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Famous Suitor Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...have passed since then –
Each has been pleasant in its own way –
And you are but one of a dozen men
Who have played the suitor a Summer day.

But, nevertheless, when I heard your name,
Coupled with some one’s, not my own,
There burned in my bosom a sudden flame,
That carried me back to the day that is flown.
I was sitting again by the laughing brook,
With you at my feet, and the sky above,
And my heart was fluttering under your look –
The unmistakable look of Love.Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...ll do or say.

But he met my smiles with a sullen frown,
And so I turned to the wooing Town.

Oh, bold was this suitor, and blithe as bold!
His look was as bright as the Sea’s was cold.

As the Sea was sullen, the Town was gay;
He made me forget for a winter day.

For a winter day and a winter night
He laughed my sorrow away from sight.

And yet, in spite of his mirth and cheer,
I knew full well he was insincere.

And when the young buds burst on the t...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...er from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst befor...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...Death is the supple Suitor
That wins at last --
It is a stealthy Wooing
Conducted first
By pallid innuendoes
And dim approach
But brave at last with Bugles
And a bisected Coach
It bears away in triumph
To Troth unknown
And Kindred as responsive
As Porcelain....Read more of this...

by Donne, John
...ight with speechless secrecy
Deliver errands mutely, and mutually.
Remember since all thy words used to be
To every suitor, Ay, if my friends agree;
Since, household charms, thy husband's name to teach,
Were all the love tricks that thy wit could reach;
And since, an hour's discourse could scarce have made
One answer in thee, and that ill arrayed
In broken proverbs and torn sentences.
Thou art not by so many duties his,
That from the world's Common having severed thee...Read more of this...



by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...h'd board
Sparkled and shone; so genial was the hearth:
And on the right hand of the hearth he saw
Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,
Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;
And o'er her second father stoopt a girl,
A later but a loftier Annie Lee,
Fair-hair'd and tall, and from her lifted hand
Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring
To tempt the babe, who rear'd his creasy arms,
Caught at and ever miss'd it, and they laugh'd:
And on the left hand of the hearth he s...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...upon her as the saint of his deepest devotion;
Happy was he who might touch her hand or the hem of her garment!
Many a suitor came to her door, by the darkness befriended,
And, as he knocked and waited to hear the sound of her footsteps,
Knew not which beat the louder, his heart or the knocker of iron;
Or at the joyous feast of the Patron Saint of the village,
Bolder grew, and pressed her hand in the dance as he whispered
Hurried words of love, that seemed a part of the musi...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...In that fair capital where Pleasure, crowned 
Amidst her myriad courtiers, riots and rules, 
I too have been a suitor. Radiant eyes 
Were my life's warmth and sunshine, outspread arms 
My gilded deep horizons. I rejoiced 
In yielding to all amorous influence 
And multiple impulsion of the flesh, 
To feel within my being surge and sway 
The force that all the stars acknowledge too. 
Amid the nebulous humanity 
Where I an atom crawled and cleaved and sunder...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...without, drave backward to the wall, 
And midmost of a rout of roisterers, 
Femininely fair and dissolutely pale, 
Her suitor in old years before Geraint, 
Entered, the wild lord of the place, Limours. 
He moving up with pliant courtliness, 
Greeted Geraint full face, but stealthily, 
In the mid-warmth of welcome and graspt hand, 
Found Enid with the corner of his eye, 
And knew her sitting sad and solitary. 
Then cried Geraint for wine and goodly cheer 
To feed the ...Read more of this...

by Hope, Alec Derwent (A D)
...ling their way up that mysterious stair, 
A horde of lovers bursts between the gates, 
All doomed but one, the destined suitor, who 
By luck first reaches her and takes her there.

A parable of all we are or do! 
The life of Nature is a formal dance 
In which each step is ruled by what has been 
And yet the pattern emerges always new 
The marriage of linked cause and random chance 
Gives birth perpetually to the unforeseen.

One parable for the body and the mind: 
Wit...Read more of this...

by Moore, Marianne
...
a match not a marriage was made
when my great great grandmother'd said
with native genius for
disunion, "Although your suitor be
perfection, one objection
is enough; he is not
Irish."Outwitting
the fairies, befriending the furies,
whoever again
and again says, "I'll never give in," never sees

that you're not free
until you've been made captive by
supreme belief,--credulity
you say?When large dainty
fingers tremblingly divide the wings
of the fly for mid-July
with a need...Read more of this...

by Schwartz, Delmore
...are
 informed
By extreme caution, prudence, and calculation, 
For the female spider, lazier and fiercer than the male
 suitor,
May make a meal of him if she does not feel in the same
 mood, or if her appetite
Consumes her far more than the revelation of love's
 consummation.
Here among spiders, as in the higher forms of nature,
The male runs a terrifying risk when he goes seeking for 
 the bounty of beautiful Alma Magna Mater:
Yet clearly and truly he must seek and find ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious april walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds' irregular babel
And the leaves' litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower;
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then! --
Scr...Read more of this...

by Scott, Sir Walter
...lithe strathspey,
     Nor half so pleased mine ear incline
     To royal minstrel's lay as thine.
     And then for suitors proud and high,
     To bend before my conquering eye,—
     Thou, flattering bard! thyself wilt say,
     That grim Sir Roderick owns its sway.
     The Saxon scourge, Clan-Alpine's pride,
     The terror of Loch Lomond's side,
     Would, at my suit, thou know'st, delay
     A Lennox foray—for a day.'—
     XII..

     The ancient bard he...Read more of this...

by Sherrick, Fannie Isabelle
...to a wild desire;
I envied the rose in her hands so fair,
I envied the flowers that gleamed in her hair.
Ah! many a suitor I knew before
Had knelt at her feet in the days of yore;
And many a lover as foolish as I,
Had proudly boasted to win or die.
She had scorned them all with a careless grace
And a woman's scorn on her beautiful face.
Yet now in the summer I knelt at her feet,
And dreamed a dream that was fair and sweet.
The roses drooped in her gold-brown hair,...Read more of this...

by Montgomery, Lucy Maud
...king my heady clamor­
Thus, is it thus I must woo thee, oh, my delight? 

Nay, 'tis no way of the sea thus to be meekly suitor­
I shall storm thee away with laughter wrapped in my beard of snow,
With the wildest of billows for chords I shall harp thee a song for thy bridal,
A mighty lyric of love that feared not nor would forego! 

With a red-gold wedding ring, mined from the caves of sunset,
Fast shall I bind thy faith to my faith evermore,
And the stars will wait on our ple...Read more of this...

by Kenyon, Jane
...derstand that I am happy. 
For months this feeling 
has been coming closer, stopping
for short visits, like a timid suitor....Read more of this...

by Lanier, Sidney
...table days
Deem men their life an opal gray, where plays
The one red Sweet of gracious ladies'-praise.
Now, comes a suitor with sharp prying eye --
Says, `Here, you Lady, if you'll sell, I'll buy:
Come, heart for heart -- a trade? What! weeping? why?'
Shame on such wooers' dapper mercery!
I would my lover kneeling at my feet
In humble manliness should cry, `O sweet!
I know not if thy heart my heart will greet:
I ask not if thy love my love can meet:
Whate'er thy worshipfu...Read more of this...

by Stevenson, Robert Louis
...bed 
Where none but elders laid their head; 
The little room where you and I 
Did for awhile together lie 
And, simple, suitor, I your hand 
In decent marriage did demand; 
The great day nursery, best of all, 
With pictures pasted on the wall 
And leaves upon the blind-- 
A pleasant room wherein to wake 
And hear the leafy garden shake 
And rustle in the wind-- 
And pleasant there to lie in bed 
And see the pictures overhead-- 
The wars about Sebastopol, 
The grinning guns al...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...n it ere it comes,
Afraid of Joy,
Then sue it to delay
And lest it fly,
Beguile it more and more --
May not this be
Old Suitor Heaven,
Like our dismay at thee?...Read more of this...

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