Famous Spindrift Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Cross-Roads

by Amy Lowell
 A bullet through his heart at dawn. On 
the table a letter signed
with a woman's name. A wind that goes howling round the 
house,
and weeping as in shame. Cold November dawn peeping through 
the windows,
cold dawn creeping over the floor, creeping up his cold legs,
creeping over his cold body, creeping across his cold face.
A glaze of thin yellow sunlight...Read more of this...

Hatteras Calling

by Conrad Aiken
 Southeast, and storm, and every weathervane 
shivers and moans upon its dripping pin, 
ragged on chimneys the cloud whips, the rain 
howls at the flues and windows to get in, 
the golden rooster claps his golden wings 
and from the Baptist Chapel shrieks no more, 
the golden arrow in the southeast sings 
and hears on the roof the Atlantic...Read more of this...

Cruisers

by Rudyard Kipling
 As our mother the Frigate, bepainted and fine,
Made play for her bully the Ship of the Line;
So we, her bold daughters by iron and fire,
Accost and decoy to our masters' desire.

Now, pray you, consider what toils we endure,
Night-walking wet sea-lanes, a guard and a lure;
Since half of our trade is that same pretty sort
As mettlesome wenches do practise in...Read more of this...

The Blue Swallows

by Howard Nemerov
 Across the millstream below the bridge 
Seven blue swallows divide the air 
In shapes invisible and evanescent, 
Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s 
Or memory’s power to keep them there. 

“History is where tensions were,” 
“Form is the diagram of forces.” 
Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, 
While gazing down upon those birds— 
How strange, to be above the birds!— 
Thus...Read more of this...

The Coastwise Lights

by Rudyard Kipling
 Our brows are bound with spindrift and the weed is on our knees;
Our loins are battered 'neath us by the swinging, smoking seas.
From reef and rock and skerry -- over headland, ness, and voe --
The Coastwise Lights of England watch the ships of England go!

Through the endless summer evenings, on the lineless, level floors;
Through the yelling Channel tempest when...Read more of this...

On Growing Old

by John Masefield
 Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying; 
My dog and I are old, too old for roving. 
Man, whose young passion sets the spindrift flying, 
Is soon too lame to march, too cold for loving. 
I take the book and gather to the fire, 
Turning old yellow leaves; minute by minute 
The clock ticks to my heart....Read more of this...

I In My Intricate Image

by Dylan Thomas
 I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She...Read more of this...

Voyages II

by Hart Crane
 --And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers' hands.

And onward, as bells off San...Read more of this...

The Last Chantey

by Rudyard Kipling
 "And there was no more sea."


Thus said The Lord in the Vault above the Cherubim
 Calling to the Angels and the Souls in their degree:
 "Lo! Earth has passed away
 On the smoke of Judgment Day.
 That Our word may be established shall We gather up the sea?"

Loud sang the souls of the jolly, jolly mariners:
 "Plague upon the...Read more of this...

Elegy For My Father

by Annie Finch
 HLF, August 8, 1918—August 22, 1997

“Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze towards paradise.”
—Hart Crane, “Voyages”

“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

Under the ocean that stretches out wordlessly
past the long edge of the last human shore,
there are deep windows the waves haven't opened,
where night is...Read more of this...

In My Craft Or Sullen Art

by Dylan Thomas
 In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On...Read more of this...

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