Famous Threshold Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Threshold poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous threshold poems. These examples illustrate what a famous threshold poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
William Butler Yeats
O what has made that sudden noise?
What on the threshold stands?
It never crossed the sea because
John Bull and the sea are friends;
But this is not the old sea
Nor this the old seashore.
What gave that roar of mockery,
That roar in the sea's roar?
The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
John Bull has stood for Parliament,
A dog must have his...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
v.1-4,10, paraphrased
C. M.
Delight in ordinances of worship; or, God present in his churches.
My soul, how lovely is the place
To which thy God resorts!
'Tis heav'n to see his smiling face,
Though in his earthly courts.
There the great Monarch of the skies
His saving power displays,
And light breaks in upon our eyes
With kind and quick'ning rays.
With his rich gifts the heav'nly Dove
Descends...Read more of this...
by
George William Russell
My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
Where, pondering how all human love and hate
Find one sad level; and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrongdoer, each with meekened...Read more of this...
by
Emile Verhaeren
Come even to our threshold, scattering your white ash, O peaceful, slowly falling snow: the lime-tree in the garden holds all its branches bowed, and the light calandra dissolves in the sky no longer.
O snow, who warm and protect the barely rising corn with the moss and wool that you spread from plain to plain! Silent snow, the gentle friend...Read more of this...
by
Jim Carroll
1/
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance
Pills and powdres only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift
Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheese...Read more of this...
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
"The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
"And all the phantom, Nature, stands--
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,--
A...Read more of this...
by
Coventry Patmore
Not in the crisis of events
Of compass'd hopes, or fears fulfill'd,
Or acts of gravest consequence,
Are life's delight and depth reveal'd.
The day of days was not the day;
That went before, or was postponed;
The night Death took our lamp away
Was not the night on which we groan'd.
I drew my bride, beneath the moon,
Across my threshold; happy hour!
But, ah, the walk that...Read more of this...
by
John Keats
Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring's honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has...Read more of this...
by
Christina Rossetti
There's blood between us, love, my love,
There's father's blood, there's brother's blood,
And blood's a bar I cannot pass.
I choose the stairs that mount above,
Stair after golden sky-ward stair,
To city and to sea of glass.
My lily feet are soiled with mud,
With scarlet mud which tells a tale
Of hope that was, of guilt that was,
Of love that shall not yet avail;
Alas,...Read more of this...
by
James Whitcomb Riley
New Castle, July 4, 1878
or a hundred years the pulse of time
Has throbbed for Liberty;
For a hundred years the grand old clime
Columbia has been free;
For a hundred years our country's love,
The Stars and Stripes, has waved above.
Away far out on the gulf of years--
Misty and faint and white
Through the fogs of wrong--a sail appears,
And the Mayflower heaves in sight,
And...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
I was not aware of the moment
when I first crossed the threshold of this life.
What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery
like a bud in the forest at midnight!
When in the morning I looked upon the light
I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,...Read more of this...
by
Marilyn Hacker
Her brown falcon perches above the sink
as steaming water forks over my hands.
Below the wrists they shrivel and turn pink.
I am in exile in my own land.
Her half-grown cats scuffle across the floor
trailing a slime of blood from where they fed.
I lock the door. They claw under the door.
I am an exile in my own bed.
Her spotted mongrel, bristling...Read more of this...
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
O Mother Earth! upon thy lap
Thy weary ones receiving,
And o'er them, silent as a dream,
Thy grassy mantle weaving,
Fold softly in thy long embrace
That heart so worn and broken,
And cool its pulse of fire beneath
Thy shadows old and oaken.
Shut out from him the bitter word
And serpent hiss of scorning;
Nor let the storms of yesterday
Disturb his quiet morning.
Breathe over him forgetfulness
Of...Read more of this...
by
Howard Nemerov
When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road....Read more of this...
by
Amy Levy
O God, my dream! I dreamed that you were dead;
Your mother hung above the couch and wept
Whereon you lay all white, and garlanded
With blooms of waxen whiteness. I had crept
Up to your chamber-door, which stood ajar,
And in the doorway watched you from afar,
Nor dared advance to kiss your lips and brow.
I had no part nor lot in you, as...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
1901
Not in the camp his victory lies
Or triumph in the market-place,
Who is his Nation's sacrifice
To turn the judgement from his race.
Happy is he who, bred and taught
By sleek, sufficing Circumstance --
Whose Gospel was the apparelled thought,
Whose Gods were Luxury and Chance --
Seese, on the threshold of his days,
The old life shrivel like a scroll,
And to...Read more of this...
by
Matthew Arnold
Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn-evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of wither'd leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent;--hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,
In the school-room windows;--but cold,
Solemn, unlighted, austere,
Through the gathering darkness, arise
The chapel-walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.
There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
And that not dwelt in now by men or women.
(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,
So what is this I make a sorrow of?)
I...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily...Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
I sweep the tavern threshold with my hair,
For both world's good and ill I take no care;
Should the two worlds roll to my house, like balls,
When drunk, for one small coin I'd sell the pair!...Read more of this...
by
Robert Herrick
Why dost thou wound and break my heart,
As if we should for ever part?
Hast thou not heard an oath from me,
After a day, or two, or three,
I would come back and live with thee?
Take, if thou dost distrust that vow,
This second protestation now:--
Upon thy cheek that spangled tear,
Which sits as dew of roses there,
That tear shall scarce be dried...Read more of this...
by
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
In the warm yellow smile of the morning,
She stands at the lattice pane,
And watches the strong young binders
Stride down to the fields of grain.
And she counts them over and over
As they pass her cottage door:
Are they six, she counts them seven;
Are they seven, she counts one more.
When the sun swings high in the heavens,
And...Read more of this...
by
José Martí
A sincere man am I
From the land where palm trees grow,
And I want before I die
My soul's verses to bestow.
I'm a traveler to all parts,
And a newcomer to none:
I am art among the arts,
With the mountains I am one.
I know how to name and class
All the strange flowers that grow;
I know every blade of grass,
Fatal lie and sublime woe.
I have...Read more of this...
by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
GO from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life I shall command
The uses of my soul nor lift my hand 5
Serenely in the sunshine as before
Without the sense of that which I forbore¡ª
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Allan Poe
Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme-
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in-
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope- that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can hope- Oh God! I can-
Its fount is holier- more...Read more of this...
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