When emotions take over, the poet within you emerges. As a tribute to war-torn families and honorable soldiers, use these Veterans Day quotes from poems to express your gratitude. You may not have authored the poem, but your feelings can be genuine. Let the softness of the lingering words echo into a world filled with hatred and greed. Awaken the dormant poet within you and get inspired to pen a few verses in praise of the patriots.

You'd be surprised to discover your latent talents.

These Veterans Day quotes from poems are bound to bring tears in the eyes of a true patriot.

 

• Stephen Crane, War Is Kind
  Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
  Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches,
  Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
  Do not weep.
  War is kind.
   
• Philip Freneau
  But fame is theirs - and future days
  On pillar'd brass shall tell their praise;
  Shall tell - when cold neglect is dead –
  "These for their country fought and bled."
   
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
  I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
  And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
  I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
  But I saw they were not as was thought;
  They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
  The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
  And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
  And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
   
• Edgar Guest, The Things That Make a Soldier Great
  Endanger but that humble street whereon his children run,
  You make a soldier of the man who never bore a gun.
  What is it through the battle smoke the valiant soldier sees?
   

• John McCrae (1915), In Flanders Fields
  In Flanders fields the poppies blow
  Between the crosses, row on row,
  That mark our place; and in the sky
  The larks, still bravely singing, fly
  Scarce heard amid the guns below.
   
• Rudyard Kipling, Tommy
  It's Tommy this, and Tommy that,
  And chuck him out the brute,
  But it's 'Savior of his Country,'
  When the guns begin to shoot.
   
• Siegfried Sassoon, Aftermath
  But the past is just the same -- and War’s a bloody game...
  Have you forgotten yet?...
  Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.
   
• Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
  What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
  Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
  Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
  Can patter out their hasty orisons.
   
• Li Po, Nefarious War
  In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
  The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
  While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
  Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.
   
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade
  Half a league, half a league,
  Half a league onward,
  All in the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
  ‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
  Charge for the guns!’ he said:
  Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.
   
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mother and Poet
  Dead! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
  And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
  Dead! both my boys! When you sit at the feast
  And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
  Let none look at me!
   
• Sophie Jewett, Armistice
  We pray the fickle flag of truce
  Still float deceitfully and fair;
  Our eyes must love its sweet abuse;
  This hour we will not care,
  Though just beyond to-morrow's gate,
  Arrayed and strong, the battle wait.