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Famous Whistling Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Burns, Robert
...sun, sweet, in the green thorn bush;
The soaring lark, the perching red-breast shrill,
Or deep-ton’d plovers grey, wild-whistling o’er the hill;
Shall he—nurst in the peasant’s lowly shed,
To hardy independence bravely bred,
By early poverty to hardship steel’d.
And train’d to arms in stern Misfortune’s field—
Shall he be guilty of their hireling crimes,
The servile, mercenary Swiss of rhymes?
Or labour hard the panegyric close,
With all the venal soul of dedicating prose...Read more of this...



by Aiken, Conrad
...Li Po's Gorge alone,
and yet, this too might be. ‘The wind was high
north of the White King City, by the fields
of whistling barley under cuckoo sky,'
where, as the silkworm drew her silk, Li Po
spun out his thoughts of us. ‘Endless as silk'
(he said) ‘these poems for lost loves, and us,'
and, ‘for the peachtree, blooming in the ditch.'
Here is the divine loneliness in which
we greet, only to doubt, a voice, a word,
the smoke of a sweetfern after frost, a face
to...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...en
The breasts of Pallas and the naked wonder of the Queen.

But when the herdsman called his straggling goats
With whistling pipe across the rocky road,
And the shard-beetle with its trumpet-notes
Boomed through the darkening woods, and seemed to bode
Of coming storm, and the belated crane
Passed homeward like a shadow, and the dull big drops of rain

Fell on the pattering fig-leaves, up he rose,
And from the gloomy forest went his way
Past sombre homestead and wet orcha...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ff the N.E. coast of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Groaner: a whistling buoy.) 


I

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost fo...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...The white of the white. 

Anne says: 
This is the rainy season. 
I am sorrowful in November. 
The kettle is whistling. 
I must butter the toast. 
And give it jam too. 
My kitchen is a heart. 
I must feed it oxygen once in a while 
and mother the mother. 

* 

Say the woman is forty-four. 
Say she is five seven-and-a-half. 
Say her hair is stick color. 
Say her eyes are chameleon. 
Would you put her in a sack and bury her, 
suck ...Read more of this...



by Bryant, William Cullen
...erds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky— blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem without a bush or tree,
Whistling aloud by guess, to flocks they cannot see.

The timid hare seems half its fears to lose,
Crouching and sleeping 'neath its grassy lair,
And scarcely startles, tho' the shepherd goes
Close by its home, and dogs are barking there;
The wild colt only turns around to stare
At passer by, then knaps his hide again;
And moody crows beside the road for...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone
 cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street's
 summer green leafed trees.

 III

This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you
 father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress
 and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers,
 you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and 
 consonants to breath...Read more of this...

by Thomas, Dylan
...the town closed as the town awoke.

 A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
 Blackbirds and the sun of October
 Summery
 On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
 To the rain wringing
 Wind blow cold
 In the wood faraway under me.

 Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
 With its horns thro...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...1
PROUD music of the storm! 
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! 
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! 
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! 
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; 
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! 
You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient...Read more of this...

by Jong, Erica
...Smoke, it is all smoke
in the throat of eternity. . . .
For centuries, the air was full of witches
Whistling up chimneys
on their spiky brooms
cackling or singing more sweetly than Circe,
as they flew over rooftops
blessing & cursing their
kind.

We banished & burned them
making them smoke in the throat of god;
we declared ourselves
"enlightened."
"The dark age of horrors is past,"
said my mother to me in 1952,
seven years after our people went up...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...w scragged
 limbs; 
Walking the path worn in the grass, and beat through the leaves of the brush;
Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot; 
Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve—where the great gold-bug drops
 through the dark; 
Where flails keep time on the barn floor; 
Where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow; 
Where cattle stand and shake away flies with the tremulous shuddering of their
 hides;
...Read more of this...

by Kipling, Rudyard
...nd when he could spy the white of her eye, he made the pistol crack.
He has fired once, he has fired twice, but the whistling ball went wide.
"Ye shoot like a soldier," Kamal said. "Show now if ye can ride."
It's up and over the Tongue of Jagai, as blown dustdevils go,
The dun he fled like a stag of ten, but the mare like a barren doe.
The dun he leaned against the bit and slugged his head above,
But the red mare played with the snaffle-bars, as a maiden p...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...ose. 

327 Upon these premises propounding, he 
328 Projected a colony that should extend 
329 To the dusk of a whistling south below the south. 
330 A comprehensive island hemisphere. 
331 The man in Georgia waking among pines 
332 Should be pine-spokesman. The responsive man, 
333 Planting his pristine cores in Florida, 
334 Should prick thereof, not on the psaltery, 
335 But on the banjo's categorical gut, 
336 Tuck tuck, while the flamingos flap...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...eming
Changed -- shriller. Of a sudden, the clear moon
Showed her a passer-by, inopportune
Indeed, but here he was, whistling and striding.
Lotta squeezed in between the currants, hiding.
"The best laid plans of mice and men," alas!
The stranger came indeed, but did not pass.
Instead, he leant upon the garden-gate,
Folding his arms and whistling. Lotta's state,
Crouched in the prickly currants, on wet grass,
Was far from pleasant. Still the stranger st...Read more of this...

by Wordsworth, William
...ought resigned with pain, when from the mast  The impatient mariner the sail unfurl'd,  And whistling, called the wind that hardly curled  The silent sea. From the sweet thoughts of home,  And from all hope I was forever hurled.  For me—farthest from earthly port to roam  Was best, could I but shun the spot where man might      come.   ...Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ot able.
Full many a dainty horse had he in stable:
And when he rode, men might his bridle hear
Jingeling  in a whistling wind as clear,
And eke as loud, as doth the chapel bell,
There as this lord was keeper of the cell.
The rule of Saint Maur and of Saint Benet, 
Because that it was old and somedeal strait
This ilke* monk let olde thinges pace, *same
And held after the newe world the trace.
He *gave not of the text a pulled hen,* *he cared nothing
That s...Read more of this...

by Thompson, Francis
...to me,
Their traitorous trueness and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue,
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind,
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue,
Or whether, thunder-driven,
They clanged His chariot thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn of their feet,
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace
Deliberate speed, majestic ...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...of golden laughter,
Her eyes are strange as the stealth of the moon
On a night in June . . .
She runs among whistling leaves; I hurry after;
She dances in dreams over white-waved water;
Her body is white and fragrant and cool,
Magnolia petals that float on a white-starred pool . . .
I have dreamed of her, dreaming for many nights
Of a broken music and golden lights,
Of broken webs of silver, heavily falling
Between my hands and their white desire:
And ...Read more of this...

by Sassoon, Siegfried
...he foxes disappeared,
And hounds were short of blood; and officers 
From barracks over-rode ’em all day long 
On weedy, whistling nags that knocked a hole 
In every fence; good sportsmen to a man 
And brigadiers by now, but dreadful hard
On a young huntsman keen to show some sport. 

Ay, Hell was thick with captains, and I rode 
The lumbering brute that’s beat in half a mile, 
And blunders into every blind old ditch. 
Hell was the coldest scenting land I’ve known,
And...Read more of this...

by Du Bois, W. E. B.
...the whisper of the deep,
Have kissed each other in God's name and kissed a world to sleep.
The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky,
And not from the East and not from the West knelled that
soul-waking cry,
But out of the South,—the sad, black South—it screamed from
the top of the sky,
Crying: "Awake, O ancient race!" Wailing, "O woman, arise!"
And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the
midnight cries,—
But the burden of w...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things