Famous Waiting Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Waiting poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous waiting poems. These examples illustrate what a famous waiting poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Neruda, Pablo
...river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!
Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth
to start our life!...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...a! Bards of the peaceful inventions! (for the war, the war is over!)
Yet Bards of the latent armies—a million soldiers waiting, ever-ready,
Bards towering like hills—(no more these dots, these pigmies, these little piping
straws,
these gnats, that fill the hour, to pass for poets;)
Bards with songs as from burning coals, or the lightning’s fork’d stripes!
Ample Ohio’s bards—bards for California! inland bards—bards of the war;)
(As a wheel turns on its axle, so I find my...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...is not forgotten, nor Beau Sejour, nor Port Royal.
Many already have fled to the forest, and lurk on its outskirts,
Waiting with anxious hearts the dubious fate of to-morrow.
Arms have been taken from us, and warlike weapons of all kinds;
Nothing is left but the blacksmith's sledge and the scythe of the mower."
Then with a pleasant smile made answer the jovial farmer:--
"Safer are we unarmed, in the midst of our flocks and our cornfields,
Safer within these peacef...Read more of this...
by
Ginsberg, Allen
...ms & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom o...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...ld will change that.
I have swallowed an orange, being woman.
You have swallowed a ruler, being man.
Yet waiting to die we are the same thing.
Jehovah pleasures himself with his axe
before we are both overthrown.
Skeezix, you are me. La de dah.
You grow a beard but our drool is identical.
Forgive us, Father, for we know not.
Today is November 14th, 1972.
I live in Weston, Mass., Middlesex County,
U.S.A., and...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...I do not love you except because I love you;
I go from loving to not loving you,
From waiting to not waiting for you
My heart moves from cold to fire.
I love you only because it's you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of my changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
Maybe January light will consume
My heart with its cruel
Ray, stealing my key to true calm.
I...Read more of this...
by
Angelou, Maya
...reedom
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn
and he names the sky his own.
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant h...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...ust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you ...Read more of this...
by
Alighieri, Dante
...Depth alike, abortions drear;
Cast with those abject angels whose delay
To join rebellion, or their Lord defend,
Waiting their proved advantage, flung them here. -
Chased forth from Heaven, lest else its beauties end
The pure perfection of their stainless claim,
Out-herded from the shining gate they came,
Where the deep hells refused them, lest the lost
Boast something baser than themselves."
And I,
"Master, what grievance hath their failure cost...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...his brutal sense,
In heart or head, possessing, soon inspired
With act intelligential; but his sleep
Disturbed not, waiting close the approach of morn.
Now, when as sacred light began to dawn
In Eden on the humid flowers, that breathed
Their morning incense, when all things, that breathe,
From the Earth's great altar send up silent praise
To the Creator, and his nostrils fill
With grateful smell, forth came the human pair,
And joined their vocal worship to the ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...alized—you conceive too much of articulation.
Do you not know, O speech, how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost;
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams;
I underlying causes, to balance them at last;
My knowledge my live parts—it keeping tally with the meaning of things,
HAPPINESS—which, whoever hears me, let him or her set out in search of this
day.
My final merit I refuse you—I refuse putting from me what...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...them to be free to
mine?
8
The efflux of the Soul is happiness—here is happiness;
I think it pervades the open air, waiting at all times;
Now it flows unto us—we are rightly charged.
Here rises the fluid and attaching character;
The fluid and attaching character is the freshness and sweetness of man and woman;
(The herbs of the morning sprout no fresher and sweeter every day out of the roots of
themselves,
than it sprouts fresh and sweet continually out of itsel...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...owling ships,
Though in black jest it bows and nods
Under the moons with silver rods,
I know it is roaring at the gods,
Waiting the last eclipse.
"And in the last eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Above all moons made dark and riven,
Hold up its foaming head in heaven,
And laugh, knowing its hour.
"And the high ones in the happy town
Propped of the planets seven,
Shall know a new light in the mind,
A noise about them and behind,
Shall hear an awful voice,...Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...der, what doth most amaze
Is that we know our love is held for praise.
56
Beauty sat with me all the summer day,
Awaiting the sure triumph of her eye;
Nor mark'd I till we parted, how, hard by,
Love in her train stood ready for his prey.
She, as too proud to join herself the fray,
Trusting too much to her divine ally,
When she saw victory tarry, chid him--"Why
Dost thou not at one stroke this rebel slay?"
Then generous Love, who holds my heart in fee,
Told of our a...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...of
And certes, lord, t'abiden your presence prosperous estate*
Here in this temple of the goddess Clemence
We have been waiting all this fortenight:
Now help us, lord, since it lies in thy might.
"I, wretched wight, that weep and waile thus,
Was whilom wife to king Capaneus,
That starf* at Thebes, cursed be that day: *died
And alle we that be in this array,
And maken all this lamentatioun,
We losten all our husbands at that town,
While that the siege thereabouten lay...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...her hand
Was all that he could understand.
He saw in dreams a drawing-room,
Where thirteen wretches sat in gloom,
Waiting - he thought he knew for whom:
He saw them drooping here and there,
Each feebly huddled on a chair,
In attitudes of blank despair:
Oysters were not more mute than they,
For all their brains were pumped away,
And they had nothing more to say -
Save one, who groaned "Three hours are gone!"
Who shrieked "We'll wait no longer, John!
Tell them to se...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...s,
Through the strings of the yarn whizzes the shuttle away.
Far in the roads the pilot calls, and the vessels are waiting,
That to the foreigner's land carry the produce of home;
Others gladly approach with the treasures of far-distant regions,
High on the mast's lofty head flutters the garland of mirth.
See how yon markets, those centres of life and of gladness, are swarming!
Strange confusion of tongues sounds in the wondering ear.
On to the pile the wealth of...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ter at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...and I drown utterly?
I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.
THIRD VOICE:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among ...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
... In this way
Beats my warm and precious heart.
x x x
We noiselessly walked through the house,
Not waiting for anything.
They showed me way to the sick man,
And I did not recognize him.
He said, "Now let God have the glory"
And became more thoughtful and blue.
"It's long time that I hit the road,
I've only been waiting for you.
So you bother me in my fever,
I keep those words from you.
Tell me: can you not forgive me?"
An...Read more of this...
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