Through quavering hymns and panting psalms.

No priest that prays in gilded stole,
To save a rich man's mortgaged soul;
No sister, fresh from holy vows,
So humbly stoops,...Read more of this...

Hurrahing In Harvest

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
 Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
 Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies? 
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,
 Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
 And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet...Read more of this...

Coleur de Rose

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 I want more lives in which to love 
This world so full of beauty, 
I want more days to use the ways 
I know of doing duty; 
I ask no greater joy than this 
(So much I am life's lover,) 
When I reach age to turn the page 
And read the story over, 
(Oh love stay near!)

Oh rapturous promise...Read more of this...

Imanuel Ehrenhardt

by Edgar Lee Masters
 I began with Sir William Hamilton's lectures.
Then studied Dugald Stewart;
And then John Locke on the Understanding,
And then Descartes, Fichte and Schelling,
Kant and then Schopenhauer --
Books I borrowed from old Judge Somers.
All read with rapturous industry
Hoping it was reserved to me
To grasp the tail of the ultimate secret,
And drag it out of its hole.
My soul flew up ten thousand miles,
And...Read more of this...

The Selfsame Song

by Thomas Hardy
 A bird sings the selfsame song, 
With never a fault in its flow, 
That we listened to here those long 
Long years ago.

A pleasing marvel is how 
A strain of such rapturous rote 
Should have gone on thus till now 
unchanged in a note!

--But its not the selfsame bird.-- 
No: perished to dust is he.... 
As also are those...Read more of this...

The Eleusinian Festival

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Wreathe in a garland the corn's golden ear!
With it, the Cyane [31] blue intertwine
Rapture must render each glance bright and clear,
For the great queen is approaching her shrine,--
She who compels lawless passions to cease,
Who to link man with his fellow has come,
And into firm habitations of peace
Changed the rude tents' ever-wandering home.

Shyly in the mountain-cleft
Was the Troglodyte concealed;
And the...Read more of this...

Time And Life

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 I.

Time, thy name is sorrow, says the stricken
Heart of life, laid waste with wasting flame
Ere the change of things and thoughts requicken,
Time, thy name.

Girt about with shadow, blind and lame,
Ghosts of things that smite and thoughts that sicken
Hunt and hound thee down to death and shame.

Eyes of hours whose paces halt or quicken
Read in bloodred lines of loss and...Read more of this...

My Piney Wood

by Robert William Service
 I have a tiny piney wood;
my trees are only fifty,
Yet give me shade and solitude
For they are thick and thrifty.
And every day to me they fling
With largess undenying,
Fat cones to make my kettle sing
And keep my pan a-frying.

Go buy yourself a piney wood
If you have gold for spending,
Where you can dream in mellow mood
With peace and joy unending;
Where you...Read more of this...

Prelude

by Robert William Service
 Alas! upon some starry height,
The Gods of Excellence to please,
This hand of mine will never smite
The Harp of High Serenities.
Mere minstrel of the street am I,
To whom a careless coin you fling;
But who, beneath the bitter sky,
Blue-lipped, yet insolent of eye,
Can shrill a song of Spring;
A song of merry mansard days,
The cheery chimney-tops among;
Of rolics and of roundelays
When we...Read more of this...

The Power Of Song

by Friedrich von Schiller
 The foaming stream from out the rock
With thunder roar begins to rush,--
The oak falls prostrate at the shock,
And mountain-wrecks attend the gush.
With rapturous awe, in wonder lost,
The wanderer hearkens to the sound;
From cliff to cliff he hears it tossed,
Yet knows not whither it is bound:
'Tis thus that song's bright waters pour
From sources never known before.

In union with those dreaded...Read more of this...

At Cheyenne

by Eugene Field
 Young Lochinvar came in from the West,
With fringe on his trousers and fur on his vest; 
The width of his hat-brim could nowhere be beat, 
His No. 

brogans were chuck full of feet, 
His girdle was horrent with pistols and things, 
And he flourished a handful of aces on kings. 
The fair Mariana sate watching a star, 
When who...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXIV

by Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 253] SONNET XXIV. Gli occhi di ch' io parlai sì caldamente. HIS LYRE IS NOW ATTUNED ONLY TO WOE.  The eyes, the face, the limbs of heavenly mould,So long the theme of my impassion'd lay,Charms which so stole me from myself away,That strange to other men the course...Read more of this...

With brutus in st. jo

by Eugene Field
 Of all the opry-houses then obtaining in the West
The one which Milton Tootle owned was, by all odds, the best;
Milt, being rich, was much too proud to run the thing alone,
So he hired an "acting manager," a gruff old man named Krone--
A stern, commanding man with piercing eyes and flowing beard,
And his voice assumed a thunderous tone when Jack...Read more of this...

550. Song—A Lass wi' a Tocher

by Robert Burns
 AWA’ wi’ your witchcraft o’ Beauty’s alarms,
The slender bit Beauty you grasp in your arms,
O, gie me the lass that has acres o’ charms,
O, gie me the lass wi’ the weel-stockit farms.


Chorus.—Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher,
Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher;
Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher;
 The nice yellow guineas for me.


Your...Read more of this...

With two spoons for two spoons

by Eugene Field
 How trifling shall these gifts appear
Among the splendid many
That loving friends now send to cheer
Harvey and Ellen Jenney.

And yet these baubles symbolize
A certain fond relation
That well beseems, as I surmise,
This festive celebration.

Sweet friends of mine, be spoons once more,
And with your tender cooing
Renew the keen delights of yore--
The rapturous bliss of wooing.

What though that silver in your hair
Tells of...Read more of this...

Lo! Victress on the Peaks

by Walt Whitman
 LO! Victress on the peaks! 
Where thou, with mighty brow, regarding the world, 
(The world, O Libertad, that vainly conspired against thee;) 
Out of its countless beleaguering toils, after thwarting them all; 
Dominant, with the dazzling sun around thee,
Flauntest now unharm’d, in immortal soundness and bloom—lo! in these hours
 supreme, 
No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee—nor mastery’s...Read more of this...

A Certain Lady

by Dorothy Parker
 Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head, 
And drink your rushing words with eager lips, 
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red, 
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips. 
When you rehearse your list of loves to me, 
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed. 
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see...Read more of this...

Azure and Gold

by Amy Lowell
 April had covered the hills
With flickering yellows and reds,
The sparkle and coolness of snow
Was blown from the mountain beds.
Across a deep-sunken stream
The pink of blossoming trees,
And from windless appleblooms
The humming of many bees.
The air was of rose and gold
Arabesqued with the song of birds
Who, swinging unseen under leaves,
Made music more eager than words.
Of a sudden, aslant the road,
A brightness...Read more of this...

To Some I Have Talked With By The Fire

by William Butler Yeats
 While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,
My heart would brim with dreams about the times
When we bent down above the fading coals
And talked of the dark folk who live in souls
Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;
And of the wayward twilight companies
Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content,
Because their blossoming dreams have never bent
Under the fruit...Read more of this...

A Channel Crossing

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone,
Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone:
Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour
Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower,
Stars fulfilled the desire...Read more of this...

An Empty Crib

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 Beside a crib that holds a baby’s stocking,
A tattered picture book, a broken toy,
A sleeping mother dreams that she is rocking
Her fair-haired cherub boy.

Upon the cradle’s side her light touch keeping,
She gently rocks it, crooning low a song;
And smiles to think her little one is sleeping,
So peacefully and long.

Step light, breathe low, break not her rapturous dreaming,
Wake not the...Read more of this...

Anashuya And Vijaya

by William Butler Yeats
 A little Indian temple in the Golden Age. Around it a garden;
around that the forest. Anashuya, the young priestess, kneeling
within the temple.

Anashuya. Send peace on all the lands and flickering
corn. -
O, may tranquillity walk by his elbow
When wandering in the forest, if he love
No other. - Hear, and may the indolent flocks
Be plentiful. - And if he love another,
May...Read more of this...

Sonnet CII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CII. S' Amor non è, che dunque è quel ch' i' sento? THE CONTRADICTIONS OF LOVE.  If no love is, O God, what fele I so?And if love is, what thing and which is he?If love be gode, from whence cometh my woe?If it be wicke, a wonder thinketh meWhen...Read more of this...

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