Famous Windy Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Le Jardin

by Oscar Wilde
 The lily's withered chalice falls
Around its rod of dusty gold,
And from the beech-trees on the wold
The last wood-pigeon coos and calls.

The gaudy leonine sunflower
Hangs black and barren on its stalk,
And down the windy garden walk
The dead leaves scatter, - hour by hour.

Pale privet-petals white as milk
Are blown into a snowy mass:
The roses lie upon the grass
Like little shreds of...Read more of this...

An Address to the New Tay Bridge

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Beautiful new railway bridge of the Silvery Tay,
With your strong brick piers and buttresses in so grand array,
And your thirteen central girders, which seem to my eye
Strong enough all windy storms to defy.
And as I gaze upon thee my heart feels gay,
Because thou are the greatest railway bridge of the present day,
And can be seen for miles away
From North,...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 06: Over the darkened city the city of towers

by Conrad Aiken
 Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep...Read more of this...

Daisy

by Francis Thompson
 Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 
Six foot out of the turf, 
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill-- 
O breath of the distant surf!-- 

The hills look over on the South, 
And southward dreams the sea; 
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand 
Came innocence and she. 

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 
Red for the...Read more of this...

Exiled

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Searching my heart for its true sorrow,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people,
Sick of the city, wanting the sea;

Wanting the sticky, salty sweetness
Of the strong wind and shattered spray;
Wanting the loud sound and the soft sound
Of the big surf that breaks all day.

Always before about my dooryard,
Marking the reach of the...Read more of this...

Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day

by Anne Bronte
 My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas. 
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are...Read more of this...

Under The Balcony

by Oscar Wilde
 O beautiful star with the crimson mouth!
O moon with the brows of gold!
Rise up, rise up, from the odorous south!
And light for my love her way,
Lest her little feet should stray
On the windy hill and the wold!
O beautiful star with the crimson mouth!
O moon with the brows of gold!

O ship that shakes on the desolate sea!
O ship with the...Read more of this...

The Ballad Of The Black Fox Skin

by Robert William Service
 I

There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,
When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name;
Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came.

His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam when the brown spring freshets flow;
Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow;
They knew...Read more of this...

A Letter From the Trenches to a School Friend

by Charles Sorley
 I have not brought my Odyssey
With me here across the sea;
But you'll remember, when I say
How, when they went down Sparta way,
To sandy Sparta, long ere dawn
Horses were harnessed, rations drawn,
Equipment polished sparkling bright,
And breakfasts swallowed (as the white
Of eastern heavens turned to gold) -
The dogs barked, swift farewells were told.
The sun springs up, the horses neigh,
Crackles the whip...Read more of this...

The Yarn of the Loch Achray

by John Masefield
 The Loch Achray was a clipper tall
With seven-and-twenty hands in all.
Twenty to hand and reef and haul,
A skipper to sail and mates to bawl
'Tally on to the tackle-fall,
Heave now 'n' start her, heave 'n' pawl!'
Hear the yarn of a sailor,
An old yarn learned at sea.

Her crew were shipped and they said 'Farewell,
So-long, my Tottie, my lovely gell;
We sail to-day...Read more of this...

The Song of Right and Wrong

by G K Chesterton
 Feast on wine or fast on water 
And your honour shall stand sure, 
God Almighty's son and daughter 
He the valiant, she the pure; 
If an angel out of heaven 
Brings you other things to drink, 
Thank him for his kind attentions, 
Go and pour them down the sink. 

Tea is like the East he grows in, 
A great...Read more of this...

Sonnet 90: Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever now

by William Shakespeare
 Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,
And do not drop in for an after-loss.
Ah, do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,
Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;
Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,
To linger out a...Read more of this...

Out in the Garden

by Katherine Mansfield
 Out in the garden,
Out in the windy, swinging dark,
Under the trees and over the flower-beds,
Over the grass and under the hedge border,
Someone is sweeping, sweeping,
Some old gardener.
Out in the windy, swinging dark,
Someone is secretly putting in order,
Someone is creeping, creeping....Read more of this...

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

by T S (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
 TWELVE o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputtered,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates...Read more of this...

Pomona

by William Morris
 I am the ancient apple-queen,
As once I was so am I now.
For evermore a hope unseen,
Betwixt the blossom and the bough.

Ah, where's the river's hidden Gold!
And where the windy grave of Troy?
Yet come I as I came of old,
From out the heart of Summer's joy....Read more of this...

Windy Nights

by Robert Louis Stevenson
 Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the...Read more of this...

The Trail Of Ninety-Eight

by Robert William Service
 Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!

Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into...Read more of this...

Windy fall

by Kobayashi Issa
 At my daughter's grave, thirty days
after her death:

 Windy fall--
 these are the scarlet flowers
 she liked to pick....Read more of this...

Red Slippers

by Amy Lowell
 Red slippers in a shop-window, and outside in the 
street, flaws of grey,
windy sleet!...Read more of this...

The Man from Goondiwindi Q

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 I 

This is the sunburnt bushman who 
Came down from Goondiwindi, Q. 

II 

This is the Push from Waterloo 
That spotted the sunburnt bushman who 
Came down from Goondiwindi, Q. 

III 

These are the wealthy uncles -- two, 
Part of the Push from Waterloo 
That spotted the sunburnt bushman who 
Came down from Goondiwindi, Q. 

IV 

This is the...Read more of this...

Martha Washington

by Sidney Lanier
 Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal".



Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time,
When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet
Of Trade have cased us in such icy rime
That hearts are scarcely hot enough to beat,
Thy fame, O Lady of the lofty eyes,
Doth fall along the age, like as a lane
Of Spring, in whose most generous boundaries
Full many a frozen virtue...Read more of this...

The Grey Rock

by William Butler Yeats
 Poets with whom I learned my trade.
Companions of the Cheshire Cheese,
Here's an old story I've remade,
Imagining 'twould better please
Your cars than stories now in fashion,
Though you may think I waste my breath
Pretending that there can be passion
That has more life in it than death,
And though at bottling of your wine
Old wholesome Goban had no say;
The moral's yours because it's...Read more of this...

The Boiling Water

by Kenneth Koch
 A serious moment for the water is 
 when it boils
And though one usually regards it
 merely as a convenience
To have the boiling water
 available for bath or table
Occasionally there is someone
around who understands
The importance of this moment
 for the water—maybe a saint,
Maybe a poet, maybe a crazy 
 man, or just someone
 temporarily disturbed
With his mind "floating"in a
...Read more of this...

Lament

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my...Read more of this...

Sonnet 06

by Alan Seeger
 Oh, you are more desirable to me 
Than all I staked in an impulsive hour, 
Making my youth the sport of chance, to be 
Blighted or torn in its most perfect flower; 
For I think less of what that chance may bring 
Than how, before returning into fire, 
To make my dearest memory of the thing 
That is but...Read more of this...

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