Famous Virgin Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Florida Sunday

by Sidney Lanier
 From cold Norse caves or buccaneer Southern seas
Oft come repenting tempests here to die;
Bewailing old-time wrecks and robberies,
They shrive to priestly pines with many a sigh,
Breathe salutary balms through lank-lock'd hair
Of sick men's heads, and soon -- this world outworn --
Sink into saintly heavens of stirless air,
Clean from confessional. One died, this morn,
And willed the world to wise Queen...Read more of this...

What man, what hero (QUEMN VIRUM AUT HEROA)

by Horace
     What man, what hero, Clio sweet,
       On harp or flute wilt thou proclaim?
     What god shall echo's voice repeat
       In mocking game
     To Helicon's sequester'd shade,
       Or Pindus, or...Read more of this...

Boldness in Love

by Thomas Carew
 Mark how the bashful morn in vain
Courts the amorous marigold,
With sighing blasts and weeping rain,
Yet she refuses to unfold.
But when the planet of the day
Approacheth with his powerful ray,
The she spreads, then she receives
His warmer beams into her virgin leaves.

So shalt thou thrive in love, fond boy;
If thy tears and sighs discover
Thy grief, thou never shalt enjoy
The just reward...Read more of this...

Virgin Youth

by D. H. Lawrence
 Now and again
All my body springs alive,
And the life that is polarised in my eyes,
That quivers between my eyes and mouth,
Flies like a wild thing across my body,
Leaving my eyes half-empty, and clamorous,
Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame, 
Gathering the soft ripples below my breast
Into urgent, passionate waves, 
And my soft, slumbering belly
Quivering awake with...Read more of this...

The Black Virgin

by G K Chesterton
 One in thy thousand statues we salute thee 
On all thy thousand thrones acclaim and claim 
Who walk in forest of thy forms and faces 
Walk in a forest calling on one name 
And, most of all, how this thing may be so 
Who know thee not are mystified to know
That one cries "Here she stands" and one cries...Read more of this...

Parable For A Certain Virgin

by Dorothy Parker
 Oh, ponder, friend, the porcupine;
Refresh your recollection,
And sit a moment, to define
His means of self-protection.

How truly fortified is he!
Where is the beast his double
In forethought of emergency
And readiness for trouble?

Recall his figure, and his shade-
How deftly planned and clearly
For slithering through the dappled glade
Unseen, or pretty nearly.

Yet should an alien eye discern
His presence in the woodland,
How little has he...Read more of this...

The Bard

by Thomas Gray
 Pindaric Ode

"Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Tho' fanned by Conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail,
Nor e'en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,
From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!"
Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay,
As down the...Read more of this...

Those Images

by William Butler Yeats
 What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.

Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.

Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognise the five
That make the Muses sing....Read more of this...

The Fury Of Sundays

by Anne Sexton
 Moist, moist, 
the heat leaking through the hinges, 
sun baking the roof like a pie 
and I and thou and she 
eating, working, sweating, 
droned up on the heat. 
The sun as read as the cop car siren. 
The sun as red as the algebra marks. 
The sun as red as two electric eyeballs. 
She wanting to take a...Read more of this...

An Epitaph Upon A Virgin

by Robert Herrick
 Here a solemn fast we keep,
While all beauty lies asleep;
Hushed be all things, no noise here,
But the toning of a tear,
Or the sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering....Read more of this...

Take Back the Virgin Page

by Thomas Moore
 Written on Returning a Blank Book


Take back the virgin page, 
White and unwritten still; 
Some hand, more calm and sage, 
The leaf must fill. 
Thoughts come, as pure as light 
Pure as even you require; 
But, oh! each word I write 
Love turns to fire. 

Yet let me keep the book: 
Oft shall my heart renew, 
When on its...Read more of this...

As in the simple ages

by Emile Verhaeren
As in the simple ages, I have given you my heart, like a wide-spreading flower that opens pure and lovely in the dewy hours; within its moist petals my lips have rested.
The flower, I gathered it with fingers of flame; say nothing to it: for all words are perilous; it is through the eyes that soul listens to soul.
The flower...Read more of this...

Behind the Arras

by Bliss Carman
 I like the old house tolerably well, 
Where I must dwell 
Like a familiar gnome; 
And yet I never shall feel quite at home. 
I love to roam. 
Day after day I loiter and explore 
From door to door; 
So many treasures lure 
The curious mind. What histories obscure 
They must immure! 

I hardly know which room I care...Read more of this...

Hymn on the Morning of Christs Nativity

by John Milton
 IT was the Winter wilde, 
While the Heav'n-born-childe, 
 All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; 
Nature in aw to him 
Had doff't her gawdy trim, 
 With her great Master so to sympathize: 
It was no season then for her 
To wanton with the Sun her lusty Paramour. 

Only with speeches fair 
She woo's the gentle Air...Read more of this...

The Song of the Cities

by Rudyard Kipling
 BOMBAY

Royal and Dower-royal, I the Queen
 Fronting thy richest sea with richer hands --
A thousand mills roar through me where I glean
 All races from all lands.


 CALCUTTA

Me the Sea-captain loved, the River built,
 Wealth sought and Kings adventured life to hold.
Hail, England! I am Asia -- Power on silt,
 Death in my hands, but Gold!


 MADRAS

Clive kissed me...Read more of this...

A Winter Day

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I 

The air is silent save where stirs 
A bugling breeze among the firs; 
The virgin world in white array 
Waits for the bridegroom kiss of day; 
All heaven blooms rarely in the east 
Where skies are silvery and fleeced, 
And o'er the orient hills made glad 
The morning comes in wonder clad; 
Oh, 'tis a time most fit...Read more of this...

The Forest Reverie

by Edgar Allan Poe
 'Tis said that when 
The hands of men 
Tamed this primeval wood, 
And hoary trees with groans of woe, 
Like warriors by an unknown foe, 
Were in their strength subdued, 
The virgin Earth Gave instant birth 
To springs that ne'er did flow 
That in the sun Did rivulets run, 
And all around rare flowers did blow 
The wild rose...Read more of this...

On The Death Of Mrs. Mary Neudham

by William Strode
 As sinn makes gross the soule and thickens it
To fleshy dulness, so the spotless white
Of virgin pureness made thy flesh as cleere
As others soules: thou couldst not tarry heere
All soule in both parts: and what could it bee
The Resurrection could bestow on thee,
Allready glorious? thine Innocence
(Thy better shroude) sent thee as pure from hence
As saints shall rise: but hee...Read more of this...

The Virgin Mother

by D. H. Lawrence
 My little love, my darling, 
You were a doorway to me; 
You let me out of the confines
Into this strange countrie, 
Where people are crowded like thistles,
Yet are shapely and comely to see.

My little love, my dearest 
Twice have you issued me, 
Once from your womb, sweet mother,
Once from myself, to be
Free of all hearts, my darling, 
Of each...Read more of this...

Virgin In A Tree

by Sylvia Plath
 How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects
All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape
In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,
Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back

For a...Read more of this...

The Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We Breathe

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake; that 's fairly mixed
With, riddles, and is rife
In every least thing's life;
This needful, never spent,
And nursing element;
My more than meat and drink,
My meal at every wink;
This air, which, by life's law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise,
Minds me in many...Read more of this...

The Wassail

by Robert Herrick
 Give way, give way, ye gates, and win
An easy blessing to your bin
And basket, by our entering in.

May both with manchet stand replete;
Your larders, too, so hung with meat,
That though a thousand, thousand eat,

Yet, ere twelve moons shall whirl about
Their silv'ry spheres, there's none may doubt
But more's sent in than was served out.

Next, may your dairies prosper so,
As that...Read more of this...

The Virgin Mother

by George William Russell
 WHO is that goddess to whom men should pray,
But her from whom their hearts have turned away,
Out of whose virgin being they were born,
Whose mother nature they have named with scorn
Calling its holy substance common clay.


Yet from this so despised earth was made
The milky whiteness of those queens who swayed
Their generations with a light caress,
And from some image of...Read more of this...

October

by Siegfried Sassoon
ACROSS the land a faint blue veil of mist
Seems hung; the woods wear yet arrayment sober
Till frost shall make them flame; silent and whist
The drooping cherry orchards of October
Like mournful pennons hang their shrivelling leaves 5
Russet and orange: all things now decay;
Long since ye garnered in your autumn sheaves 
And sad the robins pipe at set of day.

Now do ye...Read more of this...

Ode To Pornography

by David Lehman
 If you could write down the words
moving through a man's mind as
he masturbates you'd have a quick 
bonus bonk read, I used to think. 
But words were never adequate 
or the point in the bar where the girl
is a boy the boy is a girl the two girls
exchange underpants the one with
the ***** is the boy each needs to...Read more of this...

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