Famous Watery Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Watery poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous watery poems. These examples illustrate what a famous watery poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...loating water-lilies, broad and bright,
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge
With moonlight beams of their own watery light; 30
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.
Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers 35
Were mingled or opposed, the like array
Kept these imprison'd children of the Hours
Within my hand,...Read more of this...
by
Shakespeare, William
...eet design,
And credent soul to that strong-bonded oath
That shall prefer and undertake my troth.'
'This said, his watery eyes he did dismount,
Whose sights till then were levell'd on my face;
Each cheek a river running from a fount
With brinish current downward flow'd apace:
O, how the channel to the stream gave grace!
Who glazed with crystal gate the glowing roses
That flame through water which their hue encloses.
'O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies
In the s...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...e,
O Sleep? Does the bright arch of rainbow clouds
And pendent mountains seen in the calm lake
Lead only to a black and watery depth,
While death's blue vault with loathliest vapors hung,
Where every shade which the foul grave exhales
Hides its dead eye from the detested day,
Conducts, O Sleep, to thy delightful realms?
This doubt with sudden tide flowed on his heart;
The insatiate hope which it awakened stung
His brain even like despair.
While daylight held
The sky, th...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...he beating brine,
Back to the boisterous billow let us go,
And walk all day beneath the hyaline
Huge vault of Neptune's watery portico,
And watch the purple monsters of the deep
Sport in ungainly play, and from his lair keen Xiphias leap.
For if my mistress find me lying here
She will not ruth or gentle pity show,
But lay her boar-spear down, and with austere
Relentless fingers string the cornel bow,
And draw the feathered notch against her breast,
And loose the arched c...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...catest lattices,
Cover'd with crystal vines; then weeping trees,
Moving about as in a gentle wind,
Which, in a wink, to watery gauze refin'd,
Pour'd into shapes of curtain'd canopies,
Spangled, and rich with liquid broideries
Of flowers, peacocks, swans, and naiads fair.
Swifter than lightning went these wonders rare;
And then the water, into stubborn streams
Collecting, mimick'd the wrought oaken beams,
Pillars, and frieze, and high fantastic roof,
Of those dusk places i...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...luminings
For Dian play:
Dissolve the frozen purity of air;
Let thy white shoulders silvery and bare
Shew cold through watery pinions; make more bright
The Star-Queen's crescent on her marriage night:
Haste, haste away!--
Castor has tamed the planet Lion, see!
And of the Bear has Pollux mastery:
A third is in the race! who is the third,
Speeding away swift as the eagle bird?
The ramping Centaur!
The Lion's mane's on end: the Bear how fierce!
The Centaur's arrow ready seems...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...e them the banners of moss just stirred to the music.
Multitudinous echoes awoke and died in the distance,
Over the watery floor, and beneath the reverberant branches;
But not a voice replied; no answer came from the darkness;
And, when the echoes had ceased, like a sense of pain was the silence.
Then Evangeline slept; but the boatmen rowed through the midnight,
Silent at times, then singing familiar Canadian boat-songs,
Such as they sang of old on their own Acadian r...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in tim...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...ve us help!"
So ended Saturn; and the God of the sea,
Sophist and sage, from no Athenian grove,
But cogitation in his watery shades,
Arose, with locks not oozy, and began,
In murmurs, which his first-endeavouring tongue
Caught infant-like from the far-foamed sands.
"O ye, whom wrath consumes! who, passion-stung,
Writhe at defeat, and nurse your agonies!
Shut up your senses, stifle up your ears,
My voice is not a bellows unto ire.
Yet listen, ye who will, whilst I br...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...r children's cries unheard that passed through fire
To his grim idol. Him the Ammonite
Worshiped in Rabba and her watery plain,
In Argob and in Basan, to the stream
Of utmost Arnon. Nor content with such
Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heart
Of Solomon he led by fraoud to build
His temple right against the temple of God
On that opprobrious hill, and made his grove
The pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence
And black Gehenna called, the type of Hell.Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...nt fire inflame with rage.
Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,
Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls
Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks
Forthwith his former state and being forgets--
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...o the clear
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky.
As I bent down to look, just opposite
A shape within the watery gleam appeared,
Bending to look on me: I started back,
It started back; but pleased I soon returned,
Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love: There I had fixed
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me; 'What thou seest,
'What there thou seest, fair Creature, is thyself;
'With ...Read more of this...
by
Milton, John
...care now is past,
Man is not whom to warn: those few escaped
Famine and anguish will at last consume,
Wandering that watery desart: I had hope,
When violence was ceased, and war on earth,
All would have then gone well; peace would have crowned
With length of happy days the race of Man;
But I was far deceived; for now I see
Peace to corrupt no less than war to waste.
How comes it thus? unfold, celestial Guide,
And whether here the race of Man will end.
To wh...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...catch was one minnow. It jumped out of a
can full of water on their table and died under the table, gasp-
ing for watery breath while their mother fried eggs on the
Coleman stove.
The mother apologized. She was supposed to be watching
the fish --THIS IS MY EARTHLY FAILURE-- holding the
dead fish by the tail, the fish taking all the bows like a young
Jewish comedian talking about Adlai Stevenson.
The third-year student in engineering at the University...Read more of this...
by
Stevens, Wallace
...,
36 Polyphony beyond his baton's thrust.
37 Could Crispin stem verboseness in the sea,
38 The old age of a watery realist,
39 Triton, dissolved in shifting diaphanes
40 Of blue and green? A wordy, watery age
41 That whispered to the sun's compassion, made
42 A convocation, nightly, of the sea-stars,
43 And on the cropping foot-ways of the moon
44 Lay grovelling. Triton incomplicate with that
45 Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
46 Ex...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...remost voiced by mountain fame,
But quail to that of Malcolm Graeme.
XXVI.
Now back they wend their watery way,
And, 'O my sire!' did Ellen say,
'Why urge thy chase so far astray?
And why so late returned? And why '—
The rest was in her speaking eye.
'My child, the chase I follow far,
'Tis mimicry of noble war;
And with that gallant pastime reft
Were all of Douglas I have left.
I met young Malcolm as I ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...ies of shared grief.
The hills have not moved nor the clouds altered the stance of their lazy azure
Nor has the watery Pennine sun gone in before the swallows gather.
Perhaps I have lost that jouissance-and who would not given the tornadoes,
Undivined and undeserved that seized our lives in their burning fury,
Leaving us awake in a world of dark horizons and troubled days,
Our memory a cave of broken shards.
One death came when a brother and a mother ...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...in youth's first bloom and flush to reign,
The world and he both wore a different form,
And must of earth and all the watery plain
Of ocean call'd him king: through many a storm
His isles had floated on the abyss of time;
For the rough virtues chose them for their clime.
XLIII
'He came to his sceptre young: he leaves it old:
Look to the state in which he found his realm,
And left it; and his annals too behold,
How to a minion first he gave the helm;
How grew ...Read more of this...
by
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...Between the earth and moon since they had brought
The last intelligence: and now she grew
Pale as that moon lost in the watery night,
And now she wept, and now she laughed outright.
These were tame pleasures.--She would often climb
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack
Up to some beaked cape of cloud sublime,
And like Arion on the dolphin's back
Ride singing through the shoreless air. Oft-time,
Following the serpent lightning's winding track,
She ran upon the p...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...ts sing a lot,
Plums rupture on bloated branches
And grass strands, lying down, rot.
And through the dense and watery net
I see your darling face,
A quiet park, a round porch
And a Chinese arbour-place.
x x x
All promised him to me:
The heaven's edge, dark and kind,
And lovely Christmas sleep
And multi-ringing Easter wind,
And the red branches of a twig,
And waterfalls inside a park,
And two dragonflies
On rusty iron of a bulwark.
A...Read more of this...
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