Best Summer Poems

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
...

I ask for a moment's indulgence to sit by thy side. The works
that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite,
...

Crabbed Age and Youth
Cannot live together:
Youth is full of pleasance,
Age is full of care;
...

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
...

O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
...

In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
...

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
...

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.
...

The sun is set; and in his latest beams
Yon little cloud of ashen gray and gold,
Slowly upon the amber air unrolled,
...

I didn't go to church today,
I trust the Lord to understand.
The surf was swirling blue and white,
The children swirling on the sand.
...

Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom,
And the crow is on the oak a-building of her nest,
And love is burning diamonds in my true lover's breast;
...

Warm summer sun,
Shine kindly here,
Warm southern wind,
Blow softly here.
...

Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
...

I love to rise in a summer morn
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me.
...

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,
And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.
I already hear the dead thuds of logs below
Falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.
...

O gather me the rose, the rose,
While yet in flower we find it,
For summer smiles, but summer goes,
And winter waits behind it.
...

Inscribed to a Dear Child:
In Memory of Golden Summer Hours
And Whispers of a Summer Sea
...

1540

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away—
...

There is never a sight more beautiful
Or so amazing than that of a tree,
In summer with branches and leaves so full
With gently swaying boughs for all to see.
...

In the blue sky just a few specks of gray
In the evening of a beautiful day
Though last night it rained and more rain on the way
And that more rain is needed 'twould be fair to say
...

he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
...

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
...

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
...

My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.
...

We plucked a red rose, you and I
All in the summer weather;
Sweet its perfume and rare its bloom,
Enjoyed by us together.
...

I

The stars were wild that summer evening
As on the low lake shore stood you and I
...

A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
The page he contemplates he doesn't see.
...

O thou who passest thro' our valleys in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitched'st here thy goldent tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.
...

122

A something in a summer's Day
As slow her flambeaux burn away
...

Bend low again, night of summer stars.
So near you are, sky of summer stars,
So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars,
Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,
...

19

A sepal, petal, and a thorn
Upon a common summer's morn—
...

There is a singer eveyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
...

How like the seasons is our life,
We face the sunshine, storms and strife;
As seasons come, so they must go,
We are enjoined within that flow.
...

'Oh, dear, this utterly sweltering season of the highly rampant sun is drawing nigh, and it will always be good enough to go on taking daytime baths, as the lakes and rivers will still be with plenteous waters, and at the end of the day, nightfall will be pleasant with fascinating moon, and in such nights Love-god can somehow be almost mollified...[who tortured us in the previous vernal season... but now without His sweltering us, we can happily enjoy the nights devouring cool soft drinks and dancing and merrymaking in outfields...]
...

In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!
...

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
...

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
...

Pillowed and hushed on the silent plain,
Wrapped in her mantle of golden grain,

Wearied of pleasuring weeks away,
...

Until I found you,
I wrote verse, drew pictures,
And, went out with friends
For walks…
...

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing, they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow,
...

(Dedicated to neat poet Catrina Heart)

1. Summer dragon runs
Upon the plant and animal
...

Between the dusk of a summer night
And the dawn of a summer day,
We caught at a mood as it passed in flight,
And we bade it stoop and stay.
...

I have kissed the summer dawn. Before the palaces, nothing moved. The water lay dead. Battalions of shadows still kept the forest road.

I walked, walking warm and vital breath, While stones watched, and wings rose soundlessly.
...

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying,
and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my
...

I would give up drinking
To be drunk with your perfume
On a summer night
With the sea breeze singing
...

A diamond or a coal?
A diamond, if you please:
Who cares about a clumsy coal
Beneath the summer trees?
...

Like rainbows dissolving or love's end
We mourn the parting of friends

As the Sun travels East to West
...

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.
...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
...

In the blue summer evenings, I will go along the paths,
And walk over the short grass, as I am pricked by the wheat:
Daydreaming I will feel the coolness on my feet.
I will let the wind bathe my bare head.
...

Night fell over North Lebanon and snow was covering the villages surrounded by the Kadeesha Valley, giving the fields and prairies the appearance of a great sheet of parchment upon which the furious Nature was recording her many deeds. Men came home from the streets while silence engulfed the night.

In a lone house near those villages lived a woman who sat by her fireside spinning wool, and at her side was her only child, staring now at the fire and then at his mother.
...

Winter's last rose; rose of regret:
O how once your radiant beauty
Shimmered in summer's potent hour.
Now your faded petals offer,
...

This is the treacherous month when autumn days
With summer's voice come bearing summer's gifts.
Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts
Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze
...

The browns, the olives, and the yellows died,
And were swept up to heaven; where they glowed
Each dawn and set of sun till Christmastide,
And when the land lay pale for them, pale-snowed,
...

A sunset's mounded cloud;
A diamond evening-star;
Sad blue hills afar;
Love in his shroud.
...

In the morning, very early,
That's the time I love to go
Barefoot where the fern grows curly
And grass is cool between each toe,
On a summer morning-O!
On a summer morning!
...

Pray to what earth does this sweet cold belong,
Which asks no duties and no conscience?
The moon goes up by leaps, her cheerful path
In some far summer stratum of the sky,
...

When first we saw the apple tree
The boughs were dark and straight,
But never grief to give had we,
Though Spring delayed so late.
...

I was picking flowers and you were praising smoke.
The echoes of that last time linger on.
Birds pieced from the gray quilt of the dusk
Sang mighty wholeness that is ever lost.
...

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying,
and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my
...

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
...

Oh, the world is all too rude for thee, with much ado and care;
Oh, this world is but a rude world, and hurts a thing so fair;
...

Now welcome Summer with thy sunne soft,
That hast this winter`s weathers overshake,
And driven away the longe nighties black.

...

O I will walk with you, my lad, whichever way you fare,
You'll have me, too, the side o' you, with heart as light as air;
No care for where the road you take's a-leadin' anywhere,--
It can but be a joyful ja'nt whilst you journey there.
...

Celia, we know, is sixty-five,
Yet Celia's face is seventeen;
Thus winter in her breast must live,
While summer in her face is seen.
...

I looked into my heart to write
And found a desert there.
But when I looked again I heard
Howling and proud in every word
...

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
...

A PLAN the Muses entertain'd

Methodically to impart
...

Here in this spring, stars float along the void;
Here in this ornamental winter
Down pelts the naked weather;
This summer buries a spring bird.
...

Go, sit upon the lofty hill,
And turn your eyes around,
Where waving woods and waters wild
Do hymn an autumn sound.
...

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
...

...

Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects' aimless industry.
...

Once upon a Summer day,
Birds chirped in a musical way,
Grass drenched in the morning dew,
The sky covered in a vast color of blue.
...

981

As Sleigh Bells seem in summer
Or Bees, at Christmas show—
...

The road is my wedded companion. She speaks to me under my feet all
day, she sings to my dreams all night.
My meeting with her had no beginning, it begins endlessly at
each daybreak, renewing its summer in fresh flowers and songs, and
...

Frail Travellers, deftly flickering over the flowers;
O living flowers against the heedless blue
Of summer days, what sends them dancing through
This fiery-blossom’d revel of the hours?
...

Bland as the morning breath of June
The southwest breezes play;
And, through its haze, the winter noon
...

Piecemeal the summer dies;
At the field's edge a daisy lives alone;
A last shawl of burning lies
On a gray field-stone.
...

YEAR that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough--yet the air I breathed froze me;
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me;
...

111

The Bee is not afraid of me.
I know the Butterfly.
...

I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,
Broken, with rocks, with clinging cedars, with tall shapes dingily seen,
...

When you go away, my friend,
When you say your last good-bye,
Then the summer time will end,
And the winter will be nigh.
...

Pale amber sunlight falls across
The reddening October trees,
That hardly sway before a breeze
As soft as summer: summer's loss
...

HERE where the roses blossom, where vines round the laurels are twining,
Where the turtle-dove calls, where the blithe cricket is heard,
Say, whose grave can this be, with life by all the Immortals
...

BY broad Potomac's shore--again, old tongue!
(Still uttering--still ejaculating--canst never cease this babble?)
Again, old heart so gay--again to you, your sense, the full flush
...

The summer sun is sinking low;
Only the tree-tops redden and glow:
Only the weathercock on the spire
Of the neighboring church is a flame of fire;
...

On fields o'er which the reaper's hand has pass'd
Lit by the harvest moon and autumn sun,
My thoughts like stubble floating in the wind
And of such fineness as October airs,
...

The mood was bittersweet and lyrical.
The birds sang evening almost every day.
My dress was yellow as the paling sun.
Wind whispered of us to the Queen Anne's lace.
...

You are my enslavement and my freedom
You are my flesh burning like a raw summer night
You are my country
You are the green silks in hazel eyes
...

Lyric night of the lingering Indian summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.
...

Scene.--_A kitchen.--Group of Children, popping corn.--The Fairy Queen
of the Seasons discovered in the smoke of the corn-popper.--Waving her
...

Early summer rain--
houses facing the river,
two of them.
...

My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear:
That love is merchandized whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
...

At summer eve, when heaven's aerial bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
...

I am yours as the summer air at evening is
Possessed by the scent of linden blossoms,
...

221

It can't be "Summer"!
That—got through!
...

High, hollowed in green
above the rocks of reason
lies the crater lake
whose ice the dreamer breaks
...

Warm summer loves
Return the letter in the wind
A write that forever young in heart
Remain my soul free, loved in serenity
...