Famous Sparrows Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Preludes

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 I

THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of...Read more of this...

Spring Carol

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 WHEN loud by landside streamlets gush,
And clear in the greenwood quires the thrush,
With sun on the meadows
And songs in the shadows
Comes again to me
The gift of the tongues of the lea,
The gift of the tongues of meadows.

Straightway my olden heart returns
And dances with the dancing burns;
It sings with the sparrows;
To the rain and the (grimy) barrows
Sings my heart aloud...Read more of this...

Each And All

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee, from the hill-top looking down;
And the heifer, that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton tolling the bell at noon,
Dreams not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's...Read more of this...

The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken

by Vachel Lindsay
 A little colt — broncho, loaned to the farm
To be broken in time without fury or harm,
Yet black crows flew past you, shouting alarm,
Calling "Beware," with lugubrious singing...
The butterflies there in the bush were romancing,
The smell of the grass caught your soul in a trance,
So why be a-fearing the spurs and the traces,
O broncho that would not be broken...Read more of this...

The Swimmer

by Adam Lindsay Gordon
 With short, sharp violent lights made vivid,
To the southward far as the sight can roam,
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
The seas that climb and the surfs that comb,
Only the crag and the cliff to nor'ward,
And rocks receding, and reefs flung forward,
And waifs wreck'd seaward and wasted shoreward
On shallows sheeted with flaming foam.

A grim grey coast and a seaboard...Read more of this...

The Lost Mistress

by Robert Browning
 All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
As one at first believes?
Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
About your cottage eaves!

And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
I noticed that today;
One day more bursts them open fully
—You know the red turns grey.

Tomorrow we meet the same then, dearest?
May I take your hand in mine?
Mere friends are we,—well, friends the merest
Keep much...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 06: Over the darkened city the city of towers

by Conrad Aiken
 Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep...Read more of this...

Noon

by Philip Levine
 I bend to the ground 
to catch 
something whispered, 
urgent, drifting 
across the ditches. 
The heaviness of 
flies stuttering 
in orbit, dirt 
ripening, the sweat 
of eggs. 
 There are 
small streams 
the width ofa thumb 
running in the villages 
of sheaves, whole 
eras of grain 
wakening on 
the stalks, a roof 
that breathes over 
my head. 
 Behind...Read more of this...

Amphion

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 MY father left a park to me, 
But it is wild and barren, 
A garden too with scarce a tree, 
And waster than a warren: 
Yet say the neighbours when they call, 
It is not bad but good land, 
And in it is the germ of all 
That grows within the woodland. 

O had I lived when song was...Read more of this...

Epode

by Ben Jonson
  XI. — EPODE.                                   And her black spite expel, Which to effect (since no breast is so sure,                  Or safe, but she'll procure Some way of entrance) we must plant a guard                  Of thoughts to watch, and ward At the eye and ear, the ports unto the mind,                 Give knowledge instantly, To wakeful reason, our affections' king :                  Who, in th' examining,...Read more of this...

Pastoral

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 The little sparrows 
hop ingenuously 
about the pavement 
quarreling 
with sharp voices 
over those things 
that interest them. 
But we who are wiser 
shut ourselves in 
on either hand 
and no one knows 
whether we think good 
or evil. 

    Meanwhile, 
the old man who goes about 
gathering dog-lime 
walks in the gutter 
without looking up...Read more of this...

Taking Down a Trellis

by Du Fu
 Tie stick already wither and fall Pumpkin leaf become sparse Lucky bear fruit white flower finish Better take leave green vine eliminate Autumn insect sound not go Dusk sparrow think what Cold thing now lie waste Human life also have beginning  The sticks I tied already wither and fall, The pumpkin leaves are getting sparse...Read more of this...

Rita And The Rifle

by Mahmoud Darwish
 Between Rita and my eyes
There is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita
Kneels and plays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream 
Ah, Rita
Between us there are a million sparrows and images 
And many...Read more of this...

Paris

by Alan Seeger
 First, London, for its myriads; for its height, 
Manhattan heaped in towering stalagmite; 
But Paris for the smoothness of the paths 
That lead the heart unto the heart's delight. . . . 


Fair loiterer on the threshold of those days 
When there's no lovelier prize the world displays 
Than, having beauty and your twenty years, 
You have the means...Read more of this...

136 Syllables At Rocky Mountain Dharma Center

by Allen Ginsberg
 Tail turned to red sunset on a juniper crown a lone magpie cawks.

Mad at Oryoki in the shrine-room -- Thistles blossomed late afternoon.

Put on my shirt and took it off in the sun walking the path to lunch.

A dandelion seed floats above the marsh grass with the mosquitos.

At 4 A.M. the two middleaged men sleeping together holding hands.

In the...Read more of this...

Unclean

by Brooks Haxton
 I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am 
 like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am 
 as a sparrow alone upon the housetop. 
 Psalm 102

The pelican in scripture is unclean. It pukes dead fish
onto the hatchlings, and it roosts alone, like Satan
on the Tree of Life. Nobody told me. I liked pelicans.
I...Read more of this...

My Kingdom

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 Down by a shining water well 
I found a very little dell, 
No higher than my head. 
The heather and the gorse about 
In summer bloom were coming out, 
Some yellow and some red. 

I called the little pool a sea; 
The little hills were big to me; 
For I am very small. 
I made a boat, I made...Read more of this...

Mama never forgets her birds

by Emily Dickinson
 Mama never forgets her birds,
Though in another tree --
She looks down just as often
And just as tenderly
As when her little mortal nest
With cunning care she wove --
If either of her "sparrows fall,"
She "notices," above....Read more of this...

Mariana

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
WITH BLACKEST moss the flower-plots 
Were thickly crusted, one and all: 
The rusted nails fell from the knots 
That held the pear to the gable-wall. 
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange: 
Unlifted was the clinking latch; 
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
Upon the lonely moated grange. 
She only said, "My life is dreary, 
He cometh not," she said;...Read more of this...

Freedom of Love

by Andre Breton
 (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white...Read more of this...

We Aint Got No Money Honey But We Got Rain

by Charles Bukowski
 call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the 
depression era.
there wasn't any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn't rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
and in Los Angeles the storm drains
weren't built to carry off taht much
water
and the...Read more of this...

Garage Sale

by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
  I sold her bed for a song. 
A song of yearning like an orphan’s. 
Or the one knives carve into bread. 

 But the un-broken bread 
song too. For the song that rivers 
sing to the ferryman’s oars. With 

 that dread in it. 
For a threadbare tune: garroted, 
chest-choked, cheap. A sparrow’s, 

 beggar’s, a foghorn’s call....Read more of this...

Each and All

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The wexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed...Read more of this...

When Tulips Bloom

by Henry Van Dyke
 I 

When tulips bloom in Union Aquare, 
And timid breaths of vernal air 
Go wandering down the dusty town, 
Like children lost in Vanity Fair; 

When every long, unlovely row 
Of westward houses stands aglow, 
And leads the eyes to sunset skies 
Beyond the hills where green trees grow; 

Then wearly seems the street parade, 
And weary books, and...Read more of this...

North Haven

by Elizabeth Bishop
(In Memoriam: Robert Lowell)


I can make out the rigging of a schooner
a mile off; I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse1s tail.

The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have
--drifting, in a dreamy sort of...Read more of this...

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