Famous Northern Lights Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Northern Lights poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous northern lights poems. These examples illustrate what a famous northern lights poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...men’s
eyes,
Rich as a sunset on the Norway coast, the sky, the islands, and the cliffs,
Or midnight’s silent glowing northern lights unreachable.
Haply God’s riddle it, so vague and yet so certain,
The soul for it, and all the visible universe for it,
And heaven at last for it....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...s the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th'almighty stretch'd-out arm;
Glorious th'enraptur'd main:
LXXXV
Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme;
Glorious the thunder's roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr's gore:
LXXXVI
Glorious—more glorious, is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down,
By meekness, call'd thy Son:
Thou at stupendous truth believ'd;—
And now the matc...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...n:
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;
Glorious th' enraptur'd main:
Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme;
Glorious the thunder's roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr's gore:
Glorious--more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
By meekness, call'd thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believ'd,
And now the matchless deed's achiev'd,...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...ight hour.
And when, in journeying o'er the path of life,
My love I follow'd, as she onward moved,
With stars and northern lights o'er head in strife,
Going and coming, perfect bliss I proved
At
midnight hour.
Until at length the full moon, lustre-fraught,
Burst thro' the gloom wherein she was enshrined;
And then the willing, active, rapid thought
Around the past, as round the future twined,
At
midnight hour.
1818....Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...r
losing moths among lost faces,
speaking to the stubs who asked you
to speak of songs and God and dancing,
of bananas, northern lights or Jesus,
any hummingbird of thought whatever
flying away from the red death jazz of war?
Did I see your hand make a useless gesture
trying to say with a code of five fingers
something the tongue only stutters?
did I see a dusk Golgotha?...Read more of this...
by
Sandburg, Carl
...the flags that fly
To dare the storm and the fog accurst,
Of the great North Sea where the bergs are nursed,
And the Northern Lights ride high?"
"The Australian folk," said a lone sea-mew,
"The Australian flag," said he.
"It is strange that a folk that is far and few
Should fly their flag where there never flew
Another flag!" said he.
"I have followed their flag in the fields of France,
With its white stars flying free,
And no misfortune and no mischance ...Read more of this...
by
Paterson, Andrew Barton
...ves? What looks
a stripe a hundred million
miles away from here
is where we live.
*
Let's keep it clear. The Northern Lights
are not the North Star. Being but
a blur, they cannot reassure us.
They keep moving - I think far
too easily. September spills
some glimmers of
the boreals to come:
they're modest pools
of horizontal haze, where later
they'll appear as foldings in the vertical,
a work of curtains, throbbing dim
or bright. (One wonders at
one...Read more of this...
by
McHugh, Heather
...
The stars can be faint,
The moon can be eating itself out,
There can be meteors flaring to death on earth,
The Northern Lights can be blooming and seething
And tearing themselves apart all night,
We walk arm in arm, and we are happy.
2
You in whose ultimate madness we live,
You flinging yourself out into the emptiness,
You - like us - great an instant,
O only universe we know, forgive us....Read more of this...
by
Kinnell, Galway
...You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the ...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too h...Read more of this...
by
Francis, Robert
...I'll tell of the howling wilderness and the haggard Arctic heights,
Of a reckless vow that I made, and how I staked the Northern Lights....Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...s,
To the glimmering fields and the silent places.
I whistle gaily on starry nights
Through the arch of the elfin northern lights,
But in long white valleys I pause to hark
Where the ring of the home-lights gems the dark.
Come, ye earth-children, whose hearts are sad,
I will make you valiant and strong and glad!...Read more of this...
by
Montgomery, Lucy Maud
...on's Bay to the Northern Ocean. In the high Northern Latititudes, as the same writer informs us, when the Northern Lights vary their position in the air, they make a rustling and a crackling noise. This circumstance is alluded to in the first stanza of the following poem.] THE COMPLAINT, etc. Before I see another day, Oh let my body die away! In sleep I heard the northern gleams; &n...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen ***** sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him ...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...ely journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.Read more of this...
by
Allingham, William
...This is the song of the parson's son, as he squats in his shack alone,
On the wild, weird nights, when the Northern Lights shoot up from the frozen zone,
And it's sixty below, and couched in the snow the hungry huskies moan:
"I'm one of the Arctic brotherhood, I'm an old-time pioneer.
I came with the first -- O God! how I've cursed this Yukon -- but still I'm here.
I've sweated athirst in its summer heat, I've frozen and starved in its cold;
I've followe...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...k to the sea and no man knows their path.
Then dark they lie and stark they lie -- rookery, dune, and floe,
And the Northern Lights come down o' nights to dance with the houseless snow;
And God Who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the wind along the snow.
But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear,
The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year.
English they be and Jap...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...THE only one whom, Lida, thou canst love,
Thou claim'st, and rightly claim'st, for only thee;
He too is wholly thine; since doomed to rove
Far from thee, in life's turmoils nought I see
Save a thin veil, through which thy form I view,
As though in clouds; with kindly smile and true,
It cheers me, like the stars eterne that gleam
Across the northern-ligh...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...I SEND to you, commissioners,
A paper that may please ye, sirs
(For troth they say it might be worse
An' I believe't)
And on your business lay my curse
Before I leav't.
I thocht I'd serve wi' you, sirs, yince,
But I've thocht better of it since;
The maitter I will nowise mince,
But tell ye true:
I'll service wi' some ither prince,
An' no wi' you.
...Read more of this...
by
Stevenson, Robert Louis
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