Famous Wheat Poems by Famous Poets

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

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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...

Solitude

by Anna Akhmatova
 So many stones have been thrown at me,
That I'm not frightened of them anymore,
And the pit has become a solid tower,
Tall among tall towers.
I thank the builders,
May care and sadness pass them by.
From here I'll see the sunrise earlier,
Here the sun's last ray rejoices.
And into the windows of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove...Read more of this...

The Secret of the Machines

by Rudyard Kipling
 We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,
 We were melted in the furnace and the pit--
We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,
 We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,
 And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:
And now, if you will...Read more of this...

Christmas Antiphones

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 I -- In Church

Thou whose birth on earth
Angels sang to men,
While thy stars made mirth,
Saviour, at thy birth,
This day born again;

As this night was bright
With thy cradle-ray,
Very light of light,
Turn the wild world's night
To thy perfect day.

God whose feet made sweet
Those wild ways they trod,
From thy fragrant feet
Staining field and street
With the blood of God;

God whose breast is rest
In...Read more of this...

A Summer Afternoon

by James Whitcomb Riley
 A languid atmosphere, a lazy breeze,
With labored respiration, moves the wheat
From distant reaches, till the golden seas
Break in crisp whispers at my feet.

My book, neglected of an idle mind,
Hides for a moment from the eyes of men;
Or lightly opened by a critic wind,
Affrightedly reviews itself again.

Off through the haze that dances in the shine
The warm sun showers in the...Read more of this...

Song of the Wheat

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 We have sung the song of the droving days, 
Of the march of the travelling sheep; 
By silent stages and lonely ways 
Thin, white battalions creep. 
But the man who now by the land would thrive 
Must his spurs to a plough-share beat. 
Is there ever a man in the world alive 
To sing the song of the Wheat!...Read more of this...

Peace

by Henry Van Dyke
 I

IN EXCELSIS

Two dwellings, Peace, are thine.
One is the mountain-height,
Uplifted in the loneliness of light
Beyond the realm of shadows,--fine,
And far, and clear,--where advent of the night
Means only glorious nearness of the stars,
And dawn, unhindered, breaks above the bars
That long the lower world in twilight keep.
Thou sleepest not, and hast no need of sleep,
For all thy cares and fears have dropped...Read more of this...

A Paranaeticall Or Advisive Verseto His Friend Mr John Wicks

by Robert Herrick
 Is this a life, to break thy sleep,
To rise as soon as day doth peep?
To tire thy patient ox or ass
By noon, and let thy good days pass,
Not knowing this, that Jove decrees
Some mirth, t' adulce man's miseries?
--No; 'tis a life to have thine oil
Without extortion from thy soil;
Thy faithful fields to yield thee grain,
Although with some, yet little...Read more of this...

A Tale of Starvation

by Amy Lowell
 There once was a man whom the gods didn't love,
And a disagreeable man was he.
He loathed his neighbours, and his neighbours hated him,
And he cursed eternally.
He damned the sun, and he damned the stars,
And he blasted the winds in the sky.
He sent to Hell every green, growing thing,
And he raved at the birds as they fly.
His oaths were many,...Read more of this...

A Farm-house On The Wei River

by Wang Wei
In the slant of the sun on the country-side, 
Cattle and sheep trail home along the lane; 
And a rugged old man in a thatch door 
Leans on a staff and thinks of his son, the herdboy. 
There are whirring pheasants? full wheat-ears, 
Silk-worms asleep, pared mulberry-leaves. 
And the farmers, returning with hoes on their shoulders, 
Hail one another familiarly....Read more of this...

Love

by Pablo Neruda
 What's wrong with you, with us, 
what's happening to us? 
Ah our love is a harsh cord 
that binds us wounding us 
and if we want 
to leave our wound, 
to separate, 
it makes a new knot for us and condemns us 
to drain our blood and burn together. 

What's wrong with you? I look at you 
and I...Read more of this...

A Dead Rose

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 O Rose! who dares to name thee?
No longer roseate now, nor soft, nor sweet;
But pale, and hard, and dry, as stubble-wheat,---
Kept seven years in a drawer---thy titles shame thee.

The breeze that used to blow thee
Between the hedgerow thorns, and take away
An odour up the lane to last all day,---
If breathing now,---unsweetened would forego thee.

The sun that used to smite...Read more of this...

Corn and Catholics

by Thomas Moore
 "What! still those two infernal questions,
That with our meals our slumbers mix --
That spoil our tempers and digestions --
Eternal Corn and Catholics!

Gods! were there ever two such bores?
Nothing else talk'd of night or morn --
Nothing in doors, or out of doors,
But endless Catholics and Corn!

Never was such a brace of pests --
While Ministers, still worse than either,
Skill'd but in...Read more of this...

I worked for chaff and earning Wheat

by Emily Dickinson
 I worked for chaff and earning Wheat
Was haughty and betrayed.
What right had Fields to arbitrate
In matters ratified?

I tasted Wheat and hated Chaff
And thanked the ample friend --
Wisdom is more becoming viewed
At distance than at hand....Read more of this...

A Net to Snare the Moonlight

by Vachel Lindsay
 [What the Man of Faith said]


The dew, the rain and moonlight 
All prove our Father's mind. 
The dew, the rain and moonlight 
Descend to bless mankind. 

Come, let us see that all men 
Have land to catch the rain, 
Have grass to snare the spheres of dew, 
And fields spread for the grain. 

Yea, we would give to each...Read more of this...

A Carol of Harvest for 1867

by Walt Whitman
 1
A SONG of the good green grass! 
A song no more of the city streets; 
A song of farms—a song of the soil of fields. 

A song with the smell of sun-dried hay, where the nimble pitchers handle the pitch-fork; 
A song tasting of new wheat, and of fresh-husk’d maize.

2
For the lands, and for these passionate days, and for...Read more of this...

Visiting a Dead Man on a Summer Day

by Marge Piercy
 In flat America, in Chicago, 
Graceland cemetery on the German North Side. 
Forty feet of Corinthian candle 
celebrate Pullman embedded 
lonely raisin in a cake of concrete. 
The Potter Palmers float 
in an island parthenon. 
Barons of hogfat, railroads and wheat 
are postmarked with angels and lambs. 

But the Getty tomb: white, snow patterned 
in a triangle of trees...Read more of this...

An Ode in Time of Hesitation

by William Vaughn Moody
 After seeing at Boston the statue of Robert Gould Shaw, killed while storming Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, at the head of the first enlisted ***** regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts.


I 

Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made 
To thrill the heedless passer's heart with awe, 
And set here in the city's talk and trade 
To the good memory of...Read more of this...

Give me the Splendid Silent Sun

by Walt Whitman
 1
GIVE me the splendid silent sun, with all his beams full-dazzling; 
Give me juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard; 
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows; 
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape; 
Give me fresh corn and wheat—give me serene-moving animals, teaching content;
Give me nights perfectly quiet, as on high plateaus...Read more of this...

Storm Windows

by Howard Nemerov
 People are putting up storm windows now,
Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain
Drove them indoors. So, coming home at noon,
I saw storm windows lying on the ground,
Frame-full of rain; through the water and glass
I saw the crushed grass, how it seemed to stream
Away in lines like seaweed on the tide
Or blades of wheat leaning under the wind.
The ripple...Read more of this...

To Jose Mar?a Palacio

by Antonio Machado
 Palacio, good friend,
is spring there
showing itself on branches of black poplars
by the roads and river? On the steeps
of the high Duero, spring is late,
but so soft and lovely when it comes!
Are there a few new leaves
on the old elms?
The acacias must still be bare,
and the mountain peaks snow-filled.
Oh the massed pinks and whites
of Moncayo, massed up there,
beauty, in the...Read more of this...

Kiss

by Ruth Padel
 He's gone. She can't believe it, can't go on. She's going to give up painting. So she paints Her final canvas, total-turn-off
Black. One long
Obsidian goodbye. A charcoal-burner's Smirnoff, The mirror of Loch Ness Reflecting the monster back to its own eye.
But something's wrong. Those mad Black-body particles don't sing Her story of despair, the steel and
Garnet spindle
Of the storm.
This...Read more of this...

The Flour Bin

by Henry Lawson
 By Lawson's Hill, near Mudgee, 
On old Eurunderee – 
The place they called "New Pipeclay", 
Where the diggers used to be – 
On a dreary old selection, 
Where times were dry and thin, 
In a slab and shingle kitchen 
There stood a flour bin. 

'Twas "ploorer" with the cattle, 
'Twas rust and smut in wheat, 
'Twas blight in eyes...Read more of this...

Poppies on the Wheat

by Helen Hunt Jackson
 Along Ancona's hills the shimmering heat, 
A tropic tide of air with ebb and flow 
Bathes all the fields of wheat until they glow 
Like flashing seas of green, which toss and beat 
Around the vines. The poppies lithe and fleet 
Seem running, fiery torchmen, to and fro 
To mark the shore. 
The farmer does not know 
That they...Read more of this...

Honors - Part I

by Jean Ingelow
A Scholar is musing on his want of success.)

To strive—and fail. Yes, I did strive and fail;
  I set mine eyes upon a certain night
To find a certain star—and could not hail
      With them its deep-set light.
Fool that I was! I will rehearse my fault:
  I, wingless, thought myself on high to lift
Among...Read more of this...

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