Famous Sea Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sea poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sea poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sea poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Omar Khayyam
How long must I make bricks upon the sea?
Beshrew this vain task of idolatry;
Call not Khayyam a denizen of hell;
One while in heaven, and one in hell is he....Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The smell of the sea in my nostrils,
[Pg 92]The sound of the sea in mine ears;
The touch of the spray on my burning face,
Like the mist of reluctant tears.
The blue of the sky above me,
The green of the waves beneath;
The sun flashing down on a gray-white sail
Like a scimitar from its sheath.
And ever the breaking billows,
And ever the...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE SEA-WASH never ends.
The sea-wash repeats, repeats.
Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?
Only the old strong songs?
Is that all?
The sea-wash repeats, repeats....Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O, fearful meditation! Where,...Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
Wild is the foaming Sea! The surges roar!
And nimbly dart the livid lightnings round!
On the rent rock the angry waves rebound;
Ah me! the less'ning bark is seen no more!
Along the margin of the trembling shore,
Loud as the blast my frantic cries shall sound,
My storm-drench'd limbs the flinty fragments wound,
And o'er my bleeding breast the billows pour!
Phaon! return! ye winds,...Read more of this...
by
Hilda Doolittle
Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright...Read more of this...
by
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
Second Song: The Girl from Baltistan
Throb, throb, throb,
Far away in the blue transparent Night,
On the outer horizon of a dreaming consciousness,
...Read more of this...
by
Regina Derieva
On the sea-shore, smell of iodine,
and square as in Sicily, and dancing.
An intellectual that came from the common people,
preparing himself to be Rosencrantz.
He decides to serve Claudius and therefore
spy on Prince Hamlet from the fountain.
All over the world — the prison. At the world's
end a certain John plays the piano.
Already darkness, and the end is in sight :
Ophelia...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
If all the seas were one sea,
What a _great_ sea that would be!
And if all the trees were one tree,
What a _great_ tree that would be!
And if all the axes were one axe,
What a _great_ axe that would be!
And if all the men were one man,
What a _great_ man he would be!
And if the _great_ man took the _great_ axe,
And...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the...Read more of this...
by
Eliza Cook
HE crawls to the cliff and plays on a brink
Where every eye but his own would shrink;
No music he hears but the billow’s noise,
And shells and weeds are his only toys.
No lullaby can the mother find
To sing him to rest like the moaning wind;
And the louder it wails and the fiercer it sweeps,
The...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
We walked beside the sea,
After a day which perished silently
Of its own glory---like the Princess weird
Who, combating the Genius, scorched and seared,
Uttered with burning breath, 'Ho! victory!'
And sank adown, an heap of ashes pale;
So runs the Arab tale.
The sky above us showed
An universal and unmoving cloud,
On which, the cliffs permitted us to see
Only the outline of their majesty,
As master-minds,...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
When the sun sets over the long blue wave
I spring from my couch of rest,
And I hurtle and boom over leagues of foam
That toss in the weltering west,
I pipe a hymn to the headlands high,
My comrades forevermore,
And I chase the tricksy curls of foam
O'er the glimmering sandy shore.
The moon is my friend on clear, white...Read more of this...
by
John Masefield
"Goneys an' gullies an' all o' the birds o' the sea
They ain't no birds, not really", said Billy the Dane.
"Not mollies, nor gullies, nor goneys at all", said he,
"But simply the sperrits of mariners livin' again.
"Them birds goin' fishin' is nothin' but the souls o' the drowned,
Souls o' the drowned, an' the kicked as are never no more
An' that...Read more of this...
by
Archibald MacLeish
Science, that simple saint, cannot be bothered
Figuring what anything is for:
Enough for her devotions that things are
And can be contemplated soon as gathered.
She knows how every living thing was fathered,
She calculates the climate of each star,
She counts the fish at sea, but cannot care
Why any one of them exists, fish, fire or feathered.
Why should she? Her religion is to...Read more of this...
by
Lewis Carroll
There are certain things--as, a spider, a ghost,
The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three--
That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most
Is a thing they call the Sea.
Pour some salt water over the floor--
Ugly I'm sure you'll allow it to be:
Suppose it extended a mile or more,
That's very like the Sea.
Beat a dog...Read more of this...
by
John Keats
It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,
That scarcely will the very smallest shell
Be moved for days from whence it sometime fell,
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vexed and...Read more of this...
by
Stephen Crane
"What says the sea, little shell?
What says the sea?
Long has our brother been silent to us,
Kept his message for the ships,
Awkward ships, stupid ships."
"The sea bids you mourn, O Pines,
Sing low in the moonlight.
He sends tale of the land of doom,
Of place where endless falls
A rain of women's tears,
And men in grey robes --
Men in grey robes --
Chant the...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world -- here on...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
An Hour is a Sea
Between a few, and me --
With them would Harbor be --...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
My father and mother, two tiny figures,
side by side, facing the clouds that move
in from the Atlantic. August, '33.
The whole weight of the rain to come, the weight
of all that has fallen on their houses
gathers for a last onslaught, and yet they
hold, side by side, in the eye of memory.
What was she wearing, you ask, what did he
say to...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Least Rivers -- docile to some sea.
My Caspian -- thee....Read more of this...
by
Ted Hughes
He tried ignoring the sea
But it was bigger than death, just as it was bigger than life.
He tried talking to the sea
But his brain shuttered and his eyes winced from it as from open flame.
He tried sympathy for the sea
But it shouldered him off - as a dead thing shoulders you off.
He tried hating...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
The drop wept for his severance from the sea,
But the sea smiled, for «I am all,» said he,
«The Truth is all, nothing exists beside,
That one point circling apes plurality.»...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
OR, from that Sea of Time,
Spray, blown by the wind—a double winrow-drift of weeds and shells;
(O little shells, so curious-convolute! so limpid-cold and voiceless!
Yet will you not, to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still bring up—Eternity’s music, faint and far,
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim—strains for the Soul of the Prairies,
Whisper’d reverberations—chords...Read more of this...
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