Famous Take Root Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Genesis

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 In the outer world that was before this earth,
That was before all shape or space was born,
Before the blind first hour of time had birth,
Before night knew the moonlight or the morn;

Yea, before any world had any light,
Or anything called God or man drew breath,
Slowly the strong sides of the heaving night
Moved, and brought forth the strength of life...Read more of this...

Coole Park 1929

by William Butler Yeats
 I meditate upon a swallow's flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature's spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled...Read more of this...

Celestial Love

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Higher far,
Upward, into the pure realm,
Over sun or star,
Over the flickering Dæmon film,
Thou must mount for love,—
Into vision which all form
In one only form dissolves;
In a region where the wheel,
On which all beings ride,
Visibly revolves;
Where the starred eternal worm
Girds the world with bound and term;
Where unlike things are like,
When good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one.
There Past, Present,...Read more of this...

The Seer

by George William Russell
 OH, if my spirit may foretell
 Or earlier impart,
It is because I always dwell
 With morning in my heart.


I feel the keen embrace of light
 Ere dawning on the view
It sprays the chilly fold of night
 With iridescent dew.


The robe of dust around it cast
 Hides not the earth below,
Its heart of ruby flame, the vast
 Mysterious gloom and...Read more of this...

Here Died

by Henry Lawson
 There's many a schoolboy's bat and ball that are gathering dust at home, 
For he hears a voice in the future call, and he trains for the war to come; 
A serious light in his eyes is seen as he comes from the schoolhouse gate; 
He keeps his kit and his rifle clean, and he sees that his back...Read more of this...

Redbud Trail - Winter

by James Lee Jobe
 It??™s two muddy miles from Highway 20,
just past the north fork of Cache Creek,
across the broad meadow, through 
blue oak woodland, up, up to the ridge,
and back down to the creek bank,
the crossing point, me striding with
mud caking my old hiking boots.



For a millennia the Miwok people walked 
these canyons and ridges. Pomo, too.
Gathering acorns to trade, the sweetest...Read more of this...

Faith

by George Herbert
 Lord, how couldst thou so much appease
Thy wrath for sin, as when man's sight was dim, 
And could see little, to regard his ease, 
And bring by Faith all things to him? 

Hungry I was, and had no meat: 
I did conceit a most delicious feast; 
I had it straight, and did as truly eat, 
As ever did a...Read more of this...

The Bride Of Corinth

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [First published in Schiller's Horen, in connection 
with a
friendly contest in the art of ballad-writing between the two
great poets, to which many of their finest works are owing.]

ONCE a stranger youth to Corinth came,

Who in Athens lived, but hoped that he
From a certain townsman there might claim,

As his father's friend, kind courtesy.

Son and daughter, they

Had been wont to say

Should...Read more of this...

The Three Bushes

by William Butler Yeats
 An incident from the `Historia mei Temporis'
of the Abbe Michel de Bourdeille

Said lady once to lover,
'None can rely upon
A love that lacks its proper food;
And if your love were gone
How could you sing those songs of love?
I should be blamed, young man.
 O my dear, O my dear.

Have no lit candles in your room,'
That lovely lady said,
'That I at...Read more of this...

Passing away saith the World

by Christina Rossetti
 Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty and youth, sapp'd day by day:
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answer'd: Yea.

Passing...Read more of this...

87. The Twa Dogs

by Robert Burns
 ’TWAS 1 in that place o’ Scotland’s isle,
That bears the name o’ auld King Coil,
Upon a bonie day in June,
When wearin’ thro’ the afternoon,
Twa dogs, that were na thrang at hame,
Forgather’d ance upon a time.
 The first I’ll name, they ca’d him Caesar,
Was keepit for His Honor’s pleasure:
His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs,
Shew’d he was nane o’...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXVI

by Edmund Spenser
 SWeet is the Rose, but growes vpon a brere;
Sweet is the Iunipere, but sharpe his bough;
sweet is the Eglantine, but pricketh nere;
sweet is the firbloome, but his braunches rough.
Sweet is the Cypresse, but his rynd is tough,
sweet is the nut, but bitter is his pill;
sweet is the broome-flowre, but yet sowre enough;
and sweet is Moly, but his root is...Read more of this...

Initial Love

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Venus, when her son was lost,
Cried him up and down the coast,
In hamlets, palaces, and parks,
And told the truant by his marks,
Golden curls, and quiver, and bow;—
This befell long ago.
Time and tide are strangely changed,
Men and manners much deranged;
None will now find Cupid latent
By this foolish antique patent.
He came late along the waste,
Shod like a traveller for haste,
With malice...Read more of this...

Root Cellar

by Theodore Roethke
 Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt...Read more of this...

The Cow In Apple-Time

by Robert Frost
 Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She...Read more of this...

I think that the Root of the Wind is Water --

by Emily Dickinson
 I think that the Root of the Wind is Water --
It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product --
Airs no Oceans keep --
Mediterranean intonations --
To a Current's Ear --
There is a maritime conviction
In the Atmosphere --...Read more of this...

To Robert Nichols

by Robert Graves
 (From Frise on the Somme in February, 1917, in answer to a letter saying: “I am just finishing my ‘Faun’s Holiday.’ I wish you were here to feed him with cherries.”)


Here by a snowbound river 
In scrapen holes we shiver, 
And like old bitterns we 
Boom to you plaintively: 
Robert, how can I rhyme
Verses for your desire— 
Sleek fauns...Read more of this...

Shattered Head

by Adrienne Rich
 A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun's tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
When? When? cry the soothseekers
but time is a bloodshot eye
seeing its last of beauty its own
foreclosure
a bloodshot mind
finding itself unspeakable
What is the last thought?
Now I will let you know?
or, Now I know?
(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue
mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid) 

Shattered head on the...Read more of this...

I In My Intricate Image

by Dylan Thomas
 I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She...Read more of this...

Drink wine to root up metaphysic weeds,

by Omar Khayyam
Drink wine to root up metaphysic weeds,
And tangle of the two-and-seventy creeds;
Do not forswear that wondrous alchemy,
'Twill turn to gold, and cure a thousand needs....Read more of this...

The Times Are Nightfall

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less; 
The times are winter, watch, a world undone: 
They waste, they wither worse; they as they run 
Or bring more or more blazon man’s distress. 
And I not help. Nor word now of success:
All is from wreck, here, there, to rescue one— 
Work which to see scarce so much as...Read more of this...

Change Upon Change

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 Five months ago the stream did flow,
The lilies bloomed within the sedge,
And we were lingering to and fro,
Where none will track thee in this snow,
Along the stream, beside the hedge.
Ah, Sweet, be free to love and go!
For if I do not hear thy foot,
The frozen river is as mute,
The flowers have dried down to the root:
And why, since these...Read more of this...

Give Me Strength

by Rabindranath Tagore
 This is my prayer to thee, my lord---strike, 
strike at the root of penury in my heart. 

Give me the strength lightly to bear my joys and sorrows. 

Give me the strength to make my love fruitful in service. 

Give me the strength never to disown the poor or bend my knees before insolent might. 

Give me the strength...Read more of this...

Barefoot

by Anne Sexton
 Loving me with my shows off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
let out to play naked. Intricate nubs,
my toes. No longer bound.
And what's more, see toenails and
all ten stages, root by root.
All spirited and wild, this little
piggy went to market and this little piggy
stayed. Long brown legs and long brown...Read more of this...

To A Child

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Dear child! how radiant on thy mother's knee,
With merry-making eyes and jocund smiles,
Thou gazest at the painted tiles,
Whose figures grace,
With many a grotesque form and face.
The ancient chimney of thy nursery!
The lady with the gay macaw,
The dancing girl, the grave bashaw
With bearded lip and chin;
And, leaning idly o'er his gate,
Beneath the imperial fan of state,
The Chinese mandarin.

With what a...Read more of this...

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