Famous Runnels Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Sonnet CLXXXIII

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET CLXXXIII. Il cantar novo e 'l pianger degli augelli. MORNING.  The birds' sweet wail, their renovated song,At break of morn, make all the vales resound;With lapse of crystal waters pouring round,In clear, swift runnels, the fresh shores among.She, whose pure passion knows nor guile nor wrong,With front of snow,...Read more of this...

A Lovers Quarrel

by Robert Browning
 I.

Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey,

II.

Runnels, which rillets swell,
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love...Read more of this...

Business Girls

by John Betjeman
 From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam's escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the...Read more of this...

Full Fathom Five

by Sylvia Plath
 Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed....Read more of this...

Dedication

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 for Moremi, 1963

Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life

As this yam, wholly earthed, yet a living tuber
To the warmth of waters, earthed as springs
As roots of baobab, as the hearth.

The air will not deny you. Like a top
Spin you...Read more of this...

The Punisher

by D. H. Lawrence
 I have fetched the tears up out of the little wells,
Scooped them up with small, iron words,
Dripping over the runnels. 

The harsh, cold wind of my words drove on, and still
I watched the tears on the guilty cheek of the boys
Glitter and spill. 

Cringing Pity, and Love, white-handed, came
Hovering about the Judgment which stood in my eyes,
Whirling a flame.

....Read more of this...

Dream-Forest

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Where sunshine flecks the green, 
Through towering woods my way 
Goes winding all the day. 

Scant are the flowers that bloom 
Beneath the bosky screen
And cage of golden gloom. 
Few are the birds that call, 
Shrill-voiced and seldom seen. 

Where silence masters all, 
And light my footsteps fall,
The whispering runnels only 
With blazing noon confer; 
And comes no breeze...Read more of this...

Song of a Train

by John Davidson
 A monster taught 
To come to hand 
Amain, 
As swift as thought 
Across the land 
The train. 

The song it sings 
Has an iron sound; 
Its iron wings 
Like wheels go round. 

Crash under bridges, 
Flash over ridges, 
And vault the downs; 
The road is straight -- 
Nor stile, nor gate; 
For milestones -- towns! 

Voluminous, vanishing, white, 
The...Read more of this...

Dedication

by Wole Soyinka
Dedication

for Moremi, 1963

Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life

As this yam, wholly earthed, yet a living tuber
To the warmth of waters, earthed as springs
As roots of baobab, as the hearth.

The air will not deny you. Like a top
Spin you on...Read more of this...

Forest Of Europe

by Derek Walcott
 The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you...Read more of this...

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