Ririro.com - Poetry

"Christmas Time" by John Clare paints a richly sensory portrait of Christmas in an English rural village, where every cottage hearth glows with welcome and old customs come alive. Milkmaids and shepherds, children and cottagers, wassail-singers and Morris dancers fill the poem with laughter, carols, and the smell of warming ale. Clare's speaker watches with tender longing as mistletoe is hung, bel...

"The Christmas Silence" is a nativity poem that draws readers into the breathless hush of the stable on Christmas night. Pigeons settle on dusty rafters, oxen sleep on fragrant hay, and a lone lamb tucks close to its mother's side. At the heart of this still scene, a young mother kneels beside her radiant newborn, pressing her cheek to his face in wordless prayer — until the silence of ages breaks...

"The Cowboys' Christmas Ball" gallops through a raucous Christmas dance held on the Texas frontier, where ranch hands ride into Anson City and the fiddle and bass viol strike up under candlelit walls hung with mistletoe. The narrator recalls the booming voice of caller "Windy Billy," whose livestock-laced commands send cowboys and ladies spinning through do-si-dos until the early dawn. Dust flies,...

"The Knighting of the Sirloin" retells the popular legend of King Charles II of England, who — after an exhausting Christmas hunt through the snowy Chingford woods — sits down to a warming feast at Friday Hall. So impressed is he by a magnificent loin of beef that the king draws on his royal authority and, in a moment of gleeful whimsy, knights the joint on the spot. The poem captures the warmth o...

"Bells Across the Snows" is a Christmas poem that holds joy and sorrow in the same breath, evoking a starlit winter night where the sound of distant bells stirs both warmth and grief. The speaker mourns loved ones now absent from the Christmas gathering, imagining their voices still joined in song somewhere beyond reach. Yet the poem does not surrender to despair — across its three stanzas, grief...

"Minstrels and Maids" is a Christmas carol poem by William Morris in which a group of wandering outlanders arrives bearing wine and wondrous news. Against a refrain of snow-swept streets and a wind-rattled door, they recount an encounter with three shepherds who witnessed a newborn child in an ox-stall, a flawless maid, and a white-haired man kneeling in reverence. A marvellous song healed the she...

"Church Decking at Christmas" is a Christmas poem by William Wordsworth that mourns the loss of rich religious customs stripped away by overly austere forebears. Wordsworth laments how barren ceremony leaves memory and hope impoverished, warning that cold rationalist "light" can blight the soul. He turns instead to a joyful image: a church dressed in fresh holly at Christmas, its pews so alive wit...

"So, Now Is Come Our Joyfulst Feast" is a Christmas poem brimming with the sights and sounds of holiday celebration — ivy-decked rooms, smoking chimneys, roasting spits, and the beat of bagpipe and tabor. George Wither sweeps readers through a village alive with feasting and dancing, where even misers loosen their purse strings, lads court lasses, and Jack pipes while Jill dances. Sorrow is firmly...

"The Christmas Carol" by William Wordsworth captures a winter night when minstrels play beneath a moonlit cottage, their music cutting through the freezing air to honour every household by name. The poem moves from the bright dazzle of laurel leaves under moonlight to the hush of snow-muffled winds at midnight, weaving together communal joy and quiet sorrow — unbidden tears for names once heard an...

"A Christmas Song" by William Cox Bennett is a brief, wind-swept poem in which a speaker pleads with the winter wind to carry a message home to a sailor at sea. Through biting hail, sleet, and snow, the wind becomes a messenger of love and longing, its shrill moans transformed into a call urging the sailor homeward before Christmas arrives. The poem captures the ache of separation and the fragile...

"The End of the Play" by William Makepeace Thackeray opens like a curtain call — an actor removing his mask to reveal a face far from joyful. Written as a Christmas address, the poem moves through the shared theatre of human experience: the griefs and ambitions of youth mirrored in middle age, the arbitrary cruelty of fate, the rich man's feast set against the beggar at the gate. Thackeray asks no...

"Mark Well My Heavy Doleful Tale" is a comic farewell poem lamenting the close of Christmas on Twelfth Night, when the feasting must end. The speaker mourns the departure of plum porridge, roast beef, minced pies, strong ale, and good company with mock-dramatic grief, calling for one last brimming bowl to steady his breaking heart. The humor sharpens as his sorrow proves more about an empty belly...

"A Ballade of Old Loves" by Carolyn Wells conjures three fleeting visions of women from Christmases past — a laughing maid on a staircase, a costumed reveller at a masquerade, a radiant dancer in a ballroom — each glowing briefly before dissolving back into darkness. The poem's refrain insists these are only ghosts, yet their beauty haunts the speaker. In the closing envoi, Rosamond — his present...

"Ballade of Christmas Ghosts" by Andrew Lang conjures the quiet hauntings of Christmas — not supernatural terrors, but the bittersweet ghosts of memory that return unbidden each winter. A speaker reflects on growing older, on childhood voices in village choirs, on flickering hearths and silent barn-stalls on Christmas Eve. The poem moves between melancholy and warmth, urging readers to carry their...

"The Newest Thing in Christmas Carols" is a comedic poem that turns a beloved carol on its head, cataloguing the real tribulations of Christmas rather than its joys. From indigestion after festive feasting and mounting holiday bills, to foggy slush, icy tumbles, sleepless nights, dreary pantomimes, and rampaging children home on holiday — the poem piles woe upon woe with cheerful irony, wishing re...

"Eddi's Service" is a short poem by Rudyard Kipling in which Eddi, a Saxon priest, rings the bell for a midnight Christmas service — and no one comes. The night is stormy, his neighbours are feasting, and yet Eddi presses on. His only congregation turns out to be a weary donkey and a rain-soaked bullock who wander in from the cold. Undeterred, Eddi preaches to them with the same devotion he would...

"Lines to Christmas" is a self-aware, humorous poem that skewers the annual ritual of producing obligatory Christmas verse. Monte Sohn's narrator wryly observes that while fashions in cars, hats, and war change with each passing year, Christmas poetry never does — editors expect it, bards dutifully deliver it, and most of it is cheerfully lame. Caught between satirical contempt and affectionate su...

"The Seven Sets of Presents" is a clever poem that reimagines Shakespeare's "All the World's a Stage" as a comedy of gift-giving, following a man from infancy to old age through the presents he receives. Rattles and tin soldiers give way to gaudy neckties from a sweetheart, then socks and leaky fountain pens from well-meaning friends, and finally a magnifying glass for failing eyes in old age. Eac...

"A Christmas Memory" by James Whitcomb Riley captures Christmas through the eyes of a small child staying at his aunt's house while his mother is gravely ill. Told entirely in the boy's own unpolished speech, the poem moves between cheerful anticipation of his father's Christmas Day return and quiet, half-understood glimpses of adult grief — a father's wet cheeks, an aunt who turns away to cry. Th...

"A Feel In The Chris'mas-Air" captures the bittersweet sensation that creeps in every Christmas season — a nameless ache that sits alongside appetite, energy, and the joy of watching children's flushed, excited faces. The speaker tries to pin down the feeling: is it the toy drums, the whistles, the blaring horns? He cannot quite locate it. What Riley evokes so precisely is the way festive happines...

"Das Krist Kindel" opens on a solitary December evening, a narrator dozing by a crackling fire while winter prowls outside. Through curling cigar smoke, a vision unfolds: a jolly frost-haired figure conjures a miniature stage where tiny children gather in wonder around a glowing baby boy in straw. The scene deepens into a reverent Nativity, complete with gifts of frankincense and myrrh and a soari...

"Chrismus On The Plantation" is a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar set on a gloomy Christmas Eve when a struggling plantation master tells his formerly enslaved workers he can no longer pay them and must sell the land. Before despair can settle, a man named old Ben steps forward and refuses to abandon the man who once held them in bondage — not out of submission, but out of fierce communal loyalty. Hi...

"Christmas" by Paul Laurence Dunbar crackles with the energy of a holiday gathering in full swing — fiddles playing, fires roaring, and a table heavy with possum and warm drinks. The speaker urges everyone to dance and feast through the cold night, brushing off biting frost and whistling winds with laughter and togetherness. Through vivid dialect verse, Dunbar captures a specific, joyful African A...

"Chrismus Is A-comin'" captures the infectious excitement of Christmas building through winter frost and cold nights. Dunbar's speaker — a mother watching her sleeping child, nicknamed "my little lammy" — brims with secret joy over the gifts and celebrations she has planned. Through vivid dialect verse, the poem layers seasonal imagery of snow, banjo music, dancing, and holiday feasting against th...

"A Christmas Folksong" by Paul Laurence Dunbar opens on a mild, snowless Christmas Eve thick with damp air and foreboding. The speaker watches others dance, court, and feast, but finds no comfort in the season — only loss. Loved ones named Allen, Marfy, Ca'line, John, and Susie are gone, taken in a springlike Christmas past that brought death instead of cheer. Now, with winter absent and the churc...