Famous Wading Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Giant In Glee

by Victor Hugo
 ("Ho, guerriers! je suis né dans le pays des Gaules.") 
 
 {V., March 11, 1825.} 


 Ho, warriors! I was reared in the land of the Gauls; 
 O'er the Rhine my ancestors came bounding like balls 
 Of the snow at the Pole, where, a babe, I was bathed 
 Ere in bear and in walrus-skin I...Read more of this...

So I pull my Stockings off

by Emily Dickinson
 So I pull my Stockings off
Wading in the Water
For the Disobedience' Sake
Boy that lived for "or'ter"

Went to Heaven perhaps at Death
And perhaps he didn't
Moses wasn't fairly used --
Ananias wasn't --...Read more of this...

The Beautiful Changes

by Richard Wilbur
 One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides 
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns 
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of
 you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed 
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On...Read more of this...

Things I Didnt Know I Loved

by Nazim Hikmet
 it's 1962 March 28th
I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train 
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain 
I don't like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it 
I've never worked the earth
it must be my...Read more of this...

The Lantern Out Of Doors

by Gerard Manley Hopkins
 Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
 That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
 I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light? 
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
 In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
 They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till...Read more of this...

Divided

by Jean Ingelow
.

An empty sky, a world of heather,
  Purple of foxglove, yellow of broom;
We two among them wading together,
  Shaking out honey, treading perfume.
Crowds of bees are giddy with clover,
  Crowds of grasshoppers skip at our feet,
Crowds of larks at their matins hang over,
  Thanking the Lord for a life so sweet.
Flusheth the rise with her purple...Read more of this...

The Blue-Flag In The Bog

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 God had called us, and we came;
Our loved Earth to ashes left;
Heaven was a neighbor's house,
Open to us, bereft.

Gay the lights of Heaven showed,
And 'twas God who walked ahead;
Yet I wept along the road,
Wanting my own house instead.

Wept unseen, unheeded cried,
"All you things my eyes have kissed,
Fare you well! We meet no more,
Lovely, lovely tattered mist!

Weary wings that rise...Read more of this...

These I Singing in Spring

by Walt Whitman
 THESE, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers, 
(For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy? 
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?) 
Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon I pass the gates, 
Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences,...Read more of this...

American Feuillage

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...

Lucky

by Thomas Lux
 One sweet pound of filet mignon
sizzles on the roadside. Let's say a hundred yards below
the buzzard. The buzzard
sees no cars or other buzzards
between the mountain range due north
and the horizon to the south
and across the desert west and east
no other creature's nose leads him to this feast.
The buzzard's eyes are built for this: he can see the filet's raw
and...Read more of this...

The Testing-Tree

by Stanley Kunitz
 1

On my way home from school
up tribal Providence Hill
past the Academy ballpark
where I could never hope to play
I scuffed in the drainage ditch
among the sodden seethe of leaves
hunting for perfect stones
rolled out of glacial time
into my pitcher’s hand;
then sprinted lickety-
split on my magic Keds
from a crouching start,
scarcely touching the ground
with my flying skin
as I poured it on
for the prize...Read more of this...

The Fatal Sisters

by Thomas Gray
 Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepares!)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darkened air. 

Glittering lances are the loom,
Where the dusky warp we strain,
Weaving many a soldier's doom,
Orkney's woe and Randver's bane. 

See the grisly texture grow,
('Tis of human entrails made!)
And the weights that play below,
Each a gasping warrior's head. 

Shafts for shuttles, dipped in...Read more of this...

Mental Cases

by Wilfred Owen
 Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows,
Drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish,
Baring teeth that leer like skulls' tongues wicked?
Stroke on stroke of pain, -- but what slow panic,
Gouged these chasms round their fretted sockets?
Ever from their hair and through their hand palms
Misery swelters. Surely we have perished
Sleeping, and walk hell; but...Read more of this...

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