Famous Tombstones Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tombstones poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tombstones poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tombstones poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.
It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead.
We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.
"God save the Queen" we living sing,
From height to height 'tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of...Read more of this...
by
Housman, A E
...O if it's true that in the night,
When rest the living in their havens
And liquid rays of lunar light
Glide down on tombstones from the heavens,
O if it's true that still and bare
Are then the graves until aurora --
I call the shade, I wait for Laura:
To me, my friend, appear, appear!
Beloved shadow, come to me
As at our parting -- wintry, ashen
In your last minutes' agony;
Emerge in any form or fashion:
A distant star across the sphere,
A gentle sound, a puff of air or
...Read more of this...
by
Pushkin, Alexander
...rical laughter;
While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.
Further down the valley the clustered tombstones recede,
Winding about their dimness the mist’s grey cerements, after
The street lamps in the darkness have suddenly started to bleed.
The leaves fly over the window and utter a word as they pass
To the face that leans from the darkness, intent, with two dark-filled eyes
That watch for ever earnestly from behind the window glass....Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
...while our home is here
No sounding name is half so dear;
When fades at length our lingering day,
Who cares what pompous tombstones say?
Read on the hearts that love us still,
Hic jacet Joe. Hic jacet Bill....Read more of this...
by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...he would commence again her endless search and endeavor;
Sometimes in churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and tombstones,
Sat by some nameless grave, and thought that perhaps in its bosom
He was already at rest, and she longed to slumber beside him.
Sometimes a rumor, a hearsay, an inarticulate whisper,
Came with its airy hand to point and beckon her forward.
Sometimes she spake with those who had seen her beloved and known him,
But it was long ago, in some far-off ...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...I see around me tombstones grey
Stretching their shadows far away.
Beneath the turf my footsteps tread
Lie low and lone the silent dead -
Beneath the turf - beneath the mould -
Forever dark, forever cold -
And my eyes cannot hold the tears
That memory hoards from vanished years
For Time and Death and Mortal pain
Give wounds that will not heal again -
Let me remember half th...Read more of this...
by
Brontë, Emily
...ystal staving off the gloom
As covertly as phosphorus in a grave.
Void notions proper to a buried head!
Beneath these tombstones here
Unseenness fills the sockets of the dead,
Whatever to their souls may now appear;
And who but those unfathomably deaf
Who quiet all this ground
Could catch, within the ear's diminished clef,
A music innocent of time and sound?
What do the living hear, then, when the bell
Hangs plumb within the tower
Of the still church, and still their...Read more of this...
by
Wilbur, Richard
...pass
graveyards in a car.
The dead lie,
unsuperstitiously,
with their feet toward me--
please forgive me for
saying the tombstones would not
fancy their faces turned from the highway.
Oh perish the thought
I was thinking in that moment
Newman Illinois
the Saturday night dance--
what a life? Would I like it again?
No. Once I returned late summer
from California thin from journeying
and the girls were not the same.
You'll say that's natural
they had been dancing all the time....Read more of this...
by
Dorn, Edward
...ll the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheatfields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed Boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport
Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don’t make and example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don’t ask the trees for their names
Don’t ask the valley...Read more of this...
by
Darwish, Mahmoud
...e green bushes
And beautiful flowers there,
Then they can through the burying-ground roam,
And read the epitaphs on the tombstones
Before they go home.
There the lovers can wander safe arm in arm,
For policemen are there to protect them from harm
And to watch there all day,
So that no accident can befall them
In the Hill o' Balgay.
Then there's Harry Scott's mansion,
Most beautiful to be seen,
Also the Law Hill, likewise the Magdalen Green,
And the silvery Tay,
Rolling on its...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...one cottage joined on
To the next, the common land fenced off, the nearby chapel
Turned to a desirable residence, the tombstones garden ornaments,
The heart of Hall Ings Mill crumpled under mechanical hammers
And reeled before our eyes, dust rising to powder the wings
Of passing butterflies. We watched the white-glazed inner walls
Sink in shame to shattered heaps of stone and shards of nothingness.
I never thought it would be the experience it was-
How could anythin...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ney stalks fell with a crashing rebound :
The gale swept everything before it in its way;
No less than 250 trees and 37 tombstones were blown down at Balgay.
Oh! it was a pitiful and a terrible sight
To see the fallen trees lying left and right,
Scattered about in the beautiful Hill of Balgay,
Also the tombstones that were swept away.
At Broughty Ferry the gale made a noise like thunder,
Which made the inhabitants shake with fear and wonder
If their dwellings would be blo...Read more of this...
by
McGonagall, William Topaz
...I. The Minor Poet
His little trills and chirpings were his best.
No music like the nightingale's was born
Within his throat; but he, too, laid his breast
Upon a thorn.
II. The Pretty Lady
She hated bleak and wintry things alone.
All that was warm and quick, she loved too well-
A light, a flame, a heart against her own;
It is forever bitter cold, in Hel...Read more of this...
by
Parker, Dorothy
...ton likewise is in Trinity yard where Wall Street stops.
And in this yard stenogs, bundle boys, scrubwomen, sit on the tombstones, and walk on the grass of graves, speaking of war and weather, of babies, wages and love.
An iron picket fence … and streaming thousands along Broadway sidewalks … straw hats, faces, legs … a singing, talking, hustling river … down the great street that ends with a Sea.
… easy is the sleep of Alexander Hamilton.
… easy is the sleep of Robert Ful...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.
This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left's marked ****, one right's marked ****
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.
Far-sighted for his family's future dead,
but for his wife, this banker's still alone
on his long obelisk, and doomed to head
a blackened d...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
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