Famous Stalks Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The golden barks of lovely summer

by Emile Verhaeren
The golden barks of lovely summer that set out, riotous for space, are returning sad and weary from the blood-stained horizons.
With monotonous strokes of the oars, they advance upon the waters; they are as cradles in which sleep autumn flowers.
Stalks of lilies with golden brows, you all lie overthrown; alone, the roses struggle to live beyond death.
What matters to their...Read more of this...

Blackberry Eating

by Galway Kinnell
I love to go out in late September 
among the fat, overripe, icy black blackberries 
to eat blackberries for breakfast, 
the stalks are very prickly, a penalty 
they earn for knowing the black art 
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them 
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries 
fall almost unbidden to my tongue, 
as words sometimes...Read more of this...

Birth-Day Ode 03

by Robert Southey
 And wouldst thou seek the low abode
Where PEACE delights to dwell?
Pause Traveller on thy way of life!
With many a snare and peril rife
Is that long labyrinth of road:
Dark is the vale of years before
Pause Traveller on thy way!
Nor dare the dangerous path explore
Till old EXPERIENCE comes to lend his leading ray.

Not he who comes with lanthorn light
Shall guide thy...Read more of this...

Epistle To My Brother George

by John Keats
 Full many a dreary hour have I past,
My brain bewildered, and my mind o'ercast
With heaviness; in seasons when I've thought
No spherey strains by me could e'er be caught
From the blue dome, though I to dimness gaze
On the far depth where sheeted lightning plays;
Or, on the wavy grass outstretched supinely,
Pry 'mong the stars, to strive to think divinely:
That I should...Read more of this...

Our bright garden is health itself

by Emile Verhaeren
Our bright garden is health itself.
It is squandered in its brightness from the thousand hands of the branches and leaves as they wave to and fro.
And the pleasant shade that welcomes our feet after the long roads pours into our tired limbs a quickening strength, gentle as the garden's mosses.
When the pond plays with the wind and the sun, a...Read more of this...

Sheltered Garden

by Hilda Doolittle
 I have had enough. 
I gasp for breath. 

Every way ends, every road, 
every foot-path leads at last 
to the hill-crest -- 
then you retrace your steps, 
or find the same slope on the other side, 
precipitate. 

I have had enough -- 
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, 
herbs, sweet-cress. 

O for some sharp swish of a branch -- 
there is no...Read more of this...

The Eleusinian Festival

by Friedrich von Schiller
 Wreathe in a garland the corn's golden ear!
With it, the Cyane [31] blue intertwine
Rapture must render each glance bright and clear,
For the great queen is approaching her shrine,--
She who compels lawless passions to cease,
Who to link man with his fellow has come,
And into firm habitations of peace
Changed the rude tents' ever-wandering home.

Shyly in the mountain-cleft
Was the Troglodyte concealed;
And the...Read more of this...

The Coney

by Paul Muldoon
 Although I have never learned to mow
I suddenly found myself half-way through
last year's pea-sticks
and cauliflower stalks
in our half-acre of garden.
My father had always left the whetstone
safely wrapped
in his old, tweed cap
and balanced on one particular plank
beside the septic tank.

This past winter he had been too ill
to work. The scythe would dull
so much more quickly in my hands
than his, and...Read more of this...

Peace

by George Herbert
 Sweet Peace, where dost thou dwell? I humbly crave,
Let me once know.
I sought thee in a secret cave,
And ask'd, if Peace were there,
A hollow wind did seem to answer, No:
Go seek elsewhere.

I did; and going did a rainbow note:
Surely, thought I,
This is the lace of Peace's coat:
I will search out the matter.
But while I looked the clouds immediately
Did break...Read more of this...

Two Months

by Rudyard Kipling
 June
No hope, no change! The clouds have shut us in,
 And through the cloud the sullen Sun strikes down
 Full on the bosom of the tortured Town,
Till Night falls heavy as remembered sin
That will not suffer sleep or thought of ease,
 And, hour on hour, the dry-eyed Moon in spite
 Glares through the haze and mocks with watery light
The...Read more of this...

For A Coming Extinction

by W S Merwin
 Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like...Read more of this...

Thoras Song (Ashtaroth)

by Adam Lindsay Gordon
 We severed in Autumn early,
Ere the earth was torn by the plough;
The wheat and the oats and the barley
Are ripe for the harvest now.
We sunder'd one misty morning
Ere the hills were dimm'd by the rain;
Through the flowers those hills adorning --
Thou comest not back again.

My heart is heavy and weary
With the weight of a weary soul;
The mid-day glare grows...Read more of this...

The Child and the Mariner

by William Henry Davies
 A dear old couple my grandparents were, 
And kind to all dumb things; they saw in Heaven 
The lamb that Jesus petted when a child; 
Their faith was never draped by Doubt: to them 
Death was a rainbow in Eternity, 
That promised everlasting brightness soon. 
An old seafaring man was he; a rough 
Old man, but kind; and hairy,...Read more of this...

Morning Midday And Evening Sacrifice

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 The dappled die-away
Cheek and wimpled lip,
The gold-wisp, the airy-grey
Eye, all in fellowship—
This, all this beauty blooming,
This, all this freshness fuming,
Give God while worth consuming. 

Both thought and thew now bolder
And told by Nature: Tower;
Head, heart, hand, heel, and shoulder
That beat and breathe in power—
This pride of prime's enjoyment
Take as for tool, not toy meant
And hold at Christ's employment. 

The...Read more of this...

Justice Denied In Massachusetts

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.

Let us go home, and sit...Read more of this...

Two in my garden

by Omer Tarin
They stand together
The twin stalks
In my backyard,
Sometimes reminders
Of some things not done,
Some weeds not plucked
When it was time to do so;

Why I did not clear the yard
Is not so important now
As why did I want to?
Indeed, I see no petal
Half as nice as those two
That grow together, in their awkward fashion,
And they have some part of me
Where it wouldn't do;

It...Read more of this...

August 1968

by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips. ...Read more of this...

To A Friend Concerning Several Ladies

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 You know there is not much 
that I desire, a few chrysanthemums 
half lying on the grass, yellow 
and brown and white, the 
talk of a few people, the trees, 
an expanse of dried leaves perhaps 
with ditches among them. 
But there comes 
between me and these things 
a letter 
or even a look—well placed, 
you understand, 
so that...Read more of this...

The Drunken Fisherman

by Robert Lowell
 Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah's bow suspends
No pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one...Read more of this...

Next Please

by Philip Larkin
 Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with...Read more of this...

Bridge Over The Aire Book 3

by Barry Tebb
 THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART





1



The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days

Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two

Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?



I am the mad poet first love

You never got over

You are my blue-eyed

Madonna virgin bride

I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’

On the bark of every 

Wind-bent tree in 

East End Park



2



The park itself will blossom

And...Read more of this...

Song Of A Second April

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their...Read more of this...

Indignation Jones

by Edgar Lee Masters
 You would not believe, would you
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders
And Virginians of Spoon River?
You would not believe that I had been to school
And read some books.
You saw me only as a run-down man,
With matted hair and beard
And ragged clothes.
Sometimes a...Read more of this...

Sister Cat

by Frances Mayes
 Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward...Read more of this...

agapanthus - african lily

by Rg Gregory
 [from agape (love); anthus (flower)]

you may not be willing to notice me
i have an awkward sense of myself
my name can be hard on the tongue
i do not grow easily in places
where the sun only fitfully appears

i've come a long way northwards
gardens do not flatter my needs
i am a shy sheltered plant - my leaves
first come above the earth slowly
serpenting...Read more of this...

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