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Famous Russell Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...is day.


Curst Common-sense, that imp o’ hell,
 Cam in wi’ Maggie Lauder; 1
But Oliphant 2 aft made her yell,
 An’ Russell 3 sair misca’d her:
This day Mackinlay 4 taks the flail,
 An’ he’s the boy will blaud her!
He’ll clap a shangan on her tail,
 An’ set the bairns to daud her
 Wi’ dirt this day.


Mak haste an’ turn King David owre,
 And lilt wi’ holy clangor;
O’ double verse come gie us four,
 An’ skirl up the Bangor:
This day the kirk kicks up a stoure;
 Nae mai...Read more of this...



by Russell, George William
...THOUGH your eyes with tears were blind,
Pain upon the path you trod:
Well we knew, the hosts behind,
Voice and shining of a god.


For your darkness was our day:
Signal fires, your pains untold
Lit us on our wandering way
To the mystic heart of gold.


Naught we knew of the high land,
Beauty burning in its spheres;
Sorrow we could understand
And th...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...There was once a hog theater where hogs performed 
as men, had men been hogs.

 One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has 
found a mouse which is being eaten by the same hog 
which is in the field and which has found the mouse, 
which I am performing as my contribution to the 
performer's art.

 Oh let's just be hogs, cried an old hog....Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...You haven't finished your ape, said mother to father, 
who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.

 I've had enough monkey, cried father.

 You didn't eat the hands, and I went to all the 
trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother.

 I'll just nibble on its forehead, and then I've had enough, 
said father.

 I stuffed its...Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House 
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes, 
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes, 
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses 
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem. 
Hestia's fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before 
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands 
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother 
Domum servabat, lana...Read more of this...



by Russell, George William
...HE bent above: so still her breath
What air she breathed he could not say,
Whether in worlds of life or death:
So softly ebbed away, away,
The life that had been light to him,
So fled her beauty leaving dim
The emptying chambers of his heart
Thrilled only by the pang and smart,
The dull and throbbing agony
That suffers still, yet knows not why.
Love’s ...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...AT dusk the window panes grew grey;
The wet world vanished in the gloom;
The dim and silver end of day
Scarce glimmered through the little room.


And all my sins were told; I said
Such things to her who knew not sin—
The sharp ache throbbing in my head,
The fever running high within.


I touched with pain her purity;
Sin’s darker sense I could not...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...My heart was heavy, for its trust had been 
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong; 
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men, 
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among 
The green mounds of the village burial-place; 
Where, pondering how all human love and hate 
Find one sad level; and how, soon or late, 
Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened face...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...Since the fern can't go to the sink for a drink of
water, I graciously submit myself to the task, bringing two
glasses from the sink.
 And so we sit, the fern and I, sipping water together.


 Of course I'm more complex than a fern, full of deep
thoughts as I am. But I lay this aside for the easy company
of an afternoon friendship.

 I don'...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...NOW when the spirit in us wakes and broods,
Filled with home yearnings, drowsily it flings
From its deep heart high dreams and mystic moods,
Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things:
Clothing the vast with a familiar face;
Reaching its right hand forth to greet the starry race.


Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires
Stare from the blue...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...A man had a son who was an anvil. And then sometimes 
he was an automobile tire.
 I do wish you would sit still, said the father.
 Sometimes his son was a rock.
 I realize that you have quite lost boundary, where no 
excess seems excessive, nor to where poverty roots hunger to 
need. But should you allow time to embrace you to its bosom...Read more of this...

by Lawson, Henry
...lt us a lay of Bank-holiday and the lights of Leicester-square!) 

Hats off to the dowager lady at home in her house in Russell-square! 
Like the pork-shop back and the Brixton flat, they are silently mourning there; 
For one lay out ahead of the rest in the slush 'neath a darkening sky, 
With the blood of a hundred earls congealed and his eye-glass to his eye. 

(He gave me a cheque in an envelope on a distant gloomy day; 
He gave me his hand at the mansion door and he s...Read more of this...

by Masefield, John
...rked, and an owl was calling, 
The squire's brook was still a-falling, 
The carved heads on the church looked down 
On "Russell, Blacksmith of this Town," 
And all the graves of all the ghosts 
Who rise on Christmas Eve in hosts 
To dance and carol in festivity 
For joy of Jesus Christ's Nativity 
(Bell-ringer Dawe and his two sons 
Beheld 'em from the bell-tower once}, 
To and two about about 
Singing the end of Advent out, 
Dwindling down to windlestraws 
When the glitterin...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...We bought an electric monkey, experimenting rather 
recklessly with funds carefully gathered since 
grandfather's time for the purchase of a steam monkey. 

We had either, by this time, the choice of an electric 
or gas monkey. 

The steam monkey is no longer being made, said the monkey 
merchant. 

But the family always planned on a steam monk...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...The big one went to sleep as to die and dreamed he
became a tiny one. So tiny as to have lost all substance. To have
become as theoretical as a point. 

 Then someone said, get up, big one, you're not doing
yourself any good. You puddle and stagnate in your weight.
Best to be up and toward. It irrigates you. 

 What, said the bi...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...THERE’S a cure for sorrow in the well at Ballylee
 Where the scarlet cressets hang over the trembling pool:
And joyful winds are blowing from the Land of Youth to me,
 And the heart of the earth is full.


Many and many a sunbright maiden saw the enchanted land
 With star faces glimmer up from the druid wave:
Many and many a pain of love was soothed by...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...jar Very carefully to an

abandoned chicken house in the back. "The dishes can wait, " he said

to me. Bertrand Russell could not have stated it better.

He opened the chicken house door and we went in. The place was littered

with half-rotten comic books. They were like fruit under a tree. In the

corner was an old mattress and beside the mattress were four quart jars.

He took the gallon jar over to them, and filled them carefully not spilling

a...Read more of this...

by Russell, George William
...ONE thing in all things have I seen:
One thought has haunted earth and air:
Clangour and silence both have been
Its palace chambers. Everywhere


I saw the mystic vision flow
And live in men and woods and streams,
Until I could no longer know
The dream of life from my own dreams.


Sometimes it rose like fire in me
Within the depths of my own mind,...Read more of this...

by Lehman, David
...a machine-gunner 
in the Austrian Army in World War I. 
Before the war he studied logic in Cambridge 
with Bertrand Russell. Having inherited 
his father's fortune (iron and steel), he 
gave away his money, not to the poor, whom 
it would corrupt, but to relations so rich 
it would not thus affect them. 

3. 

On leave in Vienna in August 1918 
he assembled his notebook entries 
into the Tractatus, Since it provided 
the definitive solution to all the problems...Read more of this...

by Edson, Russell
...Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which 
is simply a path leading through an archway called 
adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.
 Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life 
lived beyond the flower, is a small shack labeled, you.
 And it is here the future lives in the several postures of 
a...Read more of this...

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