Famous South Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous South poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous south poems. These examples illustrate what a famous south poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Emily Dickinson
South Winds jostle them --
Bumblebees come --
Hover -- hesitate --
Drink, and are gone --
Butterflies pause
On their passage Cashmere --
I -- softly plucking,
Present them here!...Read more of this...
by
Spike Milligan
Drake is going west, lads
So Tom is going East
But tiny Fred
Just lies in bed,
The lazy little beast....Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The green grass is growing,
The morning wind is in it,
'Tis a tune worth the knowing,
Though it change every minute.
'Tis a tune of the spring,
Every year plays it over,
To the robin on the wing,
To the pausing lover.
O'er ten thousand thousand acres
Goes light the nimble zephyr,
The flowers, tiny feet of shakers,
Worship him ever.
Hark to the winning sound!
They summon thee, dearest,
Saying; "We...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
When I am living in the Midlands
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.
The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea;
And it's there walking in the high woods
That I could wish to be,
And...Read more of this...
by
Donald Hall
December twenty-first
we gather at the white Church festooned
red and green, the tree flashing
green-red lights beside the altar.
After the children of Sunday School
recite Scripture, sing songs,
and scrape out solos,
they retire to dress for the finale,
to perform the pageant
again: Mary and Joseph kneeling
cradleside, Three Kings,
shepherds and shepherdesses. Their garments
are bathrobes with mothholes,
cut down from...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
With one black shadow at its feet,
The house thro' all the level shines,
Close-latticed to the brooding heat,
And silent in its dusty vines:
A faint-blue ridge upon the right,
An empty river-bed before,
And shallows on a distant shore,
In glaring sand and inlets bright.
But "Aye Mary," made she moan,
And "Aye Mary," night and morn,
And "Ah," she sang, "to be all alone,
To live forgotten,...Read more of this...
by
June Jordan
Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world
The whispers too they
intimate to the...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
GEORGE AUGUSTUS CLOUGH
A NATIVE OF LIVERPOOL,
DIED SUDDENLY OF "STRANGER'S FEVER"
NOV'R 5th 1843
AGED 22
He died of "Stranger's Fever" when his youth
Had scarcely melted into manhood, so
The chiselled legend runs; a brother's woe
Laid bare for epitaph. The savage ruth
Of a sunny, bright, but alien land, uncouth
With cruel caressing dealt a mortal blow,
And by this summer sea where flowers grow
In tropic splendor,...Read more of this...
by
Hilaire Belloc
When I am living in the Midlands
That are sodden and unkind,
I light my lamp in the evening:
My work is left behind;
And the great hills of the South Country
Come back into my mind.
The great hills of the South Country
They stand along the sea;
And it's there walking in the high woods
That I could wish to be,
And...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
IF the oriole calls like last year
when the south wind sings in the oats,
if the leaves climb and climb on a bean pole
saying over a song learnt from the south wind,
if the crickets send up the same old lessons
found when the south wind keeps on coming,
we will get by, we will keep on coming,
we will get by, we will...Read more of this...
by
Kenneth Slessor
After the whey-faced anonymity
Of river-gums and scribbly-gums and bush,
After the rubbing and the hit of brush,
You come to the South Country
As if the argument of trees were done,
The doubts and quarrelling, the plots and pains,
All ended by these clear and gliding planes
Like an abrupt solution.
And over the flat earth of empty...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
Now in the oak the sap of life is welling,
Tho' to the bough the rusty leafage clings;
Now on the elm the misty buds are swelling,
See how the pine-wood grows alive with wings;
Blue-jays fluttering, yodeling and crying,
Meadow-larks sailing low above the faded grass,
Red-birds whistling clear, silent robins flying,--
Who has waked the birds up? What has come to pass?
Last year's cotton-plants,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
They have my own fear of the dark,
Tupapau - spirits of the dead they call it;
Returning late with oil I found fear of it
Had spread my vabine naked on the bed.
Manao-Taipapau means ‘she thinks of the spectre’
Or ‘the spectre is thinking of her’, either way
She is afraid; I marvel at a tongue so readily ambiguous,
Lying across her forked thigh.
I...Read more of this...
by
Judith Wright
South of my days' circle, part of my blood's country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek's leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
From Bermondsey to Wandsworth
So many churches are,
Some with apsidal chancels,
Some Perpendicular
And schools by E.R. Robson
In the style of Norman Shaw
Where blue-serged adolescence learn'd
To model and to draw.
Oh, in among the houses,
The viaduct below,
Stood the Coffee Essence Factory
Of Robinson and Co.
Burnt and brown and tumbled down
And done with years ago
Where the waters of the Wandle do
Lugubriously flow.
From dust of dead...Read more of this...
by
Rg Gregory
for a man whose eyes till now were a bed of rock
whose hands were drier than deserts
the sea's voice drove fear up through the valley
the tributaries meandering inside me longing for outlet
shrivelled even as their own courses became straight
my demand for ocean died now the ocean approached
the clouds put up with a lot of invective from me today
not a...Read more of this...
by
Du Fu
Qi prince house in ordinary see Cui Jiu hall before several times listen Real be river south good landscape Fall blossom season again meet you In Prince Qi's mansion house, I met you often, By Cui Jiu's hall, I heard you several times. Truly the landscape south of the river is good, I meet you again...Read more of this...
by
Edward Lear
There was an Old Man of the South,Who had an immoderate mouth;But in swallowing a dish that was quite full of Fish,He was choked, that Old Man of the South. ...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
A South Wind -- has a pathos
Of individual Voice --
As One detect on Landings
An Emigrant's address.
A Hint of Ports and Peoples --
And much not understood --
The fairer -- for the farness --
And for the foreignhood....Read more of this...
by
Wang Wei
Light boat south hill go
North hill vast expanse hard reach
Separate bank see person home
Long way off not recognise
A light boat sets off from the southern hill,
The north is hard to reach across the vastness.
On the other bank, I look for my home,
It cannot be recognised so far off....Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Heart of the Southland, heed me pleading now,
Who bearest, unashamed, upon my brow
The long kiss of the loving tropic sun,
And yet, whose veins with thy red current run.
Borne on the bitter winds from every hand,
Strange tales are flying over all the land,
And Condemnation, with his pinions foul,
Glooms in the place where broods the midnight owl.
What art thou, that the world...Read more of this...
by
Siegfried Sassoon
Where have you been, South Wind, this May-day morning,—
With larks aloft, or skimming with the swallow,
Or with blackbirds in a green, sun-glinted thicket?
Oh, I heard you like a tyrant in the valley;
Your ruffian haste shook the young, blossoming orchards;
You clapped rude hands, hallooing round the chimney,
And white your pennons streamed along the river.
You...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1903
Lived a woman wonderful,
(May the Lord amend her!)
Neither simple, kind, nor true,
But her Pagan beauty drew
Christian gentlemen a few
Hotly to attend her.
Christian gentlemen a few
From Berwick unto Dover;
For she was South Africa,
Ana she was South Africa,
She was Our South Africa,
Africa all over!
Half her land was dead with drouth,
Half was red with battle;
She was fenced...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Birds reported from the South --
A News express to Me --
A spicy Charge, My little Posts --
But I am deaf -- Today --
The Flowers -- appealed -- a timid Throng --
I reinforced the Door --
Go blossom for the Bees -- I said --
And trouble Me -- no More --
The Summer Grace, for Notice strove --
Remote -- Her best...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
It rises -- passes -- on our South
Inscribes a simple Noon --
Cajoles a Moment with the Spires
And infinite is gone --...Read more of this...
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