Famous Tufts Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Evarra And His Gods

by Rudyard Kipling
 Read here:
This is the story of Evarra -- man --
Maker of Gods in lands beyond the sea.
 Because the city gave him of her gold,
 Because the caravans brought turquoises,
 Because his life was sheltered by the King,
 So that no man should maim him, none should steal,
 Or break his rest with babble in the streets
 When he...Read more of this...

Aftermath

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 When the summer fields are mown, 
When the birds are fledged and flown, 
And the dry leaves strew the path; 
With the falling of the snow, 
With the cawing of the crow, 
Once again the fields we mow 
And gather in the aftermath. 
Not the sweet, new grass with flowers 
Is this harvesting of ours; 
Not the upland clover...Read more of this...

From THE TALK OF FLOWERS

by Jonas Mekas
 I do not know, whether the sun 
accomplished it, 
the rain or wind – 
but I was missing so 
the whiteness and the snow.

I listened to the rustling 
of spring rain, 
washing the reddish buds 
of chestnut-trees, – 
and a tiny spring ran down 
into the valley from the hill – 
and I was missing 
the whiteness 
and the...Read more of this...

The Buglers First Communion

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 A buglar boy from barrack (it is over the hill
There)—boy bugler, born, he tells me, of Irish
 Mother to an English sire (he
Shares their best gifts surely, fall how things will), 

This very very day came down to us after a boon he on
My late being there begged of me, overflowing
 Boon in my bestowing,
Came, I say, this day...Read more of this...

Faces

by Walt Whitman
 1
SAUNTERING the pavement, or riding the country by-road—lo! such faces! 
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality; 
The spiritual, prescient face—the always welcome, common, benevolent face, 
The face of the singing of music—the grand faces of natural lawyers and judges, broad
 at
 the
 back-top; 
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the shaved blanch’d faces
 of
 orthodox...Read more of this...

Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

by William Wordsworth
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length 
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.  Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I...Read more of this...

Pan and Luna

by Robert Browning
 Si credere dignum est.--Virgil, Georgics, III, 390


Oh, worthy of belief I hold it was, 
Virgil, your legend in those strange three lines! 
No question, that adventure came to pass 
One black night in Arcadia: yes, the pines, 
Mountains and valleys mingling made one mass 
Of black with void black heaven: the earth's confines, 
The sky's embrace,--below, above, around, 
All...Read more of this...

Of all the Sounds despatched abroad

by Emily Dickinson
 Of all the Sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a Charge to me
Like that old measure in the Boughs --
That phraseless Melody --
The Wind does -- working like a Hand,
Whose fingers Comb the Sky --
Then quiver down -- with tufts of Tune --
Permitted Gods, and me --

Inheritance, it is, to us --
Beyond the Art to Earn --
Beyond the trait to take...Read more of this...

City Visions

by Emma Lazarus
 I

As the blind Milton's memory of light, 
The deaf Beethoven's phantasy of tone, 
Wroght joys for them surpassing all things known 
In our restricted sphere of sound and sight,-- 
So while the glaring streets of brick and stone 
Vix with heat, noise, and dust from morn till night, 
I will give rein to Fancy, taking flight 
From dismal now...Read more of this...

At Carnoy

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Down in the hollow there’s the whole Brigade 
Camped in four groups: through twilight falling slow 
I hear a sound of mouth-organs, ill-played, 
And murmur of voices, gruff, confused, and low. 
Crouched among thistle-tufts I’ve watched the glow
Of a blurred orange sunset flare and fade; 
And I’m content. To-morrow we must go 
To take some curs?d Wood ... O...Read more of this...

Elemental Drifts

by Walt Whitman
 1
ELEMENTAL drifts! 
How I wish I could impress others as you have just been impressing me! 

As I ebb’d with an ebb of the ocean of life, 
As I wended the shores I know, 
As I walk’d where the ripples continually wash you, Paumanok,
Where they rustle up, hoarse and sibilant, 
Where the fierce old mother endlessly cries for her...Read more of this...

Introduction To The Song Of Hiawatha

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Should you ask me, 
whence these stories? 
Whence these legends and traditions, 
With the odors of the forest 
With the dew and damp of meadows,
With the curling smoke of wigwams,
With the rushing of great rivers,
With their frequent repetitions,
And their wild reverberations
As of thunder in the mountains?
I should answer, I should tell you,
"From the forests and the prairies,
From the great...Read more of this...

Frost at Midnight

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud---and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
`Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This...Read more of this...

That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire And Of The Comfort Of The Resurrection

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut...Read more of this...

Cornflowers

by Victor Hugo
 ("Tandis que l'étoile inodore.") 
 
 {XXXII.} 


 While bright but scentless azure stars 
 Be-gem the golden corn, 
 And spangle with their skyey tint 
 The furrows not yet shorn; 
 While still the pure white tufts of May 
 Ape each a snowy ball,— 
 Away, ye merry maids, and haste 
 To gather ere they...Read more of this...

Dire Cure

by William Matthews
 "First, do no harm," the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalous
in its behavior that at first they mis-
diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it
within a year." But in ten days or so
I sat beside her bed with hot-and-sour
soup and heard an intern congratulate
her...Read more of this...

Lines Written In Early Spring

by William Wordsworth
 I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And 'tis my...Read more of this...

A Blessing

by James Wright
 Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have...Read more of this...

Pear Tree

by Hilda Doolittle
 Silver dust 
lifted from the earth, 
higher than my arms reach, 
you have mounted. 
O silver,
higher than my arms reach 
you front us with great mass; 

no flower ever opened 
so staunch a white leaf, 
no flower ever parted silver 
from such rare silver; 

O white pear, 
your flower-tufts, 
thick on the branch, 
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their...Read more of this...

Night

by Ruth Padel


Then spoke the thunder, shattering the looming blackness of our national life. The rumble that breaks a spell of the dry season

 – Saro-Wiwa, "The Storm Breaks"



Does a zebra foal dream? Head lower, lower
under lenticular dark cloud,
he drags harlequin fetlocks, porcelain
quails' egg hooflets through pimpling dust,

slower, slower through the silver
rainbow night, this soot and fester
cellar-lighting, electricity of the blue
and evil...Read more of this...

The Alarm

by Thomas Hardy
 In Memory of one of the Writer's Family who was a Volunteer during the War
with Napoleon

In a ferny byway
Near the great South-Wessex Highway,
A homestead raised its breakfast-smoke aloft;
The dew-damps still lay steamless, for the sun had made no sky-way,
And twilight cloaked the croft.

'Twas hard to realize on
This snug side the mute horizon
That beyond it hostile armaments might steer,
Save from...Read more of this...

Beast and Man in India

by Rudyard Kipling
 Written for John Lockwood Kipling's
They killed a Child to please the Gods
In Earth's young penitence,
And I have bled in that Babe's stead
Because of innocence.

I bear the sins of sinful men
That have no sin of my own,
They drive me forth to Heaven's wrath
Unpastured and alone.

I am the meat of sacrifice, 
The ransom of man's guilt,
For they give my life to...Read more of this...

Vacant Lot With Pokeweed

by Amy Clampitt
 Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing—and look! here's

a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage....Read more of this...

Clover

by Sidney Lanier
 Inscribed to the Memory of John Keats.



Dear uplands, Chester's favorable fields,
My large unjealous Loves, many yet one --
A grave good-morrow to your Graces, all,
Fair tilth and fruitful seasons!
Lo, how still!
The midmorn empties you of men, save me;
Speak to your lover, meadows! None can hear.
I lie as lies yon placid Brandywine,
Holding the hills and heavens in my heart
For contemplation.
'Tis a...Read more of this...

Pau-Puk-Keewis

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 You shall hear how Pau-Puk-Keewis,
He, the handsome Yenadizze,
Whom the people called the Storm-Fool,
Vexed the village with disturbance;
You shall hear of all his mischief,
And his flight from Hiawatha,
And his wondrous transmigrations,
And the end of his adventures.
On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
On the dunes of Nagow Wudjoo,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water
Stood the lodge of Pau-Puk-Keewis.
It was he who in his frenzy
Whirled these...Read more of this...

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