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Best Famous Aliens Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Aliens poems. This is a select list of the best famous Aliens poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Aliens poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of aliens poems.

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Written by Matthew Arnold | Create an image from this poem

West London

 Crouch'd on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there, Pass'd opposite; she touch'd her girl, who hied Across, and begg'd and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers; She will not ask of aliens, but of friends, Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attneds The unknown little from the unknowing great, And points us to a better time than ours.


Written by Ogden Nash | Create an image from this poem

Goody for Our Side and Your Side Too

 Foreigners are people somewhere else,
Natives are people at home;
If the place you’re at
Is your habitat,
You’re a foreigner, say in Rome.
But the scales of Justice balance true, And tit leads into tat, So the man who’s at home When he stays in Rome Is abroad when he’s where you’re at.
When we leave the limits of the land in which Our birth certificates sat us, It does not mean Just a change of scene, But also a change of status.
The Frenchman with his fetching beard, The Scot with his kilt and sporran, One moment he May a native be, And the next may find him foreign.
There’s many a difference quickly found Between the different races, But the only essential Differential Is living different places.
Yet such is the pride of prideful man, From Austrians to Australians, That wherever he is, He regards as his, And the natives there, as aliens.
Oh, I’ll be friends if you’ll be friends, The foreigner tells the native, And we’ll work together for our common ends Like a preposition and a dative.
If our common ends seem mostly mine, Why not, you ignorant foreigner? And the native replies Contrariwise; And hence, my dears, the coroner.
So mind your manners when a native, please, And doubly when you visit And between us all A rapport may fall Ecstatically exquisite.
One simple thought, if you have it pat, Will eliminate the coroner: You may be a native in your habitat, But to foreigners you’re just a foreigner.
Written by Ted Hughes | Create an image from this poem

The Owl

 I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens, A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes Emerged at a point of exclamation As if it had appeared to dinner guests In the middle of the table.
Common mallards Were artefacts of some unearthliness, Their wooings were a hypnagogic film Unreeled by the river.
Impossible To comprehend the comfort of their feet In the freezing water.
You were a camera Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy Like a mother handed her new baby By the midwife.
Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood Of fifteen years before.
My masterpiece Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions Into my face, taking me for a post.
Written by George Meredith | Create an image from this poem

Meditation under Stars

 What links are ours with orbs that are
So resolutely far:
The solitary asks, and they
Give radiance as from a shield:
Still at the death of day,
The seen, the unrevealed.
Implacable they shine To us who would of Life obtain An answer for the life we strain To nourish with one sign.
Nor can imagination throw The penetrative shaft: we pass The breath of thought, who would divine If haply they may grow As Earth; have our desire to know; If life comes there to grain from grass, And flowers like ours of toil and pain; Has passion to beat bar, Win space from cleaving brain; The mystic link attain, Whereby star holds on star.
Those visible immortals beam Allurement to the dream: Ireful at human hungers brook No question in the look.
For ever virgin to our sense, Remote they wane to gaze intense: Prolong it, and in ruthlessness they smite The beating heart behind the ball of sight: Till we conceive their heavens hoar, Those lights they raise but sparkles frore, And Earth, our blood-warm Earth, a shuddering prey To that frigidity of brainless ray.
Yet space is given for breath of thought Beyond our bounds when musing: more When to that musing love is brought, And love is asked of love's wherefore.
'Tis Earth's, her gift; else have we nought: Her gift, her secret, here our tie.
And not with her and yonder sky? Bethink you: were it Earth alone Breeds love, would not her region be The sole delight and throne Of generous Deity? To deeper than this ball of sight Appeal the lustrous people of the night.
Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails, It is our ravenous that quails, Flesh by its craven thirsts and fears distraught.
The spirit leaps alight, Doubts not in them is he, The binder of his sheaves, the sane, the right: Of magnitude to magnitude is wrought, To feel it large of the great life they hold: In them to come, or vaster intervolved, The issues known in us, our unsolved solved: That there with toil Life climbs the self-same Tree, Whose roots enrichment have from ripeness dropped.
So may we read and little find them cold: Let it but be the lord of Mind to guide Our eyes; no branch of Reason's growing lopped; Nor dreaming on a dream; but fortified By day to penetrate black midnight; see, Hear, feel, outside the senses; even that we, The specks of dust upon a mound of mould, We who reflect those rays, though low our place, To them are lastingly allied.
So may we read, and little find them cold: Not frosty lamps illumining dead space, Not distant aliens, not senseless Powers.
The fire is in them whereof we are born; The music of their motion may be ours.
Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth and voiced Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced.
Of love, the grand impulsion, we behold The love that lends her grace Among the starry fold.
Then at new flood of customary morn, Look at her through her showers, Her mists, her streaming gold, A wonder edges the familiar face: She wears no more that robe of printed hours; Half strange seems Earth, and sweeter than her flowers.
Written by Jean Ingelow | Create an image from this poem

HONORS - PART I

A Scholar is musing on his want of success.)

To strive—and fail. Yes, I did strive and fail;
  I set mine eyes upon a certain night
To find a certain star—and could not hail
      With them its deep-set light.
Fool that I was! I will rehearse my fault:
  I, wingless, thought myself on high to lift
Among the winged—I set these feet that halt
      To run against the swift.
And yet this man, that loved me so, can write—
  That loves me, I would say, can let me see;
Or fain would have me think he counts but light
      These Honors lost to me.
         (The letter of his friend.)
"What are they? that old house of yours which gave
  Such welcome oft to me, the sunbeams fall
Yet, down the squares of blue and white which pave
      Its hospitable hall.
"A brave old house! a garden full of bees,
  Large dropping poppies, and Queen hollyhocks,
With butterflies for crowns—tree peonies
      And pinks and goldilocks.
"Go, when the shadow of your house is long
  Upon the garden—when some new-waked bird.
Pecking and fluttering, chirps a sudden song,
      And not a leaf is stirred;
"But every one drops dew from either edge
  Upon its fellow, while an amber ray
Slants up among the tree-tops like a wedge
      Of liquid gold—to play
"Over and under them, and so to fall
  Upon that lane of water lying below—
That piece of sky let in, that you do call
      A pond, but which I know
"To be a deep and wondrous world; for I
  Have seen the trees within it—marvellous things
So thick no bird betwixt their leaves could fly
      But she would smite her wings;—
"Go there, I say; stand at the water's brink,
  And shoals of spotted barbel you shall see
Basking between the shadows—look, and think
      'This beauty is for me;
"'For me this freshness in the morning hours,
  For me the water's clear tranquillity;
For me the soft descent of chestnut flowers;
      The cushat's cry for me.
"'The lovely laughter of the wind-swayed wheat
  The easy slope of yonder pastoral hill;
The sedgy brook whereby the red kine meet
      And wade and drink their fill.'
"Then saunter down that terrace whence the sea
  All fair with wing-like sails you may discern;
Be glad, and say 'This beauty is for me—
      A thing to love and learn.
"'For me the bounding in of tides; for me
  The laying bare of sands when they retreat;
The purple flush of calms, the sparkling glee
      When waves and sunshine meet.'
"So, after gazing, homeward turn, and mount
  To that long chamber in the roof; there tell
Your heart the laid-up lore it holds to count
      And prize and ponder well.
"The lookings onward of the race before
  It had a past to make it look behind;
Its reverent wonder, and its doubting sore,
      Its adoration blind.
"The thunder of its war-songs, and the glow
  Of chants to freedom by the old world sung;
The sweet love cadences that long ago
      Dropped from the old-world tongue.
"And then this new-world lore that takes account
  Of tangled star-dust; maps the triple whirl
Of blue and red and argent worlds that mount
      And greet the IRISH EARL;
"Or float across the tube that HERSCHEL sways,
  Like pale-rose chaplets, or like sapphire mist;
Or hang or droop along the heavenly ways,
      Like scarves of amethyst.
"O strange it is and wide the new-world lore,
  For next it treateth of our native dust!
Must dig out buried monsters, and explore
      The green earth's fruitful crust;
"Must write the story of her seething youth—
  How lizards paddled in her lukewarm seas;
Must show the cones she ripened, and forsooth
      Count seasons on her trees;
"Must know her weight, and pry into her age,
  Count her old beach lines by their tidal swell;
Her sunken mountains name, her craters gauge,
      Her cold volcanoes tell;
"And treat her as a ball, that one might pass
  From this hand to the other—such a ball
As he could measure with a blade of grass,
      And say it was but small!
"Honors! O friend, I pray you bear with me:
  The grass hath time to grow in meadow lands,
And leisurely the opal murmuring sea
      Breaks on her yellow sands;
"And leisurely the ring-dove on her nest
  Broods till her tender chick will peck the shell
And leisurely down fall from ferny crest
      The dew-drops on the well;
"And leisurely your life and spirit grew,
  With yet the time to grow and ripen free:
No judgment past withdraws that boon from you,
      Nor granteth it to me.
"Still must I plod, and still in cities moil;
  From precious leisure, learned leisure far,
Dull my best self with handling common soil;
      Yet mine those honors are.
"Mine they are called; they are a name which means,
  'This man had steady pulses, tranquil nerves:
Here, as in other fields, the most he gleans
      Who works and never swerves.
"We measure not his mind; we cannot tell
  What lieth under, over, or beside
The test we put him to; he doth excel,
    We know, where he is tried;
"But, if he boast some farther excellence—
  Mind to create as well as to attain;
To sway his peers by golden eloquence,
    As wind doth shift a fane;
"'To sing among the poets—we are nought:
  We cannot drop a line into that sea
And read its fathoms off, nor gauge a thought,
    Nor map a simile.
"'It may be of all voices sublunar
  The only one he echoes we did try;
We may have come upon the only star
    That twinkles in his sky,'
"And so it was with me."
                         O false my friend!
  False, false, a random charge, a blame undue;
Wrest not fair reasoning to a crooked end:
    False, false, as you are true!
But I read on: "And so it was with me;
  Your golden constellations lying apart
They neither hailed nor greeted heartily,
    Nor noted on their chart.
"And yet to you and not to me belong
  Those finer instincts that, like second sight
And hearing, catch creation's undersong,
      And see by inner light.
"You are a well, whereon I, gazing, see
  Reflections of the upper heavens—a well
From whence come deep, deep echoes up to me—
      Some underwave's low swell.
"I cannot soar into the heights you show,
  Nor dive among the deeps that you reveal;
But it is much that high things ARE to know,
      That deep things ARE to feel.
"'Tis yours, not mine, to pluck out of your breast
  Some human truth, whose workings recondite
Were unattired in words, and manifest
      And hold it forth to light
"And cry, 'Behold this thing that I have found,'
  And though they knew not of it till that day,
Nor should have done with no man to expound
      Its meaning, yet they say,
"'We do accept it: lower than the shoals
  We skim, this diver went, nor did create,
But find it for us deeper in our souls
      Than we can penetrate.'
"You were to me the world's interpreter,
  The man that taught me Nature's unknown tongue,
And to the notes of her wild dulcimer
      First set sweet words, and sung.
"And what am I to you? A steady hand
  To hold, a steadfast heart to trust withal;
Merely a man that loves you, and will stand
      By you, whatever befall.
"But need we praise his tendance tutelar
  Who feeds a flame that warms him? Yet 'tis true
I love you for the sake of what you are,
      And not of what you do:—
"As heaven's high twins, whereof in Tyrian blue
  The one revolveth: through his course immense
Might love his fellow of the damask hue,
      For like, and difference.
"For different pathways evermore decreed
  To intersect, but not to interfere;
For common goal, two aspects, and one speed,
      One centre and one year;
"For deep affinities, for drawings strong,
  That by their nature each must needs exert;
For loved alliance, and for union long,
      That stands before desert.
"And yet desert makes brighter not the less,
  For nearest his own star he shall not fail
To think those rays unmatched for nobleness,
      That distance counts but pale.
"Be pale afar, since still to me you shine,
  And must while Nature's eldest law shall hold;"—
Ah, there's the thought which makes his random line
      Dear as refinèd gold!
Then shall I drink this draft of oxymel,
  Part sweet, part sharp? Myself o'erprized to know
Is sharp; the cause is sweet, and truth to tell
      Few would that cause forego,
Which is, that this of all the men on earth
  Doth love me well enough to count me great—
To think my soul and his of equal girth—
      O liberal estimate!
And yet it is so; he is bound to me,
  For human love makes aliens near of kin;
By it I rise, there is equality:
      I rise to thee, my twin.
"Take courage"—courage! ay, my purple peer
  I will take courage; for thy Tyrian rays
Refresh me to the heart, and strangely dear
      And healing is thy praise.
"Take courage," quoth he, "and respect the mind
  Your Maker gave, for good your fate fulfil;
The fate round many hearts your own to wind."
      Twin soul, I will! I will!


Written by Aleksandr Blok | Create an image from this poem

A Girl Sang a Song

 A girl sang a song in the temple's chorus, 
About men, tired in alien lands, 
About the ships that left native shores, 
And all who forgot their joy to the end.
Thus sang her clean voice, and flew up to the highness, And sunbeams shined on her shoulder's white -- And everyone saw and heard from the darkness The white and airy gown, singing in the light.
And all of them were sure, that joy would burst out: The ships have arrived at their beach, The people, in the land of the aliens tired, Regaining their bearing, are happy and reach.
And sweet was her voice and the sun's beams around.
.
.
.
And only, by Caesar's Gates -- high on the vault, The baby, versed into mysteries, mourned, Because none of them will be ever returned.
Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

The Aliens

 you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction or
distress.
they dress well, eat well, sleep well.
they are contented with their family life.
they have moments of grief but all in all they are undisturbed and often feel very good.
and when they die it is an easy death, usually in their sleep.
you may not believe it but such people do exist.
but I am not one of them.
oh no, I am not one of them, I am not even near to being one of them but they are there and I am here.
Written by Rg Gregory | Create an image from this poem

bee-attitudes

 in the shadow 
of the flower
is the sting

the bee driven by need
uses its painful gift
to keep its sense of beauty
in proportion

it does its job with
a thoughtless dedication
its honeyed world
excites no inner space

bees are not poets
who wade through words
with too much brain
around their ankles

each itching bee-part
is attuned
to a cosmic web
each buzz miraculous

flowers put powder
on their private parts
to call the bees in
it seems a good game

much fumbling and the bee
goes home to mother
rewards ripple outwards
to many dripping tongues

bees hate anything
that gets in the way
the bee-world is exclusive
aliens - keep out

bees live on a knife-edge
between honey
and a ripped-out sting
violation propels them

in the shadow 
of the nectar
is the horror
Written by George William Russell | Create an image from this poem

On Behalf of Some Irishmen not Followers of Tradition

 THEY call us aliens, we are told,
Because our wayward visions stray
From that dim banner they unfold,
The dreams of worn-out yesterday.
The sum of all the past is theirs, The creeds, the deeds, the fame, the name, Whose death-created glory flares And dims the spark of living flame.
They weave the necromancer’s spell, And burst the graves where martyrs slept, Their ancient story to retell, Renewing tears the dead have wept.
And they would have us join their dirge, This worship of an extinct fire In which they drift beyond the verge Where races all outworn expire.
The worship of the dead is not A worship that our hearts allow, Though every famous shade were wrought With woven thorns above the brow.
We fling our answer back in scorn: “We are less children of this clime Than of some nation yet unborn Or empire in the womb of time.
We hold the Ireland in the heart More than the land our eyes have seen, And love the goal for which we start More than the tale of what has been.
” The generations as they rise May live the life men lived before, Still hold the thought once held as wise, Go in and out by the same door.
We leave the easy peace it brings: The few we are shall still unite In fealty to unseen kings Or unimaginable light.
We would no Irish sign efface, But yet our lips would gladlier hail The firstborn of the Coming Race Than the last splendour of the Gael.
No blazoned banner we unfold— One charge alone we give to youth, Against the sceptred myth to hold The golden heresy of truth.

Book: Shattered Sighs