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Famous Sundown Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Carman, Bliss
...he small Gaspereau,
Whose yellow leaves repeat it, seems to know
A new felicity.

Even the shadows tall,
Walking at sundown through the plain, recall
A mound the grasses keep,
Where once a mortal came and found long sleep
By the Aurelian Wall....Read more of this...



by Celan, Paul
...Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink it and drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents
 he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden
 hair Margarete
he writes it ans steps out of doors and the stars are
 flashing he whistles his pack ou...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...I

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb ...Read more of this...

by Dyke, Henry Van
...ng beside the nest
Told of the love that broods o'er every living thing.
He watched the shepherd bring
His flock at sundown to the welcome fold,
The fisherman at daybreak fling
His net across the waters gray and cold,
And all day long the patient reaper swing
His curving sickle through the harvest-gold.
So through the world the foot-path way he trod,
Drawing the air of heaven in every breath;
And in the evening sacrifice of death
Beneath the open sky he gave his soul ...Read more of this...

by Toomer, Jean
...I am a reaper whose muscles set at sundown. All my oats are cradled. 
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. 
And I hunger. 

I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it. 
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. 
I hunger. 

My eyes are caked with dust of oatfields at harvest-time. 
I am a blind man who stares across t...Read more of this...



by Dunn, Stephen
...d the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we're all saying
each other's names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.
I've come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they're all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ging as he stands, 
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or 
at noon intermission or at sundown, 
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of 
the girl sewing or washing, 
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else, 
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, 
robust, friendly, 
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured,
 native-born, out on the vacant lot at sundown, after work,
The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, 
The upper-hold and the under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; 
The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through
 clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, 
The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes su...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...> "

 We finished our coffee and left. Not a drop of rain had fal-

len in Stanley. It was about an hour before sundown.

 We drove up to Big Redfish Lake, about four miles from

Stanley and looked it over. Big Redfish Lake is the Forest

Lawn of camping in Idaho, laid out for maximum comfort.

There were a lot of people camped there, and some of them

looked as if they had been camped there for a long time.

 We decided that we were too young to camp ...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ing in the world
 only an ocean of to-morrows,
 a sky of to-morrows.

I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say
 at sundown:
 To-morrow is a day....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...sts, as they strike the grain and grass with the
 showers
 of
 their terrible clouds;
I hear the Coptic refrain, toward sundown, pensively falling on the breast of the black
 venerable
 vast mother, the Nile; 
I hear the bugles of raft-tenders on the streams of Kanada; 
I hear the chirp of the Mexican muleteer, and the bells of the mule; 
I hear the Arab muezzin, calling from the top of the mosque; 
I hear the Christian priests at the altars of their churches—I hear the respo...Read more of this...

by Betjeman, John
...wind about her hair, 
The tennis-playing, biking girl, 
The wholly-to-my-liking girl, 
To see and not to care.

At sundown on my tricycle
I tour the Borough’s edge, 
And icy as an icicle
See bicycle by bicycle
Stacked waiting in the hedge.

Get down from me! I thunder there, 
You spaniels! Shut your jaws! 
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear, 
Suspenders torn asunder there
And buttocks in your paws! 

Oh whip the dogs away my Lord, 
They make me ill with lust.
...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...in
Was loosened and the lily's petal furled,
Then I would rise, climb the old wall again,
And pausing look forth on the sundown world,
Scan the wide reaches of the wondrous plain,
The hamlet sites where settling smoke lay curled,
The poplar-bordered roads, and far away
Fair snowpeaks colored with the sun's last ray.

Waves of faint sound would pulsate from afar
Faint song and preludes of the summer night;
Deep in the cloudless west the evening star
Hung 'twixt the orange ...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...g men played together
On the ice the noisy ball-play,
On the plain the dance of snow-shoes.
One dark evening, after sundown,
In her wigwam Laughing Water
Sat with old Nokomis, waiting
For the steps of Hiawatha
Homeward from the hunt returning.
On their faces gleamed the firelight,
Painting them with streaks of crimson,
In the eyes of old Nokomis
Glimmered like the watery moonlight,
In the eyes of Laughing Water
Glistened like the sun in water;
And behind them crouched...Read more of this...

by Arnold, Matthew
...orn— 
All the live murmur of a summer's day.

Screened is this nook o'er the high, half-reaped field,
And here till sundown, shepherd! will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travel...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...King Eochaid came at sundown to a wood
Westward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen
He had outridden his war-wasted men
That with empounded cattle trod the mire,
And where beech-trees had mixed a pale green light
With the ground-ivy's blue, he saw a stag
Whiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea.
Because it stood upon his path and seemed
More hands in height than any st...Read more of this...

by Seeger, Alan
...erged. 
Before him tireless to applaud it surged 
The sweet interminable spectacle.

And like the west behind a sundown sea 
Shone the past joys his memory retraced, 
And bright as the blue east he always faced 
Beckoned the loves and joys that were to be.

From every branch a blossom for his brow 
He gathered, singing down Life's flower-lined road, 
And youth impelled his spirit as he strode 
Like winged Victory on the galley's prow.

That Loveliness whose be...Read more of this...

by Justice, Donald
...Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

Or are Americans half in love with failure?
One used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.
(That Viking Portable, all water spotted and yellow--

remember?) Or does mere dis...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...rn the burial-house of him I love? 

Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes, 
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, 
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding
 the
 air; 
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific;
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and
 there; 
With ranging hill...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...light,
And that she not sing of the past times
He killed my bird colored white.

He said, in the lighthouse at sundown:
"Love me, laugh and write poetry!"
And I buried the joyous songbird
Behind a round well near a tree.

I promised that I would not mourn her.
But my heart turned to stone without choice,
And it seems to me that everywhere
And always I'll hear her sweet voice.



x x x

True love's memory, You are heavy!
In your smoke I si...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things