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Quotes & Poems

Nature poems: the sea, the seasons and the sky

Updated

Poets have always gone outside to think. Here are short, famous poems about the sea, autumn, spring, rain, trees and the moon - each with its source and a plain-English note - plus a few small poems of our own.

Short poems about the sea

"Break, Break, Break" - Alfred Tennyson

Poems, 1842

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

What it's about: Standing by the sea, the poet watches children playing and ships sailing home while he misses someone who has died. The waves keep breaking; the person does not come back. Sixteen lines about the sea and life, often chosen for a memorial.

Poems about the seaside for children

"At the Sea-Side" - Robert Louis Stevenson

A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885

When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.

What it's about: Every child who has dug a hole on the beach knows this moment: the sea fills it. Six lines, easy to learn by heart.

Low Tide

The tide goes out
and leaves the sand
written all over
in a language
only the gulls can read.

Original - Quotes and Poems

Autumn poems by famous poets

"To Autumn" (first stanza) - John Keats

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, 1820

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

What it's about: Autumn and the sun are two friends ripening everything - apples, nuts, late flowers - while the bees think summer will never end. It is an ode, a formal poem addressed to one subject; see our types of poems.

October

The maple lets go
of each leaf
like a parent
at the school gate.

Original - Quotes and Poems

Spring and flower poems

"I wandered lonely as a Cloud" (Daffodils) - William Wordsworth

Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of dancing Daffodills;
Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:--
A Poet could not but be gay
In such a laughing company:
I gaz'd--and gaz'd--but little thought
What wealth the shew to me had brought:

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.

What it's about: A walker comes across thousands of daffodils by a lake, and later, at home, the memory of them still cheers him up. This is the original 1807 text, with its old spellings ("Daffodills", "shew"); the better-known four-stanza version is Wordsworth's 1815 revision. More on our William Wordsworth page.

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" - A. E. Housman

A Shropshire Lad, 1896 (poem II)

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

What it's about: A twenty-year-old works out he has only fifty springs left - so he'd better go and see the cherry blossom now.

Rain and moon poems

"Rain" - Robert Louis Stevenson

A Child's Garden of Verses, 1885

The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

What it's about: Four lines that zoom out from a child's street to the whole world. One of the easiest poems to memorize.

"To the Moon" (fragment) - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Posthumous Poems, 1824

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

What it's about: Shelley asks the moon whether it looks pale because it is tired and lonely, always travelling and never finding anything worth staying for. It was published after his death.

Allotment, Rain

Rain on the shed roof.
The whole garden
drinking slowly,
saying nothing.

Original - Quotes and Poems

Poems about trees

"Trees" - Joyce Kilmer

First printed in Poetry magazine, 1913; Trees and Other Poems, 1914

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

What it's about: The poet says no poem can match a real tree, which drinks from the earth, holds birds' nests and lives through snow and rain. Twelve lines in rhyming pairs; it has a religious ending.

Nature poems for a funeral

For someone who loved the coast or the garden, "Break, Break, Break" (above) is a gentle choice; Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" and Stevenson's "Requiem" are on our funeral poems page.

FAQ

What is a famous short poem about the sea?

Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" (Poems, 1842) - 16 lines, printed in full above. We have left out John Masefield's "Sea Fever": Masefield died in 1967, so his poems are still in copyright in the UK.

What is the most famous autumn poem?

John Keats's "To Autumn", written in September 1819 and published in 1820, is the one most often called the best known. It begins "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".

What is Wordsworth's most famous nature poem?

"I wandered lonely as a Cloud", often called "Daffodils", first published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and revised in 1815. See our William Wordsworth page.

Sources

Not the former quotesandpoems.com - an independent collection of public-domain poems and original writing.