Famous Thronged Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Sons of Martha

by Rudyard Kipling
 The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.

It is their care...Read more of this...

Fern Hill

by Dylan Thomas
 Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
 The night above the dingle starry,
 Time let me hail and climb
 Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees...Read more of this...

The Child's Grave

by Edmund Blunden
I came to the churchyard where pretty Joy lies
On a morning in April, a rare sunny day;
Such bloom rose around, and so many birds' cries
That I sang for delight as I followed the way.

I sang for delight in the ripening of spring,
For dandelions even were suns come to earth;
Not a moment went by but a new lark took wing
To wait...Read more of this...

A Hermit Thrush

by Amy Clampitt
 Nothing's certain. Crossing, on this longest day, 
the low-tide-uncovered isthmus, scrambling up 
the scree-slope of what at high tide
will be again an island,

to where, a decade since well-being staked 
the slender, unpremeditated claim that brings us 
back, year after year, lugging the 
makings of another picnic—

the cucumber sandwiches, the sea-air-sanctified
fig newtons—there's no knowing what the slamming 
seas, the gales...Read more of this...

The Lovers' Colloquy

by Victor Hugo
 ("Mon duc, rien qu'un moment.") 
 
 {HERNANI, Act V.} 


 One little moment to indulge the sight 
 With the rich beauty of the summer's night. 
 The harp is hushed, and, see, the torch is dim,— 
 Night and ourselves together. To the brim 
 The cup of our felicity is filled. 
 Each sound is mute,...Read more of this...

Aphrodite

by George William Russell
 NOT unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways:
One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days.
With solemn gaiety the stars danced far withdrawn on elfin heights:
The lilac breathed amid the shade of green and blue and citron lights.
But yet the close enfolding night seemed on the phantom verge of things,
For our adoring...Read more of this...

An Arundel Tomb

by Philip Larkin
 Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding...Read more of this...

The Travail Of Passion

by William Butler Yeats
 When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;
When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;
Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way
Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,
The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;
We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,
That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,
Lilies...Read more of this...

Shes All My Fancy Painted Him

by Lewis Carroll
 She's all my fancy painted him 
(I make no idle boast); 
If he or you had lost a limb, 
Which would have suffered most? 

He said that you had been to her, 
And seen me here before; 
But, in another character, 
She was the same of yore. 

There was not one that spoke to us, 
Of all that thronged...Read more of this...

Ode To The Johns Hopkins University

by Sidney Lanier
 How tall among her sisters, and how fair, --
How grave beyond her youth, yet debonair
As dawn, 'mid wrinkled Matres of old lands
Our youngest Alma Mater modest stands!
In four brief cycles round the punctual sun
Has she, old Learning's latest daughter, won
This grace, this stature, and this fruitful fame.
Howbeit she was born
Unnoised as any stealing summer morn.
From far the sages saw,...Read more of this...

Nephelidia

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 From the depth of the dreamy decline of the dawn through a notable nimbus of nebulous noonshine,
Pallid and pink as the palm of the flag-flower that flickers with fear of the flies as they float,
Are they looks of our lovers that lustrously lean from a marvel of mystic miraculous moonshine,
These that we feel in the blood of our blushes...Read more of this...

Chartres

by Edith Wharton
 I

Immense, august, like some Titanic bloom,
 The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,
Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,
 Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
 The pale high-alter. On the prayer-worn floor,
By worshippers innumerous thronged of yore,
 A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
The stranded driftwood of Faith's ebbing sea--
 For...Read more of this...

The Road

by Siegfried Sassoon
 The road is thronged with women; soldiers pass 
And halt, but never see them; yet they’re here— 
A patient crowd along the sodden grass, 
Silent, worn out with waiting, sick with fear. 
The road goes crawling up a long hillside,
All ruts and stones and sludge, and the emptied dregs 
Of battle thrown in heaps. Here where they died 
Are...Read more of this...

Daisy

by Francis Thompson
 Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 
Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill-- 
O breath of the distant surf!-- 

The hills look over on the South, 
And southward dreams the sea; 
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand 
Came innocence and she. 

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 
Red for the...Read more of this...

Hail! Childish Slave Of Social Rules

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 HAIL! Childish slaves of social rules
You had yourselves a hand in making!
How I could shake your faith, ye fools,
If but I thought it worth the shaking.
I see, and pity you; and then
Go, casting off the idle pity,
In search of better, braver men,
My own way freely through the city.

My own way freely, and not yours;
And, careless of a town's abusing,
Seek...Read more of this...

Still be the wine-house thronged with its glad choir,

by Omar Khayyam
Still be the wine-house thronged with its glad choir,
And Pharisaic skirts burnt up with fire,
Still be those tattered frocks and azure robes
Trod under feet of revellers in the mire....Read more of this...

Massachusetts To Virginia

by John Greenleaf Whittier
 The blast from Freedom's Northern hills, upon its Southern way,
Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay:
No word of haughty challenging, nor battle bugle's peal,
Nor steady tread of marching files, nor clang of horsemen's steel,

No trains of deep-mouthed cannon along our highways go;
Around our silent arsenals untrodden lies the snow;
And to the land-breeze of our ports, upon their errands far,
A...Read more of this...

Miracles

by Siegfried Sassoon
 I dreamt I saw a huge grey boat in silence steaming 
Down a canal; it drew the dizzy landscape after; 
The solemn world was sucked along with it—a streaming 
Land-slide of loveliness. O, but I rocked with laughter, 
Staring, and clinging to my tree-top. For a lake
Of gleaming peace swept on behind. (I mustn’t wake.) 

And then great clouds...Read more of this...

The City

by Constantine P Cavafy
 WHAT domination of what darkness dies this hour,
And through what new, rejoicing, winged, ethereal power
O’erthrown, the cells opened, the heart released from fear?
Gay twilight and grave twilight pass. The stars appear
O’er the prodigious, smouldering, dusky, city flare.
The hanging gardens of Babylon were not more fair
Than these blue flickering glades, where childhood in its glee
Re-echoes with fresh voice the heaven-lit...Read more of this...

Iii

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
To-day my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme—
And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream.
But pardon, dear departed Guest,
I will not rant, I will not rail;
For good the grain must feel the flail;
There are whom love has never blessed.
I had and have a younger brother,
One...Read more of this...

Brothers

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 How lovely the elder brother's
Life all laced in the other's,
Lóve-laced!—what once I well
Witnessed; so fortune fell.
When Shrovetide, two years gone,
Our boys' plays brought on
Part was picked for John,
Young Jóhn: then fear, then joy
Ran revel in the elder boy.
Their night was come now; all
Our company thronged the hall;
Henry, by the wall,
Beckoned me beside him:
I came where called, and eyed him
By...Read more of this...

The Choirmasters Burial

by Thomas Hardy
 He often would ask us
That, when he died,
After playing so many
To their last rest,
If out of us any
Should here abide,
And it would not task us,
We would with our lutes
Play over him
By his grave-brim
The psalm he liked best—
The one whose sense suits
"Mount Ephraim"—
And perhaps we should seem
To him, in Death's dream,
Like the seraphim.

As soon as I knew
That his spirit was...Read more of this...

The Lynching

by Claude McKay
 His Spirit in smoke ascended to high heaven. 
His father, by the cruelest way of pain, 
Had bidden him to his bosom once again; 
The awful sin remained still unforgiven. 
All night a bright and solitary star 
(Perchance the one that ever guided him, 
Yet gave him up at last to Fate's wild whim) 
Hung pitifully o'er the swinging...Read more of this...

Sonnet XLVII: In Pride of Wit

by Michael Drayton
 In pride of wit when high desire of fame 
Gave life and courage to my laboring pen, 
And first the sound and virtue of my name 
Won grace and credit in the ears of men, 
With those the thronged theatres that press 
I in the circuit for the laurel strove, 
Where the full praise, I freely must confess, 
In...Read more of this...

Sonnet V

by Alan Seeger
 A tide of beauty with returning May 
Floods the fair city; from warm pavements fume 
Odors endeared; down avenues in bloom 
The chestnut-trees with phallic spires are gay. 
Over the terrace flows the thronged cafe; 
The boulevards are streams of hurrying sound; 
And through the streets, like veins when they abound, 
The lust for pleasure throbs itself away. 
Here...Read more of this...

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