Famous Traveler Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Traveler poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous traveler poems. These examples illustrate what a famous traveler poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Edgar Lee Masters
Henry got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband's love,
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred....Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued my
voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,
and that training is...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
OUT from behind this bending, rough-cut Mask,
(All straighter, liker Masks rejected—this preferr’d,)
This common curtain of the face, contain’d in me for me, in you for you, in each for
each,
(Tragedies, sorrows, laughter, tears—O heaven!
The passionate, teeming plays this curtain hid!)
This glaze of God’s serenest, purest sky,
This film of Satan’s seething pit,
This heart’s geography’s map—this...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
AMERICA always!
Always our own feuillage!
Always Florida’s green peninsula! Always the priceless delta of Louisiana! Always the
cotton-fields of Alabama and Texas!
Always California’s golden hills and hollows—and the silver mountains of New
Mexico!
Always soft-breath’d Cuba!
Always the vast slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes
drain’d
by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the...Read more of this...
by
Wendell Berry
1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don't call it death --
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
I
A HAPPY MAN
(Carphyllides)
When these graven lines you see,
Traveler, do not pity me;
Though I be among the dead,
Let no mournful word be said.
Children that I leave behind,
And their children, all were kind;
Near to them and to my wife,
I was happy all my life.
My three sons I married right,
And their sons I rocked...Read more of this...
by
Andrei Voznesensky
My life, like a rocket, makes a parabola
flying in darkness, -- no rainbow for traveler.
There once lived an artist, red-haired Gauguin,
he was a bohemian, a former tradesman.
To get to the Louvre
from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!
He had to...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Things that never can come back, are several --
Childhood -- some forms of Hope -- the Dead --
Though Joys -- like Men -- may sometimes make a Journey --
And still abide --
We do not mourn for Traveler, or Sailor,
Their Routes are fair --
But think enlarged of all that they will tell us
Returning here --
"Here!" There are typic "Heres"...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
You are over there, Father Malloy,
Where holy ground is, and the cross marks every grave,
Not here with us on the hill --
Us of wavering faith, and clouded vision
And drifting hope, and unforgiven sins.
You were so human, Father Malloy,
Taking a friendly glass sometimes with us,
Siding with us who would rescue Spoon River
From the coldness and the dreariness of village morality.
You...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THE FINE cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt,
Something Sinbad, the sailor, took away from robbers,
Something a traveler with plenty of money might pick up
And bring home and stick on the walls and say:
“There’s a little thing made a hit with me
When I was in Cairo—I think I must see Cairo again some day.”
So there are...Read more of this...
by
W S Merwin
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And then shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing...Read more of this...
by
John Ashbery
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea--
call it a philosophy of life, if you will.Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?
That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be...Read more of this...
by
Pablo Neruda
Neither clown nor child nor black
nor white but verticle
and a questioning innocence
dressed in night and snow:
The mother smiles at the sailor,
the fisherman at the astronaunt,
but the child child does not smile
when he looks at the bird child,
and from the disorderly ocean
the immaculate passenger
emerges in snowy mourning.
I was without doubt the child bird
there in the cold archipelagoes
when it looked at...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Over stone walls and barns,
miles from the black-eyed Susans,
over circus tents and moon rockets
you are going, going.
You who have inhabited me
in the deepest and most broken place,
are going, going.
An old woman calls up to you
from her deathbed deep in sores,
asking, "What do you keep of her?"
She is the crone in the fables.
She is the fool at the supper
and you,...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous
Suppose the little cowslipShould hang its tiny cup,And say, “I’m such a little flower,I’d better not grow up.”How many a weary travelerWould miss the fragrant smell?[Pg 013]How many a little child would grieveTo miss it from the dell!Suppose the glistening dew-drop,Upon the grass, should say,“What can a little dew-drop do?I’d better roll away.”The blade on which it rested,Before the day...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
Billy Collins
In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.
But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing...Read more of this...
by
Allen Ginsberg
Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.
What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.
Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).
And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image—shrine by the
roadside to signify
to...Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
1. DREAMS
I was an ice baby.
I turned to sky blue.
My tears became two glass beads.
My mouth stiffened into a dumb howl.
They say it was a dream
but I remember that hardening.
My sister at six
dreamt nightly of my death:
"The baby turned to ice.
Someone put her in the refrigerator
and she turned as hard as a Popsicle."
I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
THE indications, and tally of time;
Perfect sanity shows the master among philosophs;
Time, always without flaw, indicates itself in parts;
What always indicates the poet, is the crowd of the pleasant company of singers, and their
words;
The words of the singers are the hours or minutes of the light or dark—but the words
of
the
maker of...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Here I lie close to the grave
Of Old Bill Piersol,
Who grew rich trading with the indians, and who
Afterwards took the bankrupt law
And emergeed from it richer than ever.
Myself grown tired of toil and poverty
And beholding how Old Bill and others grew in wealth,
Robbed a traveler one night near Proctor's Grove,
Killing him...Read more of this...
by
Li Po
The living is a passing traveler;
The dead, a man come home.
One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,
Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages.
The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain;
Fu-sang, the tree of immortality, has crumbled to kindling wood.
Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word
When the green pines feel...Read more of this...
by
Lisel Mueller
When the moon was full they came to the water.
some with pitchforks, some with rakes,
some with sieves and ladles,
and one with a silver cup.
And they fished til a traveler passed them and said,
"Fools,
to catch the moon you must let your women
spread their hair on the water --
even the wily moon will leap to that bobbing
net of shimmering threads,
gasp and...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
EMILY DICKINSON:
You gave us the bumble bee who has a soul,
The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,
And how God plays around a back yard garden.
STEVIE CRANE:
War is kind and we never knew the kindness of war till
you came;
Nor the black riders and clashes of spear and shield out
of the sea,
Nor the mumblings and shouts that rise from dreams on
call....Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as...Read more of this...
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