Famous Sunlight Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Little Lucy Landman

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, the day has set me dreaming
In a strange, half solemn way
Of the feelings I experienced
On another long past day,—
Of the way my heart made music
When the buds began to blow,
And o' little Lucy Landman
Whom I loved long years ago.
It 's in spring, the poet tells us,
That we turn to thoughts of love,
And our hearts go out a-wooing
With the lapwing...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

Impatience

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 How can I wait until you come to me? 
The once fleet mornings linger by the way; 
Their sunny smiles touched with malicious glee
At my unrest, they seem to pause, and play
Like truant children, while I sigh and say, 
How can I wait? 

How can I wait? Of old, the rapid hours
Refused to pause or loiter with me long;...Read more of this...

For The Moment

by Pierre Reverdy
 Life is simple and gay
The bright sun rings with a quiet sound
The sound of the bells has quieted 
 down
This morning the light hits it all 
The footlights of my head are lit again
And the room I live in is finally bright

Just one beam is enough
Just one burst of laughter
My joy that shakes the house 
Restrains those wanting to...Read more of this...

Two Songs by Sitara, of Kashmir

by Adela Florence Cory Nicolson
   Beloved! your hair was golden
   As tender tints of sunrise,
   As corn beside the River
         In softly varying hues.
   I loved you for your slightness,
   Your melancholy sweetness,
   Your changeful eyes, that promised
      ...Read more of this...

Fatima

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 O Love, Love, Love! O withering might!
O sun, that from thy noonday height
Shudderest when I strain my sight,
Throbbing thro' all thy heat and light,
 Lo, falling from my constant mind,
 Lo, parch'd and wither'd, deaf and blind,
 I whirl like leaves in roaring wind.

Last night I wasted hateful hours
Below the city's eastern towers:
I thirsted for the brooks, the showers:
I...Read more of this...

The Andante of Snakes

by Arthur Symons
 They weave a slow andante as in sleep, 
Scaled yellow, swampy black, plague-spotted white; 
With blue and lidless eyes at watch they keep 
A treachery of silence; infinite 

Ancestral angers brood in these dull eyes 
Where the long-lineaged venom of the snake 
Meditates evil; woven intricacies 
Of Oriental arabesque awake, 

Unfold, expand, contract, and raise and sway 
Swoln heart-shaped...Read more of this...

Prelude

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Pleasant it was, when woods were green,
And winds were soft and low,
To lie amid some sylvan scene.
Where, the long drooping boughs between,
Shadows dark and sunlight sheen
Alternate come and go;

Or where the denser grove receives
No sunlight from above,
But the dark foliage interweaves
In one unbroken roof of leaves,
Underneath whose sloping eaves
The shadows hardly move.

Beneath some patriarchal tree
I lay upon the ground;
His...Read more of this...

Third Avenue In Sunlight

by Anthony Hecht
 Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature's error.
Already the bars are filled and John is there.
Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror
He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air.
I think of him when he first got out of college,
Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed;
For several months he hung around the Village,
Boldly T-shirtet, unfettered but unfreed.

Now he confides to a stranger, "I...Read more of this...

Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight

by Robert Frost
 When I spread out my hand here today,
I catch no more than a ray
To feel of between thumb and fingers;
No lasting effect of it lingers.

There was one time and only the one
When dust really took in the sun;
And from that one intake of fire
All creatures still warmly suspire.

And if men have watched a long time
And never seen sun-smitten slime
Again...Read more of this...

Telephoning In Mexican Sunlight

by Galway Kinnell
 Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt.
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
"made her bed in his ear" and "slept him...Read more of this...

Waterfall at Lu-shan

by Li Po
 Sunlight streams on the river stones.
From high above, the river steadily plunges--

three thousand feet of sparkling water--
the Milky Way pouring down from heaven....Read more of this...

(From) The Nowhere Man

by Pritish Nandy
When you first came, quiet as the rain that never fell,
in the sunlight that never shone, I whispered words
I had never known and now shall never forget. These
words have grown into secret songs. We have known, and
loved, and shared what only lovers can share in lyric
guilt. There can be nothing simpler than this love of
ours, nothing truer when this darkness...Read more of this...

When sunlight faileth

by Hafez
When sunlight faileth,
& day’s glow is gone;
When chill mist traileth
Where warm splendour shone;

When summer’s pleasure
Dieth,—dieth too
The transient treasure
That with life up-grew

& none may herit,
Where then wilt thou turn,
O vagrant spirit,
That no home didst earn;

When none replieth
Of thy friends so true,
When sweet Joy crieth
‘Adieu, love, adieu!’


...Read more of this...

When sunlight faileth

by Hafez
When sunlight faileth,
& day’s glow is gone;
When chill mist traileth
Where warm splendour shone;
When summer’s pleasure
Dieth,—dieth too
The transient treasure
That with life up-grew
& none may herit,
Where then wilt thou turn,
O vagrant spirit,
That no home didst earn;
When none replieth
Of thy friends so true,
When sweet Joy crieth
‘Adieu, love, adieu!’...Read more of this...

The Woman At The Washington Zoo

by Randall Jarrell
 The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet. 
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
 this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my...Read more of this...

Seagull from Afar

by Dejan Stojanovic
Lie on the ground and listen to the grass, 
Hear the silent signals from outer space, 
Dream by making and make by dreaming, 
Feel what the trees bathed in sunlight feel, 
Gaze far to see the sea-gull emerging from the sea, 
Imagine that today is the birth of the world and greet it, 
Greet the old bird. 
...Read more of this...

The Funeral of Youth: Threnody

by Rupert Brooke
 The Day that Youth had died,
There came to his grave-side, 
In decent mourning, from the country’s ends, 
Those scatter’d friends 
Who had lived the boon companions of his prime,
And laughed with him and sung with him and wasted, 
In feast and wine and many-crown’d carouse, 
The days and nights and dawnings of the time 
When Youth kept open house,...Read more of this...

The Phantom of Love

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
She stood by my side with a queenly air,
Her face it was young and proud and fair;
She held my rose in her hands of snow;
It crimsoned her face with a deeper glow;
The sunlight drooped in her eyes of fire
And quickened my heart to a wild desire;
I envied the rose in her hands so fair,
I envied the flowers that gleamed in...Read more of this...

Long Point Light

by Mark Doty
 Long Pont's apparitional
this warm spring morning,
the strand a blur of sandy light,


and the square white
of the lighthouse-separated from us
by the bay's ultramarine


as if it were nowhere
we could ever go-gleams
like a tower's ghost, hazing


into the rinsed blue of March,
our last outpost in the huge
indetermination of sea.


It seems cheerful enough,
in the strengthening sunlight,
fixed point accompanying our walk

along the shore. Sometimes I...Read more of this...

From Shadow

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Now the November skies,
And the clouds that are thin and gray,
That drop with the wind away;
A flood of sunlight rolls,
In a tide of shallow light,
Gold on the land and white
On the water, dim and warm in the wood;
Then it is gone, and the wan
Clear of the shade
Covers fields and barren and glade.
The peace of labor done,
Is wide in the...Read more of this...

Storm and Sunlight

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I

In barns we crouch, and under stacks of straw, 
Harking the storm that rides a hurtling legion 
Up the arched sky, and speeds quick heels of panic 
With growling thunder loosed in fork and clap 
That echoes crashing thro’ the slumbrous vault.
The whispering woodlands darken: vulture Gloom 
Stoops, menacing the skeltering flocks of Light, 
Where the gaunt shepherd shakes...Read more of this...

The Valley Of Unrest

by Edgar Allan Poe
 Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sunlight lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley's restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless-
Nothing save the airs that brood
Over the magic solitude.
Ah, by no...Read more of this...

After a Tempest

by William Cullen Bryant
 The day had been a day of wind and storm;-- 
The wind was laid, the storm was overpast,-- 
And stooping from the zenith, bright and warm 
Shone the great sun on the wide earth at last. 
I stood upon the upland slope and cast 
My eye upon a broad and beauteous scene, 
Where the vast plain lay girt by...Read more of this...

Seaport

by A S J Tessimond
 Green sea-tarnished copper
And sea-tarnished gold
Of cupolas.

Sea-runnelled streets
Channelled by salt air
That wears the white stone.

The sunlight-filled cistern
Of a dry-dock. Square shadows.
Sun-slatted smoke above meticulous stooping of cranes.

Water pressed up by ships' prows
Going, coming.

City dust turned
Back by the sea-wind's
Wall....Read more of this...

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