Famous Swarthy Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Jay his Castanet has struck

by Emily Dickinson
 The Jay his Castanet has struck
Put on your **** for Winter
The Tippet that ignores his voice
Is impudent to nature

Of Swarthy Days he is the close
His Lotus is a chestnut
The Cricket drops a sable line
No more from yours at present...Read more of this...

The Malay -- took the Pearl

by Emily Dickinson
 The Malay -- took the Pearl --
Not -- I -- the Earl --
I -- feared the Sea -- too much
Unsanctified -- to touch --

Praying that I might be
Worthy -- the Destiny --
The Swarthy fellow swam --
And bore my Jewel -- Home --

Home to the Hut! What lot
Had I -- the Jewel -- got --
Borne on a Dusky Breasty --
I...Read more of this...

The Talking Oak

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 Once more the gate behind me falls; 
Once more before my face 
I see the moulder'd Abbey-walls, 
That stand within the chace. 

Beyond the lodge the city lies, 
Beneath its drift of smoke; 
And ah! with what delighted eyes 
I turn to yonder oak. 

For when my passion first began, 
Ere that, which in me burn'd, 
The love, that...Read more of this...

Angel Or Demon

by Victor Hugo
 ("Tu domines notre âge; ange ou démon, qu'importe!") 
 
 {I. vii.} 


 Angel or demon! thou,—whether of light 
 The minister, or darkness—still dost sway 
 This age of ours; thine eagle's soaring flight 
 Bears us, all breathless, after it away. 
 The eye that from thy presence fain would stray, 
 Shuns thee in vain; thy...Read more of this...

The Boy

by William Allingham
 The Boy from his bedroom-window 
Look'd over the little town, 
And away to the bleak black upland 
Under a clouded moon. 

The moon came forth from her cavern, 
He saw the sudden gleam 
Of a tarn in the swarthy moorland; 
Or perhaps the whole was a dream. 

For I never could find that water 
In all my walks and...Read more of this...

The Plea of the Simla Dancers

by Rudyard Kipling
  Too late, alas! the song
 To remedy the wrong; --
The rooms are taken from us, swept and
 garnished for their fate.
 But these tear-besprinkled pages
 Shall attest to future ages
That we cried against the crime of it --
 too late, alas! too late!


"What have we ever done to bear this grudge?"
 Was there no room save only in...Read more of this...

Ode To Ethiopia

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
O Mother Race! to thee I bring
This pledge of faith unwavering,
This tribute to thy glory.
I know the pangs which thou didst feel,
When Slavery crushed thee with its heel,
With thy dear blood all gory.
Sad days were those—ah, sad indeed!
But through the land the fruitful seed
Of better times was growing.
The plant of freedom upward sprung,
And spread its leaves so fresh and young—
Its...Read more of this...

Kiama

by Henry Kendall
TOWARDS the hills of Jamberoo 
Some few fantastic shadows haste, 
Uplit with fires 
Like castle spires 
Outshining through a mirage waste. 
Behold, a mournful glory sits 
On feathered ferns and woven brakes, 
Where sobbing wild like restless child 

The gusty breeze of evening wakes! 
Methinks I hear on every breath 
A lofty tone go passing by, 
That whispers - ``Weave,...Read more of this...

The Lovers of the Poor

by Gwendolyn Brooks
 arrive. The Ladies from the Ladies' Betterment
League
Arrive in the afternoon, the late light slanting
In diluted gold bars across the boulevard brag
Of proud, seamed faces with mercy and murder hinting
Here, there, interrupting, all deep and debonair,
The pink paint on the innocence of fear;
Walk in a gingerly manner up the hall. 
Cutting with knives served by their softest care,
Served by their...Read more of this...

On Gray Eyes

by William Strode
 Looke how the russet morne exceeds the night,
How sleekest Jett yields to the di'monds light,
So farr the glory of the gray-bright eye
Out-vyes the black in lovely majesty.
A morning mantl'd with a fleece of gray
Laughs from her brow and shewes a spotlesse day:
This di'mond-like doth not his lustre owe
To borrowed helpe, as black thinges cast a show,
It needs noe day...Read more of this...

North and South

by Claude McKay
 O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams! 
There time and life move lazily along. 
There by the banks of blue-and-silver streams 
Grass-sheltered crickets chirp incessant song, 
Gay-colored lizards loll all through the day, 
Their tongues outstretched for careless little flies, 
And swarthy children in the fields at play, 
Look upward laughing at the smiling skies. 
A breath of...Read more of this...

Liaison

by D. H. Lawrence
 A big bud of moon hangs out of the twilight,
Star-spiders spinning their thread 
Hang high suspended, withouten respite
Watching us overhead. 

Come then under the trees, where the leaf-cloths
Curtain us in so dark
That here we’re safe from even the ermin-moth’s
Flitting remark.

Here in this swarthy, secret tent,
Where black boughs flap the ground,
You shall draw the thorn from my discontent,
Surgeon me sound....Read more of this...

A Nocturnal Reverie

by Anne Kingsmill Finch
In such a night, when every louder wind
Is to its distant cavern safe confined;
And only gentle Zephyr fans his wings,
And lonely Philomel, still waking, sings;
Or from some tree, famed for the owl's delight,
She, hollowing clear, directs the wand'rer right:
In such a night, when passing clouds give place,
Or thinly veil the heav'ns' mysterious face;
When in some river, overhung with green,
The waving...Read more of this...

The Maid Of The Mills Repentance

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 YOUTH.

AWAY, thou swarthy witch! Go forth

From out my house, I tell thee!
Or else I needs must, in my wrath,

Expel thee!
What's this thou singest so falsely, forsooth,
Of love and a maiden's silent truth?

Who'll trust to such a story!

GIPSY.

I sing of a maid's repentant fears,

And long and bitter yearning;
Her levity's changed to truth and tears

All-burning.
She dreads no more the threats of...Read more of this...

Tormented

by Claude McKay
 I will not reason, wrestle here with you, 
Though you pursue and worry me about; 
As well put forth my swarthy arm to stop 
The wild wind howling, darkly mad without. 

The night is yours for revels; day will light. 
I will not fight you, bold and tigerish, 
For I am weak, while you are gaining strength; 
Peace! cease...Read more of this...

Through Agony

by Claude McKay
 I 

All night, through the eternity of night, 
Pain was my potion though I could not feel. 
Deep in my humbled heart you ground your heel, 
Till I was reft of even my inner light, 
Till reason from my mind had taken flight, 
And all my world went whirling in a reel. 
And all my swarthy strength turned cold...Read more of this...

Commemoration

by Claude McKay
 When first your glory shone upon my face 
My body kindled to a mighty flame, 
And burnt you yielding in my hot embrace 
Until you swooned to love, breathing my name. 

And wonder came and filled our night of sleep, 
Like a new comet crimsoning the sky; 
And stillness like the stillness of the deep 
Suspended lay as an...Read more of this...

Jack

by Carl Sandburg
 JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight children
and the woman died and the children grew up and
went away and wrote the old man every two years.
He died in the poorhouse sitting on a bench in...Read more of this...

The Torture of Cuauhtemoc

by Alan Seeger
 Their strength had fed on this when Death's white arms 
Came sleeved in vapors and miasmal dew, 
Curling across the jungle's ferny floor, 
Becking each fevered brain. On bleak divides, 
Where Sleep grew niggardly for nipping cold 
That twinged blue lips into a mouthed curse, 
Not back to Seville and its sunny plains 
Winged their brief-biding dreams, but once...Read more of this...

Those Names

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 The shearers sat in the firelight, hearty and hale and strong, 
After the hard day's shearing, passing the joke along: 
The "ringer" that shore a hundred, as they never were shorn before, 
And the novice who, toiling bravely, had tommy-hawked half a score, 
The tarboy, the cook and the skushy, the sweeper that swept the board, 
The picker-up, and...Read more of this...

Behold this Swarthy Face

by Walt Whitman
 BEHOLD this swarthy face—these gray eyes, 
This beard—the white wool, unclipt upon my neck, 
My brown hands, and the silent manner of me, without charm; 
Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting, kisses me lightly on the lips with
 robust
 love, 
And I, on the crossing of the street, or on the ship’s deck, give a kiss...Read more of this...

On Building With Stone

by Robinson Jeffers
 To be an ape in little of the mountain-making mother
Like swarthy Cheops, but my own hands
For only slaves, is a far sweeter toil than to cut
Passions in verse for a sick people.
I'd liefer bed one boulder in the house-wall than be the time's
Archilochus: we name not Homer: who now
Can even imagine the fabulous dawn when bay-leaves (to a blind
Beggar)...Read more of this...

The Eavesdropper

by Bliss Carman
 In a still room at hush of dawn,
My Love and I lay side by side
And heard the roaming forest wind
Stir in the paling autumn-tide.
I watched her earth-brown eyes grow glad
Because the round day was so fair;
While memories of reluctant night
Lurked in the blue dusk of her hair.
Outside, a yellow maple tree,
Shifting upon the silvery blue
With tiny multitudinous sound,
Rustled to...Read more of this...

The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3

by Alexander Pope
 Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs, 
Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs,
There stands a structure of majestic frame,
Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its name.
Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home;
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take--and sometimes tea.
Hither the heroes and the...Read more of this...

Whether or Not

by D. H. Lawrence
I

Dunna thee tell me its his'n, mother,
      Dunna thee, dunna thee.
--Oh ay! he'll be comin' to tell thee his-sèn
      Wench, wunna he?

Tha doesna mean to say to me, mother,
      He's gone wi that--
--My gel, owt'll do for a man i' the dark,
   ...Read more of this...

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