Famous Zodiac Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Zodiac poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous zodiac poems. These examples illustrate what a famous zodiac poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Burns, Robert
...rre,
Or loup the ecliptic like a bar;
Or turn the pole like any arrow;
Or, when auld Phoebus bids good-morrow,
Down the zodiac urge the race,
And cast dirt on his godship’s face;
For I could lay my bread and kail
He’d ne’er cast saut upo’ thy tail.—
Wi’ a’ this care and a’ this grief,
And sma’, sma’ prospect of relief,
And nought but peat reek i’ my head,
How can I write what ye can read?—
Tarbolton, twenty-fourth o’ June,
Ye’ll find me in a better tune;
But till we meet ...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...s,
For a man's attention
Brings such satisfaction
To the craving in my bones.
Brightness that I pull back
From the Zodiac,
Why those questioning eyes
That are fixed upon me?
What can they do but shun me
If empty night replies?...Read more of this...
by
Bradstreet, Anne
...f but a neck, soon should we be together.
I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black,
My Sun is gone so far in's zodiac,
Whom whilst I 'joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt,
His warmth such fridged colds did cause to melt.
My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;
Return; return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn;
In this dead time, alas, what can I more
Than view those fruits which through thy heart I bore?
Which sweet contentment yield me for a space,
True living pictures ...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...join with the planets who choir their delight.
The signs in the street and the signs in the skies
Shall make me a Zodiac, guiding and wise,
And Broadway make one with that marvelous stair
That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer....Read more of this...
by
Carman, Bliss
...bethink me, What if it should peer
At my shoulder here!
Perchance he drives the merry-go-round whose track
Is the zodiac;
His name is No-man's-friend;
And his gabbling parrot-talk has neither trend,
Beginning, nor end.
A prince of madness too, I'd cry, "A rat!"
And lunge thereat,—
Let out at one swift thrust
The cunning arch-delusion of the dust
I so mistrust,
But that I fear I should disclose a face
Wearing the trace
Of my own human guise,
Piteous, ...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...plunge, mount your darkened keys
And sear just riders back,
Until that one loved least
Looms the last Samson of your zodiac....Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...den reins,
And paces leisurely down amber plains
His snorting four. Now when his chariot last
Its beams against the zodiac-lion cast,
There blossom'd suddenly a magic bed
Of sacred ditamy, and poppies red:
At which I wondered greatly, knowing well
That but one night had wrought this flowery spell;
And, sitting down close by, began to muse
What it might mean. Perhaps, thought I, Morpheus,
In passing here, his owlet pinions shook;
Or, it may be, ere matron Night uptook
...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...in your glory,
Underneath a new old sign
Sipping beverage divine,
And pledging with contented smack
The Mermaid in the Zodiac.
Souls of Poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?...Read more of this...
by
Pinsky, Robert
...wallowed one another. I
Would laugh at that miracle."
You also in the laughter, warrior angel:
Your helmet the zodiac, rocket-plumed
Your spear the beggar's finger pointing to the mouth
Your heel planted on the serpent Formulation
Your face a vapor, the wreath of cigarette smoke crowning
Bogart as he winces through it.
You not in the words, not even
Between the words, but a torsion,
A cleavage, a stirring.
You stirring even in the arctic ice,
Even at the da...Read more of this...
by
Nemerov, Howard
...e
That so amused him, lying there
While the moon went down to disappear
Along the still and tilted track
That bears the zodiac....Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...a Benefit
Unto a Neighbor's Bin.
With Us, 'tis Harvest all the Year
For when the Frosts begin
We just reverse the Zodiac
And fetch the Acres in....Read more of this...
by
Petrarch, Francesco
.../SPAN>A wide resplendent scene of light and love.The wheels of Phœbus from the zodiac turn'd;No more the nightly constellations burn'd;Green earth and undulating ocean roll'dAway, by some resistless power controll'd;[Pg 401]Immensity conceived, and brought to birthRead more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...nt out
And for nine days he had food from other hands,
And for nine days my mind went whirling round
The one disastrous zodiac, muttering
That the immedicable mound's beyond
Our questioning, beyond our pity even.
But when nine days had gone I stood again
Before his chair and bending down my head
I bade him go when all his household slept
To an old empty woodman's house that's hidden
Westward of Tara, among the hazel-trees --
For hope would give his limbs the power -- and ...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...espective planets.
32. A planet, according to the old astrologers, was in
"exaltation" when in the sign of the Zodiac in which it exerted
its strongest influence; the opposite sign, in which it was
weakest, was called its "dejection." Venus being strongest in
Pisces, was weakest in Virgo; but in Virgo Mercury was in
"exaltation."
33. Intermete: interpose; French, "entremettre."
THE TALE. 1
In olde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Brit...Read more of this...
by
Hardy, Thomas
...How do you know that the pilgrim track
Along the belting zodiac
Swept by the sun in his seeming rounds
Is traced by now to the Fishes' bounds
And into the Ram, when weeks of cloud
Have wrapt the sky in a clammy shroud,
And never as yet a tinct of spring
Has shown in the Earth's apparelling;
O vespering bird, how do you know,
How do you know?
How do you know, deep underground,
Hid in your bed from sight and sound...Read more of this...
by
Marvell, Andrew
...skilful gard'ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, th' industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers!...Read more of this...
by
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...eze love's tidal flow,
Whose streams through Nature circling go?
Nail the wild star to its track
On the half-climbed zodiac?
Light is light which radiates,
Blood is blood which circulates,
Life is life which generates,
And many-seeming life is one,--
Wilt thou transfix and make it none?
Its onward force too starkly pent
In figure, bone, and lineamenti
Wilt thou, uncalled, interrogate,
Talker! the unreplying Fate?
Nor see the genius of the whole
Ascendant in the ...Read more of this...
by
Graves, Robert
...tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison to all true kings that ever reigned?
Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.
Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All ...Read more of this...
by
Thomas, Dylan
...e fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.
My one and noble heart has witnesses
In all love's countries, that will ...Read more of this...
by
Sitwell, Dame Edith
...heir small chioppines
Dance under the orpines.
See the casuistries
Of their slant fluttering eyes--
Gilt as the zodiac
(Dancing Herodiac).
Only the snow slides
Like gilded myrrh--
From the rose-branches--hides
Rose-roots that stir....Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Zodiac poems.