Famous Sunday Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Sunday Morning

by Wallace Stevens
1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide...Read more of this...

Sunday

by James Schuyler
 The mint bed is in
bloom: lavender haze
day. The grass is 
more than green and
throws up sharp and 
cutting lights to 
slice through the 
plane tree leaves. And 
on the cloudless blue 
I scribble your name....Read more of this...

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone

by Wystan Hugh (W H) Auden
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic...Read more of this...

The Organ-Blower

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 DEVOUTEST of my Sunday friends,
The patient Organ-blower bends;
I see his figure sink and rise,
(Forgive me, Heaven, my wandering eyes!)
A moment lost, the next half seen,
His head above the scanty screen,
Still measuring out his deep salaams
Through quavering hymns and panting psalms.

No priest that prays in gilded stole,
To save a rich man's mortgaged soul;
No sister, fresh from holy vows,
So humbly stoops,...Read more of this...

Written On Sunday Morning

by Robert Southey
 Go thou and seek the House of Prayer!
I to the Woodlands wend, and there
In lovely Nature see the GOD OF LOVE.
The swelling organ's peal
Wakes not my soul to zeal,
Like the wild music of the wind-swept grove.
The gorgeous altar and the mystic vest
Rouse not such ardor in my breast,
As where the noon-tide beam
Flash'd from the broken stream,
Quick vibrates on the...Read more of this...

Onion Days

by Carl Sandburg
 MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNITTI comes along Peoria Street
every morning at nine o'clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes
looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.
Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Pietro Giovannitti, whose
husband was killed in a tunnel explosion through
the negligence of a fellow-servant,
Works ten hours a day, sometimes twelve, picking onions
for Jasper on the Bowmanville...Read more of this...

Sunday up the River

by James Thomson
 MY love o'er the water bends dreaming; 
 It glideth and glideth away: 
She sees there her own beauty, gleaming 
 Through shadow and ripple and spray. 

O tell her, thou murmuring river, 
 As past her your light wavelets roll, 
How steadfast that image for ever 
 Shines pure in pure depths of my soul....Read more of this...

Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.

The Jew of Malta.

POLYPHILOPROGENITIVE
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.
Superfetation of ,
And at the mensual turn of time
Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through...Read more of this...

A Florida Sunday

by Sidney Lanier
 From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
Breathe salutary balms through lank-lock'd hair
Of sick men's heads, and soon -- this world outworn --
Sink into saintly heavens of stirless air,
Clean from confessional. One died, this morn,
And willed the world to wise Queen...Read more of this...

Today Is Sunday

by Nazim Hikmet
 Today is Sunday. 
For the first time they took me out into the sun today. 
And for the first time in my life I was aghast 
that the sky is so far away 
and so blue 
and so vast 
I stood there without a motion. 
Then I sat on the ground with respectful devotion 
leaning against the white wall....Read more of this...

Cape Breton

by Elizabeth Bishop
 Out on the high "bird islands," Ciboux and Hertford, 
the razorbill auks and the silly-looking puffins all stand 
with their backs to the mainland 
in solemn, uneven lines along the cliff's brown grass-frayed edge, 
while the few sheep pastured there go "Baaa, baaa." 
(Sometimes, frightened by aeroplanes, they stampede 
and fall over into the sea or onto the rocks.)...Read more of this...

A Gardener-Sage

by Katharine Tynan
 Here in the garden-bed, 
Hoeing the celery, 
Wonders the Lord has made 
Pass ever before me.
I see the young birds build, 
And swallows come and go, 
And summer grow and gild, 
And winter die in snow. 

Many a thing I note,
And store it in my mind, 
For all my ragged coat 
That scarce will stop the wind. 
I light...Read more of this...

Leeds

by Barry Tebb
 O my beloved city,

How many times have I deserted you

For the sights and sounds of Babylon?

How often and from how far

Have I conjured your broad boulevards

O Quartier Latin, crowded street caf?s

With white and scarlet awnings, gold

Adornings on stone cupolas, Byzantine domes

And plinths of equine statuary before

The Gare du Nord, grumbling fading

Faience of the Gare de l’Est?



Often, O how often,...Read more of this...

Saturday, Sunday

by Mother Goose
On Saturday night
    Shall be all my care
To powder my locks
    And curl my hair.

On Sunday morning
    My love will come in.
When he will marry me
    With a gold ring....Read more of this...

Solomon Grundy

by Mother Goose
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
This is the end
Of Solomon Grundy....Read more of this...

The Chapel in Lyonesse

by William Morris
 SIR OZANA.

All day long and every day,
From Christmas-Eve to Whit-Sunday,
Within that Chapel-aisle I lay,
And no man came a-near.

Naked to the waist was I,
And deep within my breast did lie,
Though no man any blood could spy,
The truncheon of a spear.

No meat did ever pass my lips
Those days. Alas! the sunlight slips
From off the gilded parclose, dips,
And night comes on apace.

My...Read more of this...

Chords

by Carl Sandburg
 IN the morning, a Sunday morning, shadows of sea and adumbrants of rock in her eyes … horseback in leather boots and leather gauntlets by the sea.

In the evening, a Sunday evening, a rope of pearls on her white shoulders … and a speaking, brooding black velvet, relapsing to the voiceless … battering Russian marches on a piano …...Read more of this...

The Cottage Hospital

by John Betjeman
 At the end of a long-walled garden in a red provincial town,
A brick path led to a mulberry- scanty grass at its feet.
I lay under blackening branches where the mulberry leaves hung down
Sheltering ruby fruit globes from a Sunday-tea-time heat.
Apple and plum espaliers basked upon bricks of brown;
The air was swimming with insects, and children played in the street.

Out...Read more of this...

The Black Monkey

by Katherine Mansfield
 My Babbles has a nasty knack
Of keeping monkeys on her back.
A great big black one comes and swings
Right on her sash or pinny strings.
It is a horrid thing and wild
And makes her such a naughty child.

She comes and stands beside my chair
With almost an offended air
And says:--"Oh, Father, why can't I?"
And stamps her foot and starts to cry--
I look...Read more of this...

The September Gale

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 I'M not a chicken; I have seen 
Full many a chill September, 
And though I was a youngster then, 
That gale I well remember; 
The day before, my kite-string snapped, 
And I, my kite pursuing, 
The wind whisked off my palm-leaf hat; 
For me two storms were brewing!

It came as quarrels sometimes do, 
When married folks get clashing;
There was...Read more of this...

No Sunday Chicken

by Robert William Service
 I could have sold him up because
 His rent was long past due;
And Grimes, my lawyer, said it was
 The proper thing to do:
But how could I be so inhuman?
 And me a gentle-woman.

Yet I am poor as chapel mouse,
 Pinching to make ends meet,
And have to let my little house
 To buy enough to eat:
Why, even now to...Read more of this...

The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon

by J R R Tolkien
 There is an inn, a merry old inn
beneath an old grey hill,
And there they brew a beer so brown
That the Man in the Moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

The ostler has a tipsy cat
that plays a five-stringed fiddle;
And up and down he saws his bow
Now squeaking high, now purring low,
now sawing in the middle.

The landlord keeps...Read more of this...

Sunday

by George Herbert
 O day most calm, most bright 
The fruit of this, the next world's bud, 
Th'endorsement of supreme delight, 
Writ by a friend, and with his blood; 
The couch of time; care's balm and bay: 
The week were dark, but for thy light: 
Thy torch doth show the way. 

The other days and thou 
Make up one man; whose face...Read more of this...

An Edwardian Sunday Broomhill Sheffield

by John Betjeman
 High dormers are rising
So sharp and surprising,
And ponticum edges
The driveways of gravel;
Stone houses from ledges
Look down on ravines.
The vision can travel
From gable to gable,
Italianate mansion
And turretted stable,
A sylvan expansion
So varied and jolly
Where laurel and holly
Commingle their greens.

Serene on a Sunday
The sun glitters hotly
O'er mills that on Monday
With engines will hum.
By tramway excursion
To Dore and to Totley
In search of diversion
The...Read more of this...

Sunday Afternoons

by Erica Jong
 I sit at home
at my desk alone
as I used to do
on many sunday afternoons
when you came back to me,
your arms ached for me,
and your arms would close me in
though they smelled of other women.

I think of you
on Sunday afternoons.

Your sweet head would bow,
like a child somehow,
down to me -
and your hair and your eyes were wild.

We would embrace on...Read more of this...

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