Famous Shudders Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Troops

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Dim, gradual thinning of the shapeless gloom 
Shudders to drizzling daybreak that reveals 
Disconsolate men who stamp their sodden boots 
And turn dulled, sunken faces to the sky 
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew 
Their desolation in the truce of dawn, 
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace. 

Yet...Read more of this...

Lunar Park

by Jean Delville
Becalmed the profane noise of the crowd.
Toward the risen Moon, the symbolic Bronzes
Curve, in the blue night, their antique nudity
In the sphinx-like majesty of attitudes.

A dream of incense symphonies the lustral Lake,
Enchanted by the sidereal presence of Swans,
Elegiacally swooning their silver-pale lines,
Beneath the sacred music of astral infinitude.

Drunken with silence, the aching lawns
Grow languid in the brightness of calm reveries;
Amid...Read more of this...

Au Bal

by Aleister Crowley
 [Dedicated to Horace Sheridan-Bickers]

A vision of flushed faces, shining limbs,
The madness of the music that entrances
All life in its delirium of dances!
The white world glitters in the void, and swims
Through the infinite seas of transcendental trances.
Yea! all the hoarded seed of all my fancies
Bursts in a shower of suns! The wine-cup brims
And bubbles over; I drink deep hymns
Of sorceries,...Read more of this...

Images

by Richard Aldington
 I

Like a gondola of green scented fruits 
Drifting along the dark canals of Venice, 
You, O exquisite one, 
Have entered into my desolate city. 

II

The blue smoke leaps 
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. 
So my love leaps forth toward you, 
Vanishes and is renewed. 

III

A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky 
When the sunset is faint vermilion 
In...Read more of this...

Train

by Bernadette Geyer
 Train. Distant Train. Praise the glorious distance of Train.

Dogs bark, reply to the mournful echo of Train's whistle. Train looks back, keeps moving. Train carries its boxcars of secrets further and further away (and even further still) from those who profess to love Train, but who do not run after him. Eyes brimmed with glassy reflections of Train.

To watch...Read more of this...

Auguries Of Innocence

by William Blake
 To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse...Read more of this...

Parnells Funeral

by William Butler Yeats
 I

Under the Great Comedian's tomb the crowd.
A bundle of tempestuous cloud is blown
About the sky; where that is clear of cloud
Brightness remains; a brighter star shoots down;
What shudders run through all that animal blood?
What is this sacrifice? Can someone there
Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?

Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through,
A frenzied crowd, and where the branches...Read more of this...

For K. J. Leaving and Coming Back

by Marilyn Hacker
 August First: it was a year ago
we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert
to open the house in St. Guiraud

rented unseen. I'd stay; you'd go; that's where
our paths diverged. I'd settle down to work,
you'd start the next month of your Wanderjahr.

I turned the iron key in the rusted lock
(it came, like a detective-story clue,
in a manila envelope, postmarked

elsewhere, unmarked otherwise) while you
stood...Read more of this...

The Runaway

by Robert Frost
 Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we...Read more of this...

The Drained Cup

by D. H. Lawrence
The snow is witherin' off'n th' gress
    Love, should I tell thee summat?
The snow is witherin' off'n th' gress
An' a thick mist sucks at the clots o' snow,
An' the moon above in a weddin' dress
Goes fogged an' slow--
    Love, should I tell thee summat?

Tha's been snowed up i' this cottage wi' me,
  ...Read more of this...

Syringa

by John Ashbery
 Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point?...Read more of this...

Tortures

by Wislawa Szymborska
 Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account. 

Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century...Read more of this...

In the Street

by Henry Lawson
 Where the needle-woman toils 
Through the night with hand and brain, 
Till the sickly daylight shudders like a spectre at the pain – 
Till her eyes seem to crawl, 
And her brain seems to creep – 

And her limbs are all a-tremble for the want of rest and sleep! 
It is there the fire-brand blazes in my blood; and...Read more of this...

April Byeway

by Edmund Blunden
    Friend whom I never saw, yet dearest friend,
    Be with me travelling on the byeway now
    In April's month and mood: our steps shall bend
    By the shut smithy with its penthouse brow
    Armed round with many a felly and crackt plough:
  ...Read more of this...

The Furies

by Weldon Kees
 Not a third that walks beside me,
But five or six or more.
Whether at dusk or daybreak
Or at blinding noon, a retinue
Of shadows that no door
Excludes.--One like a kind of scrawl,
Hands scrawled trembling and blue,
A harelipped and hunchbacked dwarf
With a smile like a grapefruit rind,
Who jabbers the way I do
When the brain is empty and tired
And the guests no longer...Read more of this...

For The Country

by Philip Levine
 THE DREAM

This has nothing to do with war 
or the end of the world. She 
dreams there are gray starlings 
on the winter lawn and the buds 
of next year's oranges alongside 
this year's oranges, and the sun 
is still up, a watery circle 
of fire settling into the sky 
at dinner time, but there's no 
flame racing through...Read more of this...

Night on the Convoy

by Siegfried Sassoon
 (ALEXANDRIA-MARSEILLES)


Out in the blustering darkness, on the deck 
A gleam of stars looks down. Long blurs of black, 
The lean Destroyers, level with our track, 
Plunging and stealing, watch the perilous way 
Through backward racing seas and caverns of chill spray.
One sentry by the davits, in the gloom 
Stands mute: the boat heaves onward through the night. 
Shrouded is...Read more of this...

Bookshelf

by Robert William Service
 I like to think that when I fall,
A rain-drop in Death's shoreless sea,
This shelf of books along the wall,
Beside my bed, will mourn for me.

Regard it. . . . Aye, my taste is *****.
Some of my bards you may disdain.
Shakespeare and Milton are not here;
Shelly and Keats you seek in vain.
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning too,
Remarkably are not in view.

Who are...Read more of this...

In A Light Time

by Philip Levine
 The alder shudders in the April winds 
off the moon. No one is awake and yet 
sunlight streams across 
the hundred still beds 
of the public wards 
for children. At ten 
do we truly sleep 
in a blessed sleep 
guarded by angels 
and social workers? 
Do we dream of gold 
found in secret trunks 
in familiar rooms? 
Do we...Read more of this...

The Flood

by John Clare
 On Lolham Brigs in wild and lonely mood
I've seen the winter floods their gambols play
Through each old arch that trembled while I stood
Bent o'er its wall to watch the dashing spray
As their old stations would be washed away
Crash came the ice against the jambs and then
A shudder jarred the arches—yet once more
It breasted raving waves and stood agen
To wait...Read more of this...

How Good Are The Poor

by Victor Hugo
 ("Il est nuit. La cabane est pauvre.") 
 
 {Bk. LII. iii.} 
 
 'Tis night—within the close stout cabin door, 
 The room is wrapped in shade save where there fall 
 Some twilight rays that creep along the floor, 
 And show the fisher's nets upon the wall. 
 
 In the dim corner, from the oaken...Read more of this...

Especially When The October Wind

by Dylan Thomas
 Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words,...Read more of this...

The Ride

by Richard Wilbur
 The horse beneath me seemed 
To know what course to steer 
Through the horror of snow I dreamed,
And so I had no fear,

Nor was I chilled to death 
By the wind’s white shudders, thanks 
To the veils of his patient breath 
And the mist of sweat from his flanks.

It seemed that all night through,
Within my hand no rein
And nothing...Read more of this...

Low Barometer

by Robert Seymour Bridges
 The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.

On such a night, when Air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again;

And Reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their...Read more of this...

Exposure

by Wilfred Owen
 I

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knife us . . .
Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . .
Low drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient . . .
Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous,
 But nothing happens.

Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire.
Like twitching agonies of men...Read more of this...

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