Famous Winter Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Winter poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous winter poems. These examples illustrate what a famous winter poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Sylvia Plath
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.
On their blotter of fog the trees
Seem a botanical drawing--
Memories growning, ring on ring,
A series of weddings.
Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly!
Tasting the winds, that are footless,
Waisting-deep in history--
Full of wings, otherworldliness.
In this, they are Ledas.
O mother of leaves and sweetness
Who are these peitas?
The shadows of ringdoves chanting,...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
from an officer's diary during the last war
I
The sour daylight cracks through my sleep-caked lids.
"Stephan! Stephan!" The rattling orderly
Comes on a trot, the cold tray in his hands:
Toast whitening with oleo, brown tea,
Yesterday's napkins, and an opened letter.
"Your asthma's bad, old man." He doesn't answer,
And turns to the grey windows and the...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as Spring....Read more of this...
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar
"Sunshine on de medders,
Greenness on de way;
Dat 's de blessed reason
I sing all de day."
Look hyeah! Whut you axin'?
Whut meks me so merry?
'Spect to see me sighin'
W'en hit's wa'm in Febawary?
'Long de stake an' rider
Seen a robin set;
W'y hit 'mence a-thawin',
Groun' is monst'ous wet.
Den you stan' dah wond'rin',
Lookin' skeert an' stary;
I's a right to caper
W'en hit's wa'm in Febawary.
Missis gone...Read more of this...
by
Lucy Maud Montgomery
Frosty-white and cold it lies
Underneath the fretful skies;
Snowflakes flutter where the red
Banners of the poppies spread,
And the drifts are wide and deep
Where the lilies fell asleep.
But the sunsets o'er it throw
Flame-like splendor, lucent glow,
And the moonshine makes it gleam
Like a wonderland of dream,
And the sharp winds all the day...Read more of this...
by
William Carlos (WCW) Williams
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold....Read more of this...
by
Omar Khayyam
Winter is past, and spring-tide has begun,
Soon will the pages of life's book be done!
Well saith the sage, «Life is a poison rank,
And antidote, save grape-juice, there is none.»...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Scene.--A wide stretch of fallow ground recently sown with wheat, and
frozen to iron hardness. Three large birds walking about thereon,
and wistfully eyeing the surface. Wind keen from north-east: sky a
dull grey.
(Triolet)
Rook.--Throughout the field I find no grain;
The cruel frost encrusts the cornland!
Starling.--Aye: patient pecking now is vain
Throughout the field,...Read more of this...
by
Sara Teasdale
Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded...Read more of this...
by
Christina Rossetti
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho! the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy...Read more of this...
by
Boris Pasternak
It snowed and snowed ,the whole world over,
Snow swept the world from end to end.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.
As during summer midges swarm
To beat their wings against a flame
Out in the yard the snowflakes swarmed
To beat against the window pane
The blizzard sculptured on the glass
Designs of arrows and of whorls.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
Some, too fragile for winter winds
The thoughtful grave encloses --
Tenderly tucking them in from frost
Before their feet are cold.
Never the treasures in her nest
The cautious grave exposes,
Building where schoolboy dare not look,
And sportsman is not bold.
This covert have all the children
Early aged, and often cold,
Sparrow, unnoticed by the Father --
Lambs for whom time had not a fold....Read more of this...
by
Robert Burns
WHEN biting Boreas, fell and dour,
Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r;
When Phoebus gies a short-liv’d glow’r,
Far south the lift,
Dim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r,
Or whirling drift:
Ae night the storm the steeples rocked,
Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,
While burns, wi’ snawy wreaths up-choked,
Wild-eddying swirl;
Or, thro’ the mining outlet bocked,
Down headlong hurl:
List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,
I...Read more of this...
by
John Crowe Ransom
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat and...Read more of this...
by
Walter de la Mare
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
The three men coming down the winter hill
In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds
At heel, through the arrangement of the trees,
Past the five figures at the burning straw,
Returning cold and silent to their town,
Returning to the drifted snow, the rink
Lively with children, to the older men,
The long companions they can never reach,
The blue light, men with...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
[Supposed to be chanted to some rude instrument at a modern fireplace]
Chant we the story now
Tho' in a house we sleep;
Tho' by a hearth of coals
Vigil to-night we keep.
Chant we the story now,
Of the vague love we knew
When I from out the sea
Rose to the feet of you.
Bird from the cliffs...Read more of this...
by
James Wright
And how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
-- Written A.D. 819
Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou.
You made it, I guess,
By dark.
But it is 1960,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
And put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently...Read more of this...
by
William Shakespeare
WHEN daisies pied and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver-white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo!--O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
And merry larks are...Read more of this...
by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[The following explanation is necessary, in order
to make this ode in any way intelligible. The Poet is supposed to
leave his companions, who are proceeding on a hunting expedition
in winter, in order himself to pay a visit to a hypochondriacal
friend, and also to see the mining in the Hartz mountains. The ode
alternately describes, in a...Read more of this...
by
John Greenleaf Whittier
How strange to greet, this frosty morn,
In graceful counterfeit of flower,
These children of the meadows, born
Of sunshine and of showers!
How well the conscious wood retains
The pictures of its flower-sown home,
The lights and shades, the purple stains,
And golden hues of bloom!
It was a happy thought to bring
To the dark season's frost...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
Around the house the flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone
From holly and cotoneaster
Around the house. The flakes fly!--faster
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster
We used to see upon the lawn
Around the house. The flakes fly faster,
And all the berries now are gone!...Read more of this...
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