Famous Tune Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Tune poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous tune poems. These examples illustrate what a famous tune poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
Like that which o'er Nineveh's prophet once grew,
While he waited to know that his warning was true,
And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in...Read more of this...
by
Isaac Watts
v.1-5
C. M.
The morning of a Lord's day.
Early, my God, without delay,
I haste to seek thy face;
My thirsty spirit faints away
Without thy cheering grace.
So pilgrims on the scorching sand,
Beneath a burning sky,
Long for a cooling stream at hand,
And they must drink or die.
I've seen thy glory and thy power
Through all thy temple shine;
My God, repeat that heav'nly hour,
That vision...Read more of this...
by
William Drummond
My lute, be as thou wert when thou didst grow
With thy green mother in some shady grove,
When immelodious winds but made thee move,
And birds their ramage did on thee bestow.
Since that dear Voice which did thy sounds approve,
Which wont in such harmonious strains to flow,
Is reft from Earth to tune those spheres above,
What art thou but a harbinger of...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
In mirth he mocks the other birds at noon,
Catching the lilt of every easy tune;
But when the day departs he sings of love,--
His own wild song beneath the listening moon....Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
I've dropped my Brain -- My Soul is numb --
The Veins that used to run
Stop palsied -- 'tis Paralysis
Done perfecter on stone
Vitality is Carved and cool.
My nerve in Marble lies --
A Breathing Woman
Yesterday -- Endowed with Paradise.
Not dumb -- I had a sort that moved --
A Sense that smote and stirred --
Instincts for Dance -- a caper part --
An...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Over and over, like a Tune --
The Recollection plays --
Drums off the Phantom Battlements
Cornets of Paradise --
Snatches, from Baptized Generations --
Cadences too grand
But for the Justified Processions
At the Lord's Right hand....Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
SHORTLY AFTER THE REVIVAL OF
LEARNING IN EUROPE.
Let us begin and carry up this corpse,
Singing together.
Leave we the common crofts, the vulgar thorpes
Each in its tether
Sleeping safe on the bosom of the plain,
Cared-for till cock-crow:
Look out if yonder be not day again
Rimming the rock-row!
That's the appropriate country; there, man's thought,
Rarer, intenser,
Self-gathered for an outbreak, as it ought,
Chafes in the censer.
Leave...Read more of this...
by
Dame Edith Sitwell
CAME the great Popinjay
Smelling his nosegay:
In cages like grots
The birds sang gavottes.
'Herodiade's flea
Was named sweet Amanda,
She danced like a lady
From here to Uganda.
Oh, what a dance was there!
Long-haired, the candle
Salome-like tossed her hair
To a dance tune by Handel.' . . .
Dance they still? Then came
Courtier Death,...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
She dwelt on the hillside by edge
of a maize-field, near the spring that
flows in laughing rills through the
solemn shadows of ancient trees. The
women came there to fill their jars,
and travellers would sit there to rest
and talk. She worked and dreamed
daily to the tune of the bubbling
stream.
One evening the stranger came down
from the cloud-hidden peak; his locks
were tangled like...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Robin's my Criterion for Tune --
Because I grow -- where Robins do --
But, were I Cuckoo born --
I'd swear by him --
The ode familiar -- rules the Noon --
The Buttercup's, my Whim for Bloom --
Because, we're Orchard sprung --
But, were I Britain born,
I'd Daisies spurn --
None but the Nut -- October fit --
Because, through dropping it,
The Seasons flit...Read more of this...
by
Adrienne Rich
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly...Read more of this...
by
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Forth from Calais, at dawn of night, when sunset summer on autumn shone,
Fared the steamer alert and loud through seas whence only the sun was gone:
Soft and sweet as the sky they smiled, and bade man welcome: a dim sweet hour
Gleamed and whispered in wind and sea, and heaven was fair as a field in flower,
Stars fulfilled the desire...Read more of this...
by
George Herbert
Lord, I confess my sin is great;
Great is my sin. Oh! gently treat
With thy quick flow'r, thy momentany bloom;
Whose life still pressing
Is one undressing,
A steady aiming at a tomb.
Man's age is two hours' work, or three:
Each day doth round about us see.
Thus are we to delights: but we are all
To sorrows old,
If life be...Read more of this...
by
Henry Lawson
It is stuffy in the steerage where the second-classers sleep,
For there's near a hundred for'ard, and they're stowed away like sheep, --
They are trav'lers for the most part in a straight 'n' honest path;
But their linen's rather scanty, an' there isn't any bath --
Stowed away like ewes and wethers that is shore 'n' marked 'n'...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
The sheep are in the silver wood,
The cows are in the broom;
The goats are in the wild mountain
And won't be home by noon.
My mother sang that olden tune
Most every night,
And to her newest she would croon
By candle light;
While cuddling in the velvet gloom
I'd dream of cows
That sought each dawn 'mid golden broom
To gently...Read more of this...
by
Robert Pinsky
A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax's Belgian imagination
And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
Here's a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someine gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah there's more sky in these parts than say
ground. Hence her voice's pitch
and her stare stains your...Read more of this...
by
Joseph Brodsky
It's not that the Muse feels like clamming up
it's more like high time for the lad's last nap.
And the scarf-waving lass who wished him the best
drives a steamroller across his chest.
And the words won't rise either like that rod
or like logs to rejoin their old grove's sweet rot
and like eggs in the frying pan the face
spills its eyes all...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I. THEIR BASIC SAVAGERY
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
A deep rolling bass.
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN...Read more of this...
by
Mother Goose
I won't be my father's Jack,
I won't be my father's Jill;
I will be the fiddler's wife,
And have music when I will.
T'other little tune,
T'other little tune,
Prithee, Love, play me
T'other little tune....Read more of this...
by
Anne Sexton
Wait Mister. Which way is home?
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room,
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.
Imagine it. A...Read more of this...
by
Ezra Pound
For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses:
Rain; empty river; a voyage,
Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight
Under the cabin roof was one lantern.
The reeds are heavy; bent;
and the bamboos speak as if weeping.
Autumn moon; hills rise about lakes
against sunset
Evening is like a curtain of cloud,
a blurr above ripples; and through it
sharp long spikes of...Read more of this...
by
Stanley Kunitz
My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.
The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road....Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
BEFORE this little gift was come
The little owner had made haste for home;
And from the door of where the eternal dwell,
Looked back on human things and smiled farewell.
O may this grief remain the only one!
O may our house be still a garrison
Of smiling children, and for evermore
The tune of little feet be heard along the floor!...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
What is he buzzing in my ears?
"Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?"
Ah, reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table's edge,—is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Tune poems.