Famous Watcher Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The First Walpurgis-night

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 A DRUID.


 SWEET smiles the May!

 The forest gay

From frost and ice is freed;

 No snow is found,

 Glad songs resound

Across the verdant mead.

 Upon the height

 The snow lies light,

Yet thither now we go,
There to extol our Father's name,

Whom we for ages know.
Amid the smoke shall gleam the flame;

Thus pure the heart will grow.

THE DRUIDS.

Amid the smoke shall...Read more of this...

Letters To Friends

by Barry Tebb
 I


Eddie Linden

Dear Eddie we’ve not met

Except upon the written page 

And at your age the wonder 

Is that you write at all

When so many have gone under 

Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours

Blunder following blunder

Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse

Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor

From my chained metropolitan moorings,

O hyaline March morning with Leeds

At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...

The Men Who Wear My Clothes

by Vernon Scannell
 Sleepless I lay last night and watched the slow 
Procession of the men who wear my clothes: 
First, the grey man with bloodshot eyes and sly 
Gestures miming what he loves and loathes. 

Next came the cheery knocker-back of pints, 
The beery joker, never far from tears, 
Whose loud and public vanity acquaints 
The careful watcher with his private...Read more of this...

The Town Down by the River

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
 I

Said the Watcher by the Way 
To the young and the unladen, 
To the boy and to the maiden, 
"God be with you both to-day. 
First your song came ringing, 
Now you come, you two-- 
Knowing naught of what you do, 
Or of what your dreams are bringing.

"O you children who go singing 
To the Town down the River,...Read more of this...

On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations

by Robert Frost
 You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may...Read more of this...

At That Hour

by James Joyce
 At that hour when all things have repose, 
O lonely watcher of the skies, 
Do you hear the night wind and the sighs 
Of harps playing unto Love to unclose 
The pale gates of sunrise? 

When all things repose, do you alone 
Awake to hear the sweet harps play 
To Love before him on his way, 
And the night...Read more of this...

I watcher her face to see which way

by Emily Dickinson
 I watcher her face to see which way
She took the awful news --
Whether she died before she heard
Or in protracted bruise
Remained a few slow years with us --
Each heavier than the last --
A further afternoon to fail,
As Flower at fall of Frost....Read more of this...

Threnody

by Ralph Waldo Emerson
 The south-wind brings
Life, sunshine, and desire,
And on every mount and meadow
Breathes aromatic fire,
But over the dead he has no power,
The lost, the lost he cannot restore,
And, looking over the hills, I mourn
The darling who shall not return.

I see my empty house,
I see my trees repair their boughs,
And he, —the wondrous child,
Whose silver warble wild
Outvalued every pulsing sound
Within the air's...Read more of this...

Bird Watcher

by Robert William Service
 In Wall Street once a potent power,
 And now a multi-millionaire
Alone within a shady bower
 In clothes his valet would not wear,
He watches bird wings bright the air.

The man who mighty mergers planned,
 And oil and coal kinglike controlled,
With field-glasses in failing hand
 Spies downy nestlings five days old,
With joy he could not buy for gold.

Aye, even childlike is...Read more of this...

America

by Herman Melville
 I

Where the wings of a sunny Dome expand
I saw a Banner in gladsome air-
Starry, like Berenice's Hair-
Afloat in broadened bravery there;
With undulating long-drawn flow,
As rolled Brazilian billows go
Voluminously o'er the Line.
The Land reposed in peace below;
The children in their glee
Were folded to the exulting heart
Of young Maternity.

II

Later, and it streamed in fight
When tempest mingled with the fray,
And over the...Read more of this...

A Real Motorcycle

by Erin Moure
 Unspeakable. The word that fills up the
poem, that the head
tries to excise.
At 6 a.m., the wet lion. Its sewn plush face
on the porch rail in the rain.
Heavy rains later, & maybe a thunderstorm.
12 or 13 degrees.

Inside: an iris, candle, poster of the
many-breasted Artemis in a stone hat
from Anatolia

A little pedal steel guitar

A photograph of her at a table by...Read more of this...

On first looking into Chapmans Homer

by John Keats
MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold  
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; 
Round many western islands have I been 
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. 
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told 5 
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: 
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene 
Till I heard Chapman...Read more of this...

As Watchers hang upon the East

by Emily Dickinson
 As Watchers hang upon the East,
As Beggars revel at a feast
By savory Fancy spread --
As brooks in deserts babble sweet
On ear too far for the delight,
Heaven beguiles the tired.

As that same watcher, when the East
Opens the lid of Amethyst
And lets the morning go --
That Beggar, when an honored Guest,
Those thirsty lips to flagons pressed,
Heaven to us, if true....Read more of this...

The Ballad of the Kings Mercy

by Rudyard Kipling
 Abdhur Rahman, the Durani Chief, of him is the story told.
 His mercy fills the Khyber hills -- his grace is manifold;
 He has taken toll of the North and the South -- his glory reacheth far,
 And they tell the tale of his charity from Balkh to Kandahar.

Before the old Peshawur Gate, where Kurd and Kaffir meet,
The Governor...Read more of this...

Influence

by Emma Lazarus
 The fervent, pale-faced Mother ere she sleep, 
Looks out upon the zigzag-lighted square, 
The beautiful bare trees, the blue night-air, 
The revelation of the star-strewn deep, 
World above world, and heaven over heaven. 
Between the tree-tops and the skies, her sight 
Rests on a steadfast, ruddy-shining light, 
High in the tower, an earthly star of even. 
Hers is the...Read more of this...

The Healers

by Laurence Binyon
 In a vision of the night I saw them, 
In the battles of the night. 
'Mid the roar and the reeling shadows of blood 
They were moving like light, 

Light of the reason, guarded 
Tense within the will, 
As a lantern under a tossing of boughs 
Burns steady and still. 

With scrutiny calm, and with fingers 
Patient as swift...Read more of this...

Out Out--

by Robert Frost
 The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And...Read more of this...

The Negatives

by Philip Levine
 On March 1, 1958, four deserters from the French Army of North Africa, 
August Rein, Henri Bruette, Jack Dauville, & Thomas Delain, robbed a 
government pay station at Orleansville. Because of the subsequent 
confession of Dauville the other three were captured or shot. Dauville 
was given his freedom and returned to the land of his birth, the U.S.A.

AUGUST REIN:...Read more of this...

The Storm

by George Herbert
 1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
 the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.

2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The...Read more of this...

Baile And Aillinn

by William Butler Yeats
 ARGUMENT. Baile and Aillinn were lovers, but Aengus, the
Master of Love, wishing them to he happy in his own land
among the dead, told to each a story of the other's death, so
that their hearts were broken and they died.

 I hardly hear the curlew cry,
 Nor thegrey rush when the wind is high,
 Before my thoughts begin to run
...Read more of this...

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