Famous Shadowy Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Hour of Twilight

by George William Russell
 WHEN the unquiet hours depart
And far away their tumults cease,
Within the twilight of the heart
We bathe in peace, are stilled with peace.


The fire that slew us through the day
For angry deed or sin of sense
Now is the star and homeward ray
To us who bow in penitence.


We kiss the lips of bygone pain
And find a secret sweet in them:
The thorns...Read more of this...

A Womans Love

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 So vast the tide of Love within me surging,
It overflows like some stupendous sea,
The confines of the Present and To-be;
And 'gainst the Past's high wall I feel it urging,
As it would cry "Thou too shalt yield to me!"

All other loves my supreme love embodies;
I would be she on whose soft bosom nursed
Thy clinging infant lips to quench their thirst;
She...Read more of this...

The Shadowy Waters: The Harp of Aengus

by William Butler Yeats
Edain came out of Midhir's hill, and lay
Beside young Aengus in his tower of glass,
Where time is drowned in odour-laden winds
And Druid moons, and murmuring of boughs,
And sleepy boughs, and boughs where apples made
Of opal and ruhy and pale chrysolite
Awake unsleeping fires; and wove seven strings,
Sweet with all music, out of his long hair,
Because her hands had been made...Read more of this...

Om

by George William Russell
 FAINT grew the yellow buds of light
Far flickering beyond the snows,
As leaning o’er the shadowy white
Morn glimmered like a pale primrose.


Within an Indian vale below
A child said “OM” with tender heart,
Watching with loving eyes the glow
In dayshine fade and night depart.


The word which Brahma at his dawn
Outbreathes and endeth at his night,
Whose tide of sound so rolling on
Gives birth...Read more of this...

The City In the Sea

by Edgar Allan Poe
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West 
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around by lifting winds forgot 
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from...Read more of this...

The Bride of Frankenstein

by Edward Field
 The Baron has decided to mate the monster,
to breed him perhaps,
in the interests of pure science, his only god.

So he goes up into his laboratory
which he has built in the tower of the castle
to be as near the interplanetary forces as possible,
and puts together the prettiest monster-woman you ever saw
with a body like a pin-up girl
and hardly any stitching...Read more of this...

The Shadowy Waters: Introductory Lines

by William Butler Yeats
 I walked among the seven woods of Coole:
Shan-walla, where a willow-hordered pond
Gathers the wild duck from the winter dawn;
Shady Kyle-dortha; sunnier Kyle-na-no,
Where many hundred squirrels are as happy
As though they had been hidden hy green houghs
Where old age cannot find them; Paire-na-lee,
Where hazel and ash and privet hlind the paths:
Dim Pairc-na-carraig, where the wild bees fling
Their sudden fragrances on...Read more of this...

Symphony In Yellow

by Oscar Wilde
 An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a...Read more of this...

The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty

by George William Russell
 I WOULD I could weave in
 The colour, the wonder,
 The song I conceive in
 My heart while I ponder,


 And show how it came like
 The magi of old
 Whose chant was a flame like
 The dawn’s voice of gold;


 Whose dreams followed near them
 A murmur of birds,
 And ear still could hear them
 Unchanted in words.


...Read more of this...

Only Dreams

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 A maiden sat in teh sunset glow
Of the shadowy, beautiful Long Ago, 
That we see through a mist of tears.
She sat and dreamed, with lips apart, 
With thoughtful eyes and a beating heart, 
Of the mystical future years; 
And brighter far than the sunset skies
Was the vision seen by the maiden's eyes.

There were castles built of the summer air,...Read more of this...

Song in a Minor Key

by Dorothy Parker
 There's a place I know where the birds swing low, 
And wayward vines go roaming, 
Where the lilacs nod, and a marble god 
Is pale, in scented gloaming. 
And at sunset there comes a lady fair 
Whose eyes are deep with yearning. 
By an old, old gate does the lady wait 
Her own true love's returning. 

But the days...Read more of this...

Paul Revere's Ride

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Listen, my children, and you shall hear 
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, 
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: 
Hardly a man is now alive 
Who remembers that famous day and year. 

He said to his friend, "If the British march 
By land or sea from the town to-night, 
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch 
Of the...Read more of this...

The Kraken

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millenial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for...Read more of this...

Epitaphs For Two Players

by Vachel Lindsay
 I. EDWIN BOOTH

An old actor at the Player's Club told me that Edwin Booth first impersonated Hamlet when a barnstormer in California. There were few theatres, but the hotels were provided with crude assembly rooms for strolling players.


The youth played in the blear hotel.
The rafters gleamed with glories strange.
And winds of mourning Elsinore
Howling at chance and fate and change;
Voices...Read more of this...

Autumn

by Thomas Hood
 I Saw old Autumn in the misty morn 
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening 
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing 
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn, 
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;— 
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright 
With tangled gossamer that fell by night, 
Pearling his coronet of golden corn. 

Where are the songs of...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 04: 06: Cinema

by Conrad Aiken
 As evening falls,
The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?
To what new light or darkness yearn?
A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
And one by one in myriads we descend
By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
Through half-lit...Read more of this...

Sonnet OF AUTUMN

by Charles Baudelaire
 THEY say to me, thy clear and crystal eyes: 
"Why dost thou love me so, strange lover mine?" 
Be sweet, be still! My heart and soul despise 
All save that antique brute-like faith of thine; 

And will not bare the secret of their shame 
To thee whose hand soothes me to slumbers long, 
Nor their black legend write for...Read more of this...

Under the Stars

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
Under the stars, when the shadows fall,
  Under the stars of night;
What is so fair as the jeweled crown
Of the azure skies, when the sun is down,
  Beautiful stars of light!
Under the stars, where the daisies lie
  Lifeless beneath the snow;
Lovely and pure, they have lived a day,
Silently passing forever away,
  Lying so meek and low.
Under...Read more of this...

I Do Not Fear To Own Me Kin

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 I DO not fear to own me kin
To the glad clods in which spring flowers begin;
Or to my brothers, the great trees,
That speak with pleasant voices in the breeze,
Loud talkers with the winds that pass;
Or to my sister, the deep grass.

Of such I am, of such my body is,
That thrills to reach its lips to kiss.
That gives and takes...Read more of this...

Sonnet LXX

by Francesco Petrarch
SONNET LXX. La bella donna che cotanto amavi. TO HIS BROTHER GERARDO, ON THE DEATH OF A LADY TO WHOM HE WAS ATTACHED.  The beauteous lady thou didst love so wellToo soon hath from our regions wing'd her flight,To find, I ween, a home 'mid realms of light;So much in virtue did...Read more of this...

The Other Two

by Sylvia Plath
 All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echos,
Cool as the pearled interior of a conch.
Bells, hooves, of the high-stipping black goats woke us.
Around our bed the baronial furniture
Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange.
Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air.
We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture
Anchored itself, griffin-legged...Read more of this...

To Contemplation

by Robert Southey
 Faint gleams the evening radiance thro' the sky,
The sober twilight dimly darkens round;
In short quick circles the shrill bat flits by,
And the slow vapour curls along the ground.

Now the pleas'd eye from yon lone cottage sees
On the green mead the smoke long-shadowing play;
The Red-breast on the blossom'd spray
Warbles wild her latest lay,
And sleeps along the dale the silent breeze.
Calm...Read more of this...

Veni Creator

by Bliss Carman
 I

LORD of the grass and hill, 
Lord of the rain, 
White Overlord of will, 
Master of pain, 

I who am dust and air 
Blown through the halls of death, 
Like a pale ghost of prayer,— 
I am thy breath. 

Lord of the blade and leaf, 
Lord of the bloom, 
Sheer Overlord of grief, 
Master of doom, 

Lonely as wind...Read more of this...

Amandas Painting

by Les Murray
 In the painting, I'm seated in a shield,
coming home in it up a shadowy river.
It is a small metal boat lined in eggshell
and my hands grip the gunwale rims. I'm
a composite bow, tensioning the whole boat,
steering it with my gaze. No oars, no engine,
no sails. I'm propelling the little craft with speech.
The faded rings around the loose bulk shirt
are...Read more of this...

King Canute

by Victor Hugo
 ("Un jour, Kanut mourut.") 
 
 {Bk. X. i.} 


 King Canute died.{1} Encoffined he was laid. 
 Of Aarhuus came the Bishop prayers to say, 
 And sang a hymn upon his tomb, and held 
 That Canute was a saint—Canute the Great, 
 That from his memory breathed celestial perfume, 
 And that they saw him, they...Read more of this...

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