Famous Winters Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Winters poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous winters poems. These examples illustrate what a famous winters poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
...ld I’m sair forfairn,
I’ll be a brig when ye’re a shapeless cairn!
As yet ye little ken about the matter,
But twa-three winters will inform ye better.
When heavy, dark, continued, a’-day rains,
Wi’ deepening deluges o’erflow the plains;
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,
Or stately Lugar’s mossy fountains boil;
Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course.
Or haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,
Aroused by blustering winds an’ spotting thowes,
In mony ...Read more of this...
by
Burns, Robert
...l, with bright
Sweet faces, who will help him at his need.
`And there I saw mage Merlin, whose vast wit
And hundred winters are but as the hands
Of loyal vassals toiling for their liege.
`And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,
Who knows a subtler magic than his own--
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.
She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword,
Whereby to drive the heathen out: a mist
Of incense curled about her, and her face
Wellnigh was hidden in ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ruggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and c...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...gled against the right,
alone against all, until the best of halls stood idle.
The time was great, a season of twelve winters,
that the friend of the Scyldings suffered misery,
every woe, the broadest sorrows. Therefore it became
an open secret to men, to the sons of humanity,
through miserable songs, that Grendel struggled
a long while against Hrothgar, wearing malicious hatred,
felony and feud for many long years,
a perpetual strife—he wished for no accord
with an...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...ats,
and Hygelac’s own hearth-fellows we.
To folk afar was my father known,
noble atheling, Ecgtheow named.
Full of winters, he fared away
aged from earth; he is honored still
through width of the world by wise men all.
To thy lord and liege in loyal mood
we hasten hither, to Healfdene’s son,
people-protector: be pleased to advise us!
To that mighty-one come we on mickle errand,
to the lord of the Danes; nor deem I right
that aught be hidden. We hear -- thou knowe...Read more of this...
by
Anonymous,
...pire.
17 How long since thou wast in thine Infancy?
18 Thy strength and stature, more thy years admire,
19 Hath hundred winters past since thou wast born?
20 Or thousand since thou brakest thy shell of horn?
21 If so, all these as nought, Eternity doth scorn.
4
22 Then higher on the glistering Sun I gaz'd,
23 Whose beams was shaded by the leafy Tree.
24 The more I look'd, the more I grew amaz'd
25 And softly said, what glory's like to thee?
26 Soul of this world, this Uni...Read more of this...
by
Bradstreet, Anne
...
Gentle Evangeline lived, his child, and the pride of the village.
Stalworth and stately in form was the man of seventy winters;
Hearty and hale was he, an oak that is covered with snow-flakes;
White as the snow were his locks, and his cheeks as brown as the oak-leaves.
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!
Swe...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...o lichens are
To towering citadel with which they war.
Alas! for Corbus—dreary, desolate,
And yet its woes the winters mitigate.
It rears itself among convulsive throes
That shake its ruins when the tempest blows.
Winter, the savage warrior, pleases well,
With its storm clouds, the mighty citadel,—
Restoring it to life. The lightning flash
Strikes like a thief and flies; the winds that crash
Sound like a clarion, for the Tempest bluff
Is Battl...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...y bereft
Starvd stock no longer noising round
Lone in the nooks of foddering ground
Each skeleton of lingering stack
By winters tempests beaten black
Nodds upon props or bolt upright
Stands swarthy in the summer light
And oer the green grass seems to lower
Like stump of old time wasted tower
All that in winter lookd for hay
Spread from their batterd haunts away
To pick the grass or lye at lare
Beneath the mild hedge shadows there
Sweet month that gives a welcome call
To toil ...Read more of this...
by
Clare, John
...of fire and lamp.
The sun, sometimes in summer, enters
The casements, with reviving ray;
But the long rains of many winters
Moulder the very walls away.
And outside all is ivy, clinging
To chimney, lattice, gable grey;
Scarcely one little red rose springing
Through the green moss can force its way.
Unscared, the daw, and starling nestle,
Where the tall turret rises high,
And winds alone come near to rustle
The thick leaves where their cradles lie.
I sometimes...Read more of this...
by
Bronte, Charlotte
...e South Pacific and the North
Atlantic;
I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland—I mark the long winters, and
the
isolation.
I see the cities of the earth, and make myself at random a part of them;
I am a real Parisian;
I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Constantinople;
I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne;
I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, Limerick;
I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, Lyons, Brussels, Berne, Fr...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...
4.
Spring rusts on its skinny branch
and last summer's lawn
is soggy and brown.
Yesterday is just a number.
All of its winters avalanche
out of sight. What was, is gone.
Mother, last night I slept
in your Bonwit Teller nightgown.
Divided, you climbed into my head.
There in my jabbering dream
I heard my own angry cries
and I cursed you, Dame
keep out of my slumber.
My good Dame, you are dead.
And Mother, three stones
slipped from your glittering eyes.
Now it's Friday's noon
a...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...r heartes might agrise,* *be horrified
Albeit so, that no tongue may devise,* -- *relate
Though that I might a thousand winters tell, --
The pains of thilke* cursed house of hell *that
But for to keep us from that cursed place
Wake we, and pray we Jesus, of his grace,
So keep us from the tempter, Satanas.
Hearken this word, beware as in this case.
The lion sits *in his await* alway *on the watch*
To slay the innocent, if that he may.
Disposen aye your heartes to withston...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...ooms blushing to her lover's tale:
His queen, the garden queen, his Rose,
Unbent by winds, unchilled by snows,
Far from winters of the west,
By every breeze and season blest,
Returns the sweets by Nature given
In soft incense back to Heaven;
And gratefu yields that smiling sky
Her fairest hue and fragrant sigh.
And many a summer flower is there,
And many a shade that Love might share,
And many a grotto, meant by rest,
That holds the pirate for a guest;
Whose bark in shelterin...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...more.
`And he to whom she told her sins, or what
Her all but utter whiteness held for sin,
A man wellnigh a hundred winters old,
Spake often with her of the Holy Grail,
A legend handed down through five or six,
And each of these a hundred winters old,
From our Lord's time. And when King Arthur made
His Table Round, and all men's hearts became
Clean for a season, surely he had thought
That now the Holy Grail would come again;
But sin broke out. Ah, Christ, that it ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...g,
And somewhat grimly smiled.
And there the Ionian father of the rest;
A million wrinkles carved his skin;
A hundred winters snow'd upon his breast,
From cheek and throat and chin.
Above, the fair hall-ceiling stately-set
Many an arch high up did lift,
And angels rising and descending met
With interchange of gift.
Below was all mosaic choicely plann'd
With cycles of the human tale
Of this wide world, the times of every land
So wrought, they will not fail.
The people ...Read more of this...
by
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...wine I drank
Made your cradle Catholic soul
Fret at my insouciance.
VI
1
Waking early I felt my sixty years
The winters of childhood slipping and sliding
In my tired imagination, the icicles on the kitchen window,
The ashes scattered over paths in patches of grey and black.
We have so much to comprehend, too much for any mortal,
The madness of youth, so fierce, so compulsive,
The cocktails of alcohol and drugs, the quarrels with knives and guns
Entered into as...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...rooding wing,
A landscape to the aching sight,
A vast expanse of dazzling light.
It is the foliage of the woods
That winters bring—the dress,
White Easter of the year in bud,
That makes the winter Spring.
The frost and snow his posies bring,
Nature's white spurts of the spring....Read more of this...
by
Clare, John
...ceased bride alone.
x x x
Has my fate really been so altered,
Or is this game truly truly over?
Where are winters, when I fell asleep
In the morning in the sixth hour?
In a new way, severely and calmly,
I now live on the wild shore.
I can no longer pronounce
The tender or idle word.
I can't believe that Christmas-tide is coming.
Touchingly green is this the steppe before
The beaming sun. Like a warm
Wave, licks the tender shore.
When from happine...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Winters poems.