Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Short Daughter Poems

Famous Short Daughter Poems. Short Daughter Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Daughter short poems


by Christina Rossetti
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
  And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
  A fool to snap my lily.

My garden-plot I have not kept;
  Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
  It's winter now I waken.

Talk what you please of future spring
  And sun-warm'd sweet to-morrow:—
Stripp'd bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
  I sit alone with sorrow.



by Linda Pastan
 When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

by James Joyce
 Frail the white rose and frail are
Her hands that gave
Whose soul is sere and paler
Than time's wan wave.

Rosefrail and fair -- yet frailest
A wonder wild
In gentle eyes thou veilest,
My blueveined child.

by David Ignatow
 When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

by Austin Clarke
 When night stirred at sea,
An the fire brought a crowd in
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went --
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.



by Bliss Carman
 The lover of child Marjory 
Had one white hour of life brim full; 
Now the old nurse, the rocking sea, 
Hath him to lull. 
The daughter of child Marjory 
Hath in her veins, to beat and run, 
The glad indomitable sea, 
The strong white sun.

by Gertrude Stein
 Why is the world at peace.
This may astonish you a little but when you realise how
easily Mrs. Charles Bianco sells the work of American
painters to American millionaires you will recognize that
authorities are constrained to be relieved. Let me tell you a
story. A painter loved a woman. A musician did not sing.
A South African loved books. An American was a woman
and needed help. Are Americans the same as incubators.
But this is the rest of the story. He became an authority.

by Erica Jong
 You call me
courageous, 
I who grew up
gnawing on books,
as some kids
gnaw
on bubble gum,

who married disastrously
not once
but three times,
yet have a lovely daughter
I would not undo
for all the dope
in California.

Fear was my element,
fear my contagion.
I swam in it
till I became
immune.
The plane takes off
& I laugh aloud.
Call me courageous.

I am still alive.

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

Last year I called this world of gain-givings 
The darkest thinkable, and questioned sadly 
If my own land could heave its pulse less gladly, 
So charged it seemed with circumstance whence springs 
 The tragedy of things. 

II 

Yet at that censured time no heart was rent 
Or feature blanched of parent, wife, or daughter 
By hourly blazoned sheets of listed slaughter; 
Death waited Nature's wont; Peace smiled unshent 
 From Ind to Occident.

by Lisa Zaran
 All around me, the sky with its deep shade of dark. 
The stars. 

The moon with its shrunken soul. 
Can I become what I want to become? 

Neither wife or mother. 
I am noone and nobody is my lover. 

I am afraid 
that when I go mad, 
my father will bow his downy head 
into his silver wings and weep. 

My daughter, O my daughter. 

Originally Published in The 2River View, 10.1, 2005
Copyright © Lisa Zaran, 2005

by Ellis Parker Butler
 Nature, when she made thee, dear,
Begged the treasures of the year.
For thy cheeks, all pink and white,
Spring gave apple blossoms light;
Summer, for thy matchless eyes,
Gave the azure of her skies;
Autumn spun her gold and red
In a mass of silken thread—
Gold and red and sunlight rare
For the wonder of thy hair!
Surly Winter would impart
But his coldness, for thy heart.

Dearest, let the love I bring
Turn thy Winter into Spring.
What are Summer, Spring and Fall,
If thy Winter chills them all?

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 I bought a dishmop— 
having no daughter— 
for they had twisted 
fine ribbons of shining copper 
about white twine 
and made a tousled head
of it, fastened it 
upon a turned ash stick
slender at the neck 
straight, tall— 
when tied upright 
on the brass wallbracket
to be a light for me 
and naked 
as a girl should seem 
to her father.

by Thomas Paine
No situation but may envy thee,
Holding such intimacy with the sea,
Many do that, but my delighted muse
Says, Neptune's fairest daughter is the Little Ouse.

by Mother Goose
What is the rhyme for porringer?The king he had a daughter fair,And gave the Prince of Orange her.

by Joseph Brodsky
The stone-built villages of England.
A cathedral bottled in a pub window.
Cows dispersed across fields.
Monuments to kings.

A man in a moth-eaten suit
sees a train off heading like everything here 
for the sea 
smiles at his daughter leaving for the East.
A whistle blows.

And the endless sky over the tiles
grows bluer as swelling birdsong fills.
And the clearer the song is heard 
the smaller the bird.

by Mother Goose
Trip upon trenchers,And dance upon dishes,My mother sent me for some barm, some barm;She bid me go lightly,And come again quickly,For fear the young men should do me some harm.Yet didn't you see, yet didn't you see,What naughty tricks they put upon me?They broke my pitcherAnd spilt the water,And huffed my mother,And chid her daughter,And kissed my sister instead of me.

by Edgar Lee Masters
 If you in the village think that my work was a good one,
Who closed the saloons and stopped all playing at cards,
And haled old Daisy Fraser before Justice Arnett,
In many a crusade to purge the people of sin;
Why do you let the milliner's daughter Dora,
And the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier,
Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow?

by Robert Graves
 Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Helen  Create an image from this poem
by Hilda Doolittle
 All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still 
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees, unmoved, 
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

by Omar Khayyam
To drain a gallon beaker I design,
Yea, two great beakers, brimmed with richest wine;
Old faith and reason thrice will I divorce,
Then take to wife the daughter of the vine.

by Robert Burns
 BLEST be M’Murdo to his latest day!
No envious cloud o’ercast his evening ray;
No wrinkle, furrow’d by the hand of care,
Nor ever sorrow add one silver hair!
O may no son the father’s honour stain,
Nor ever daughter give the mother pain!

by Omar Khayyam
For myself, I should pour some wine into a cup that
would contain a pint. I should be content with two
cups; but first I should divorce myself thrice from religion
and reason, and then espouse the daughter of the
vine.

by Eugene Field
 Shall I woo the one or other?
Both attract me--more's the pity!
Pretty is the widowed mother,
And the daughter, too, is pretty.

When I see that maiden shrinking,
By the gods I swear I'll get 'er!
But anon I fall to thinking
That the mother 'll suit me better!

So, like any idiot ass
Hungry for the fragrant fodder,
Placed between two bales of grass,
Lo, I doubt, delay, and dodder!

by Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of Bohemia,Whose daughter was christened Euphemia;But one day, to his grief, she married a thief,Which grieved that Old Man of Bohemia. 

by Edward Lear
There was an Old Person of Cadiz,Who was always polite to all ladies;But in handing his daughter, he fell into the water,Which drowned that Old Person of Cadiz. 


Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry