Famous Yesterdays Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Yesterdays poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous yesterdays poems. These examples illustrate what a famous yesterdays poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Isaac Watts
Man mortal, and God eternal
A mournful song at a funeral.
Through every age, eternal God,
Thou art our rest, our safe abode;
High was thy throne ere heav'n was made,
Or earth thy humble footstool laid.
Long hadst thou reigned ere time began,
Or dust was fashioned to a man;
And long thy kingdom shall endure
When earth and time shall be no more.
But man, weak man,...Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must...Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
With life's tomorrow time you grasp,
Its yesterdays you fling away,
And still, in spite of all remains
Its long eternity, today.
When one thing goes, another comes
In this wide world by heaven borne;
And when the sun is setting here
'Tis somewhere else just breaking dawn.
It seems somehow that other waves
Are rolling down the same old...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Four bright steel crosses,
universal joints, plucked
out of the burlap sack --
"the heart of the drive train,"
the book says. Stars
on Lemon's wooden palm,
stars that must be capped,
rolled, and anointed,
that have their orders
and their commands as he
has his.
Under the blue
hesitant light another day
at Automotive
in the city of dreams.
We're all here to count
and be counted, Lemon,
Rosie, Eugene, Luis,
and me, too young...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The first Day's Night had come --
And grateful that a thing
So terrible -- had been endured --
I told my Soul to sing --
She said her Strings were snapt --
Her Bow -- to Atoms blown --
And so to mend her -- gave me work
Until another Morn --
And then -- a Day as huge
As Yesterdays in pairs,
Unrolled its horror in my...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
My glass is filled, my pipe is lit,
My den is all a cosy glow;
And snug before the fire I sit,
And wait to feel the old year go.
I dedicate to solemn thought
Amid my too-unthinking days,
This sober moment, sadly fraught
With much of blame, with little praise.
Old Year! upon the Stage of Time
You stand to bow your...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
I know a seraph who has golden eyes,
And hair of gold, and body like the snow.
Here in the wind I dream her unbound hair
Is blowing round me, that desire's sweet glow
Has touched her pale keen face, and willful mien.
And though she steps as one in manner born
To tread the forests of fair Paradise,
Dark memory's wood she chooses to adorn.
Here...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I would perish
in the embrace of his stronger existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure and are awed
because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Each single angel is terrifying.
And so...Read more of this...
by
William Morris
Love is enough: through the trouble and tangle
From yesterday's dawning to yesterday's night
I sought through the vales where the prisoned winds wrangle,
Till, wearied and bleeding, at end of the light
I met him, and we wrestled, and great was my might.
O great was my joy, though no rest was around me,
Though mid wastes of the world were we twain...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Since I don't know who will be reading
this or even if it will be read, I must
invent someone on the other end
of eternity, a distant cousin laboring
under the same faint stars I labored
all those unnumbered years ago. I make you
like me in everything I can -- a man
or woman in middle years...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Albert Guest
I've trod the links with many a man,
And played him club for club;
'Tis scarce a year since I began
And I am still a dub.
But this I've noticed as we strayed
Along the bunkered way,
No one with me has ever played
As he did yesterday.
It makes no difference what the drive,
Together as we walk,
Till we up to the ball arrive,
I get...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
Wilfred Owen
Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday's Mail; the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
For, said the paper, "When this war is done
The men's first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has just begun.
Peace would do wrong to our...Read more of this...
by
Bliss Carman
We are the vagabonds of time,
And rove the yellow autumn days,
When all the roads are gray with rime
And all the valleys blue with haze.
We came unlooked for as the wind
Trooping across the April hills,
When the brown waking earth had dreams
Of summer in the Wander Kills.
How far afield we joyed to fare,...Read more of this...
by
Emily Dickinson
The Riddle we can guess
We speedily despise --
Not anything is stale so long
As Yesterday's surprise --...Read more of this...
by
Badger Clark
My fathers sleep on the sunrise plains,
And each one sleeps alone.
Their trails may dim to the grass and rains,
For I choose to make my own.
I lay proud claim to their blood and name,
But I lean on no dead kin;
My name...Read more of this...
by
Osip Mandelstam
Sisters - Heaviness and Tenderness- you look the same.
Wasps and bees both suck the heavy rose.
Man dies, and the hot sand cools again.
Carried off on a black stretcher, yesterday’s sun goes.
Oh, honeycombs’ heaviness, nets’ tenderness,
it’s easier to lift a stone than to say your name!
I have one purpose left, a golden purpose,
how, from time’s weight, to free myself again.
I...Read more of this...
by
Rainer Maria Rilke
The First Elegy
Who if I cried out would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
I that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel...Read more of this...
by
Mihai Eminescu
With life's tomorrow time you grasp,
Its yesterdays you fling away,
And still, in spite of all remains
Its long eternity, today.
When one thing goes, another comes
In this wide world by heaven borne;
And when the sun is setting here
'Tis somewhere else just breaking dawn.
It seems somehow that other waves
Are rolling down the same old...Read more of this...
by
Marge Piercy
Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.
Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull
and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation
I would not remember you
or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these
and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky...Read more of this...
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