Weather poems
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Bird Language
© Christopher Pearse Cranch
One day in the bluest of summer weather,
Sketching under a whispering oak,
I heard five bobolinks laughing together
Over some ornithological joke.
Spring Came In
© Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
SPRING came in with a red-wing's feather
And yellow clumps of the wild marshmallow--
O happy bird, can you tell me whether
In distant France they have April weather?
And little pools that are sunny and shallow?
Lovers And A Reflection
© Charles Stuart Calverley
In moss-prankt dells which the sunbeams flatter
(And heaven it knoweth what that may mean;
Meaning, however, is no great matter)
Where woods are a-tremble with words a-tween.
King Cole
© George MacDonald
King Cole he reigned in Aureoland,
But the sceptre was seldom in his hand
The Loving Shepherdess
© Robinson Jeffers
She dreamed that a two-legged whiff of flame
Rose up from the house gable-peak crying, "Oh! Oh!"
And doubled in the middle and fled away on the wind
Like music above the bee-hives.
The Poet's Dead
© Mikhail Lermontov
He's slain - and taken by the grave
Like that unknown, but happy bard,
Victim of jealousy wild,
Of whom he sang with wondrous power,
Struck down, like him, by an unyielding hand.
Answer To A Child's Question
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove,
The linnet, and thrush say, 'I love and I love!'
In the winter they're silent, the wind is so strong;
What it says I don't know, but it sings a loud song.
The Seven Sisters
© William Wordsworth
Or, The Solitude Of Binnorie
SEVEN Daughter had Lord Archibald,
Written for my Son ... at his First Putting on Breeches
© Mary Barber
WHAT is it our mamma's bewitches,
To plague us little boys with breeches ?
Cobbler Keezar's Vision
© John Greenleaf Whittier
The beaver cut his timber
With patient teeth that day,
The minks were fish-wards, and the crows
Surveyors of highway,-
Fatal Love
© Matthew Prior
Poor Hal caught his death standing under a spout
Expecting till midnight when Nan would come out;
But fatal his patience, as cruel the dame,
And cursed was the weather that quench'd the man's flame.
Whoe'er thou art that reads these moral lines,
Make love at home, and go to bed betimes.
Alberto by Warren Woessner: American Life in Poetry #118 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006
© Ted Kooser
Our species has developed monstrous weapons that can kill not only all of us but everything else on the planet, yet when the wind rises we run for cover, as we have done for as long as we've been on this earth. Here's hoping we never have the skill or arrogance to conquer the weather. And weather stories? We tell them in the same way our ancestors related encounters with fearsome dragons. This poem by Minnesota poet Warren Woessner honors the tradition by sharing an experience with a hurricane.
At Queensferry
© William Ernest Henley
The blackbird sang, the skies were clear and clean
We bowled along a road that curved a spine
Hermann And Dorothea - II. Terpsichore
© Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Then the son thoughtfully answer'd:--"I know not why, but the fact is
My annoyance has graven itself in my mind, and hereafter
I could not bear at the piano to see her, or list to her singing."
After The Flood
© Arthur Rimbaud
As soon as the idea of the Deluge had subsided,
A hare stopped in the clover and swaying flowerbells,
and said a prayer to the rainbow,
through the spider's web.
The Old Village Doctor
© Henry Clay Work
Count the mossy marbles in the graveyard!
Our old doctor and his patients, there they lie.
All regradless of the weather,
They are waiting there together,
For that long-sought "better by-and-by."
The Obliterate Tomb
© Thomas Hardy
'More than half my life long
Did they weigh me falsely, to my bitter wrong,
But they all have shrunk away into the silence
Like a lost song.
