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Famous Sap Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...coin of God has he to pay the toll
To peace on earth? Good will to men—oh, yes! 
That’s easy; and it means no more than sap, 
Until we boil the water out of it 
Over the fire of sacrifice. I’ll do it; 
And in a measurable way I’ve done it—
But not for him. What are you smiling at? 
Well, so it went until a day in June. 
We were together under an old elm, 
Which now, I hope, is gone—though it’s a crime 
In me that I should have to wish the death
Of such a tree as t...Read more of this...



by Wilde, Oscar
...vens where the mirrored planets are!

I knew that thou would'st come, for when at first
The dry wood burgeoned, and the sap of spring
Swelled in my green and tender bark or burst
To myriad multitudinous blossoming
Which mocked the midnight with its mimic moons
That did not dread the dawn, and first the thrushes' rapturous
tunes

Startled the squirrel from its granary,
And cuckoo flowers fringed the narrow lane,
Through my young leaves a sensuous ecstasy
Crept like new wine, a...Read more of this...

by Lawrence, D. H.
...I wish it were spring in the world.

Let it be spring!
Come, bubbling, surging tide of sap!
Come, rush of creation!
Come, life! surge through this mass of mortification!
Come, sweep away these exquisite, ghastly first-flowers,
which are rather last-flowers!
Come, thaw down their cool portentousness, dissolve them:
snowdrops, straight, death-veined exhalations of white and purple crocuses,
flowers of the penumbra, issue of corruption, nourished...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...way, 
While fools and knaves ignore them day by day; 
And unmolested, fools and knaves at length
Induce long wars which sap a country's strength.
The sloth of leaders, ruling but in name, 
Has dragged full many a nation down to shame.
A word unspoken by the rightful lips
Has dyed the land with blood, and blocked the sea with ships.



XXII.
The word withheld, when Indians asked for aid, 
Came when the red man started on his raid.
What Justice with a gestur...Read more of this...

by Abercrombie, Lascelles
...love, and therefore made
To pour their strength always into their love’s
Fierceness, as green wood bleeds its hissing sap
Into red heat of a fire! Not so do we:
The cloven anger, life, hath left to wage
Its flame against itself, here turned to one
Self-adoration.—Ah, what comes of this?
The joy falters a moment, with closed wings
Wearying in its upward journey, ere
Again it goes on high, bearing its song,
Its delight breathing and its vigour beating
The highest...Read more of this...



by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...he dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

 ...Read more of this...

by Rossetti, Christina
...ndeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink,
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap."

Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other's wings,
They lay down, in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fallen snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars beamed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
No...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
..., the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
Image of images, my metal phantom
Forcing forth through the harebell,
My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this tw...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...there was something.
They kept their thoughts away from when the maples
Stood uniform in buckets, and the steam
Of sap and snow rolled off the sugarhouse.
When they made her related to the maples,
It was the tree the autumn fire ran through
And swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark
Unscorched, unblackened, even, by any smoke.
They always took their holidays in autumn.
Once they came on a maple in a glade,
Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up,
And e...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...>

She's one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont's the other. And the two have been
Yokefellows in the sap yoke from of old
In many Marches. And they lie like wedges,
Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
And are a figure of the way the strong
Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
One thick where one is thin and vice versa.


New Hampshire raises the Connecticut  

In a trout hatchery near Canada,
But soon divides the river with Ve...Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...oreal life, how from earth's salty lap 
The solar beam uplifts it; all the holiness 
Enacted by leaves' fall and rising sap;

But never an angel knows the knife-edged severance 
Of sun from shadow where the trees begin, 
The blessed cool at every pore caressing us 
-An angel has no skin.

They see the Form of Air; but mortals breathing it 
Drink the whole summer down into the breast. 
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing 
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke...Read more of this...

by Milton, John
...ardens feigned 
Or of revived Adonis, or renowned 
Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son; 
Or that, not mystick, where the sapient king 
Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. 
Much he the place admired, the person more. 
As one who long in populous city pent, 
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, 
Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe 
Among the pleasant villages and farms 
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight; 
The smell of grain, or te...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...avigators rise before me, 
The world of 1492, with its awaken’d enterprise;
Something swelling in humanity now like the sap of the earth in spring, 
The sunset splendor of chivalry declining. 

And who art thou, sad shade? 
Gigantic, visionary, thyself a visionary, 
With majestic limbs, and pious, beaming eyes,
Spreading around, with every look of thine, a golden world, 
Enhuing it with gorgeous hues. 

As the chief histrion, 
Down to the footlights walks, in some gre...Read more of this...

by Drinkwater, John
...novices to know
For the first time what blue was in the skies,
What fresher green than any in the grass,
And how the sap goes beating to the sun,
And tell how on the clocks of beauty pass
Minute by minute till the last is done.
But not the new birds singing in the brake,
And not the buds of our discovery,
The deeper blue, the wilder green, the ache
For beauty that we shadow as we see,
Made heaven, but we, as love's occasion brings,
Took these, and made them Par...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...t of guarded duplicate
 eggs! it shall be you! 
Mix’d tussled hay of head, beard, brawn, it shall be you! 
Trickling sap of maple! fibre of manly wheat! it shall be you! 

Sun so generous, it shall be you! 
Vapors lighting and shading my face, it shall be you!
You sweaty brooks and dews, it shall be you! 
Winds whose soft-tickling genitals rub against me, it shall be you! 
Broad, muscular fields! branches of live oak! loving lounger in my winding
 paths! it shall be...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...limb with footing nice
     A far-projecting precipice.
     The broom's tough roots his ladder made,
     The hazel saplings lent their aid;
     And thus an airy point he won,
     Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
     One burnished sheet of living gold,
     Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled,
     In all her length far winding lay,
     With promontory, creek, and bay,
     And islands that, empurpled bright,
     Floated amid the livelier light,
     An...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...and jump.
In his hands he carried a new-burst clump
Of laurel blossoms, whose smooth-barked stalks
Were pliant with sap. As a husband talks
To the wife he left an hour ago,
Paul spoke to the Shadow. "Dear, you know
To-day the calendar calls it Spring,
And I woke this morning gathering
Asphodels, in my dreams, for you.
So I rushed out to see what flowers blew
Their pink-and-purple-scented souls
Across the town-wind's dusty scrolls,
And made the approach to the ...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
.... 

"Her kisses were so close and kind, 
That, trust me on my word, 
Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind, 
But yet my sap was stirr'd: 

"And even into my inmost ring 
A pleasure I discern'd, 
Like those blind motions of the Spring, 
That show the year is turn'd. 

"Thrice-happy he that may caress 
The ringlet's waving balm--- 
The cushions of whose touch may press 
The maiden's tender palm. 

"I, rooted here among the groves 
But languidly adjust 
My vapid vegetabl...Read more of this...

by Miller, Alice Duer
...aders of England bade the English believe
Lies at the price of peace, lies and fears,
Lies that corrupt, and fears that sap and deceive.
I though of the bars dividing man from man,
Invisible bars that the humble may not pass,
And how no pride is uglier, crueller than
The pride unchecked of class.
Oh, those invisible bars of manners and speech,
Ways that the proud man will not teach
The humble lest they too reach 
Those splendid heights where a little band 
Have always...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...
After whose stroke the wood rings, 
And the echoes! 
Echoes traveling 
Off from the center like horses. 

The sap 
Wells like tears, like the 
Water striving 
To re-establish its mirror 
Over the rock 

That drops and turns, 
A white skull, 
Eaten by weedy greens. 
Years later I 
Encounter them on the road--- 

Words dry and riderless, 
The indefatigable hoof-taps. 
While 
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars 
Govern a life....Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things