Famous Sleeping Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Sleeping poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous sleeping poems. These examples illustrate what a famous sleeping poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
William Morris
Love is enough: while ye deemed him a-sleeping,
There were signs of his coming and sounds of his feet;
His touch it was that would bring you to weeping,
When the summer was deepest and music most sweet:
In his footsteps ye followed the day to its dying,
Ye went forth by his gown-skirts the morning to meet:
In his place on the beaten-down orchard-grass...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Sleeping in fever, I am unfair
to know just who you are:
hung up like a pig on exhibit,
the delicate wrists,
the beard drooling blood and vinegar;
hooked to your own weight,
jolting toward death under your nameplate.
Everyone in this crowd needs a bath.
I am dressed in rags.
The mother wears blue.
You grind your teeth
and with each new breath
your jaws gape and your diaper sags.
I...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess …...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Or they twist … in the slow twist … of the wind.
If the north wind comes they run to the south.
If the west wind comes they run to the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
And that not dwelt in now by men or women.
(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,
So what is this I make a sorrow of?)
I...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Bishop
Earliest morning, switching all the tracks
that cross the sky from cinder star to star,
coupling the ends of streets
to trains of light.
now draw us into daylight in our beds;
and clear away what presses on the brain:
put out the neon shapes
that float and swell and glare
down the gray avenue between the eyes
in pinks and yellows,...Read more of this...
by
Katherine Mansfield
Sleeping together... how tired you were...
How warm our room... how the firelight spread
On walls and ceiling and great white bed!
We spoke in whispers as children do,
And now it was I--and then it was you
Slept a moment, to wake--"My dear,
I'm not at all sleepy," one of us said....
Was it a thousand years ago?
I woke in your arms--you were sound asleep--
And...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
They sleep within. . . .
I cower to the earth, I waking, I only.
High and cold thou dreamest, O queen, high-dreaming and lonely.
We have slept too long, who can hardly win
The white one flame, and the night-long crying;
The viewless passers; the world's low sighing
With desire, with yearning,
To the fire unburning,
To the heatless fire, to the flameless ecstasy! . ....Read more of this...
by
Thomas Moore
When daylight was yet sleeping under the pillow,
And stars in the heavens still lingering shone,
Young Kitty, all blushing, rose up from her pillow,
The last time she e'er was to press it alone.
For the youth whom she treasured her heart and her soul in
Had promised to link the last tie before noon;
And when once...Read more of this...
by
Rupert Brooke
In darkness the loud sea makes moan;
And earth is shaken, and all evils creep
About her ways.
Oh, now to know you sleep!
Out of the whirling blinding moil, alone,
Out of the slow grim fight,
One thought to wing -- to you, asleep,
In some cool room that's open to the night
Lying half-forward, breathing quietly,
One white hand on the white
Unrumpled sheet, and the ever-moving...Read more of this...
by
Antonio Machado
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last...Read more of this...
by
Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
Beyond yon dim old mountain's shadowy height,
The restless sun droops low his grand old face;
While downward sweeps the trembling veil of night,
To hide the earth; the frost king's filmy lace
Rests on the mountain's hoary snow-crowned head,
And adds to it a softened grace; the light
Which dies afar in faint and fading red
In purple...Read more of this...
by
Francesco Petrarch
SONNET XXVI. Già fiammeggiava l' amorosa stella. LAURA, WHO IS ILL, APPEARS TO HIM IN A DREAM, AND ASSURES HIM THAT SHE STILL LIVES. Throughout the orient now began to flameThe star of love; while o'er the northern skyThat, which has oft raised Juno's jealousy,Pour'd forth its beauteous scintillating beam:Beside her...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Sexton! My Master's sleeping here.
Pray lead me to his bed!
I came to build the Bird's nest,
And sow the Early seed --
That when the snow creeps slowly
From off his chamber door --
Daisies point the way there --
And the Troubadour....Read more of this...
by
Mary Darby Robinson
[Inscribed to Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire.]
CLOSE in a woodbine's tangled shade,
The BLOOMING GOD asleep was laid;
His brows with mossy roses crown'd;
His golden darts lay scatter'd round;
To shade his auburn, curled head,
A purple canopy was spread,
Which gently with the breezes play'd,
And shed around a soften'd shade.
Upon his downy smiling cheek,...Read more of this...
by
William Blake
All the night in woe,
Lyca's parents go:
Over vallies deep.
While the desarts weep.
Tired and woe-begone.
Hoarse with making moan:
Arm in arm seven days.
They trac'd the desert ways.
Seven nights they sleep.
Among shadows deep:
And dream they see their child
Starvdd in desart wild.
Pale thro' pathless ways
The fancied image strays.
Famish'd, weeping, weak
With hollow piteous shriek
Rising from unrest,
The trembling woman prest,
With feet of weary woe;
She could...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Consider
a girl who keeps slipping off,
arms limp as old carrots,
into the hypnotist's trance,
into a spirit world
speaking with the gift of tongues.
She is stuck in the time machine,
suddenly two years old sucking her thumb,
as inward as a snail,
learning to talk again.
She's on a voyage.
She is swimming further and further back,
up like a salmon,
struggling into her mother's pocketbook.
Little doll child,
come here...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
O Teddy Bear! with your head awry
And your comical twisted smile,
You rub your eyes -- do you wonder why
You've slept such a long, long while?
As you lay so still in the cupboard dim,
And you heard on the roof the rain,
Were you thinking . . . what has become of him?
And when will he play again?
Do you sometimes long for...Read more of this...
by
Christina Rossetti
Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,
Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,
Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover,
Sleeping at last.
No more a tired heart downcast or overcast,
No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,
Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.
Fast asleep. Singing birds...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
Elizabeth Bishop
It is so peaceful on the ceiling!
It is the Place de la Concorde.
The little crystal chandelier
is off, the fountain is in the dark.
Not a soul is in the park.
Below, where the wallpaper is peeling,
the Jardin des Plantes has locked its gates.
Those photographs are animals.
The mighty flowers and foliage rustle;
under the leaves the insects tunnel.
We must go under the wallpaper
to...Read more of this...
by
Richard Brautigan
I sit here, an arch-villain of romance,
thinking about you. Gee, I'm sorry
I made you unhappy, but there was nothing
I could do about it because I have to be free.
Perhaps everything would have been different
if you had stayed at the table or asked me
to go out with you to look at the moon,
instead...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
As when the old moon lighted by the tender
And radiant crescent of the new is seen,
And for a moment's space suggests the splendor
Of what in its full prime it once has been,
So on my waning years you cast the glory
Of youth and pleasure, for a little hour;
And life again seems like an unread story,
And joy and hope both stir...Read more of this...
by
Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
[To the memory of Edwin B. Foster, a member of the Howards, who nobly sacrificed his own life for others, and in remembrance of those unknown to fame or friends who have silently followed in the steps of our Saviour.]
The shadow of death is around us all,
And life is a sorrowful thing;
For the winds sweep by with a...Read more of this...
by
Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye."
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the...Read more of this...
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