Famous Hotel Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Hotel poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous hotel poems. These examples illustrate what a famous hotel poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Kipling, Rudyard
...l" break --
Thing I never took before --
Get me one for old sake's sake.
After that -- arrangements make.
No hotel will take me in,
And a bullock's back would break
'Neath the teak and leaden skin
Tonga ropes are frail and thin,
Or, did I a back-seat take,
In a tonga I might spin, --
Do your best for old sake's sake.
After that -- your work is done.
Recollect a Padre must
Mourn the dear departed one --
Throw the ashes and the dust.
Don't go down a...Read more of this...
by
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
...eye, weighed down, could not slither out of
the slime.
The doors suddenly banged ta-ra-bang,
as though the hotel¡¯s teeth
chattered.
You swept in abruptly
like ¡°take it or leave it!¡±
Mauling your suede gloves,
you declared:
¡°D¡¯you know,
I¡¯m getting married.¡±
All right, marry then.
So what,
I can take it.
As you see, I¡¯m calm!
Like the pulse
of a corpse.
Do you remember
how you used to talk?
¡°Jack L...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ville Junction
After eleven o'clock at night. Too tired
To think of sitting such an ordeal out,
He turned to the hotel to find a bed.
"No room," the night clerk said. "Unless----"
Woodsville's a place of shrieks and wandering lamps
And cars that shook and rattle--and one hotel.
"You say 'unless.'"
"Unless you wouldn't mind
Sharing a room with someone else."
"Who is it?"
"A man."
"So I should hope. What kind of man?"
"I know him: he...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...The hands of the clock were reaching high
In an old midtown hotel;
I name no name, but its sordid fame
Is table talk in hell.
I name no name, but hell's own flame
Illumes the lobby garish,
A gilded snare just off Times Square
For the maidens of the parish.
The revolving door swept the grimy floor
Like a crinoline grotesque,
And a lowly bum from an ancient slum
Crept furtively past the desk.
His footsteps...Read more of this...
by
Hughes, Langston
...he last flop-house
has turned you down this winter?
Furthermore:
"It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
world. . . ." It cost twenty-eight million dollars. The fa-
mous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting.
Alexandre Gastaud is chef. It will be a distinguished
background for society.
So when you've no place else to go, homeless and hungry
ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags--
(Or do you still c...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...e a long material
Through a still virulence,
And a weed, hairy as privates.
(3)
On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things----
Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile.
These children are after something, with hooks and cries,
And my heart too small to bandag...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...in their stride.
6
At dawn in Leeds
I was lost
Once I had left
The lock
Car park, office block,
Grand hotel looming
And no path
But then I found
Back Lane, every
Window blocked,
Every inch cobbled,
A road to nowhere
Built a hundred
Years ago.
I found a gas lamp
Anchored to a corner
Rusty and forgotten
In the glare
Of the million watt
Yorkshire Electricity
Tower of Steel for
The new museum
‘Guns before butter’
And I wonder,
Christian ...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...almost a song
in my own breath. I'm alone here
in Brooklyn Heights, late morning, the sky
above the St. George Hotel clear, clear
for New York, that is. The radio playing
"Bird Flight," Parker in his California
tragic voice fifty years ago, his faltering
"Lover Man" just before he crashed into chaos.
I would guess that outside the recording studio
in Burbank the sun was high above the jacarandas,
it was late March, the worst of yesterday's rain
had come and g...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...en's hearts are glad.
And Christmas-morning bells say 'Come!'
Even to shining ones who dwell
Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.
And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall ?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me ?
And is it true ? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
An...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...like black bananas.
Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates.
Anne, Anne,
flee on your donkey,
flee this sad hotel,
ride out on some hairy beast,
gallop backward pressing
your buttocks to his withers,
sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Ride out
any old way you please!
In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That's what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it—
the fool's disease....Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ack ships!
O such for me! O an intense life! O full to repletion, and varied!
The life of the theatre, bar-room, huge hotel, for me!
The saloon of the steamer! the crowded excursion for me! the torch-light procession!
The dense brigade, bound for the war, with high piled military wagons following;
People, endless, streaming, with strong voices, passions, pageants;
Manhattan streets, with their powerful throbs, with the beating drums, as now;
The endless and noisy chorus...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...n went out to the Fillmore
and picked up a good-looking, young, ***** whore, and he
got laid in the Albert Bacon Fall Hotel.
The next day he went down to a fancy stationery store on
Market Street and bought himself a thirty-dollar fountain pen,
one with a gold nib.
He showed it to me and said, "Write with this, but don't
write hard because this pen has got a gold nib, and a gold
nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the per-
sonality of ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...young to camp at Big Redfish
Lake, and besides they charged fifty cents a day, three dol-
lars a week like a skidrow hotel, and there were just too
many people there. There were too many trailers and camp-
ers parked in the halls. We couldn't get to the elevator be-
cause there was a family from New York parked there in a
ten-room trailer.
Three children came by drinking rub-a-dub and pulling
an old granny by her legs. Her legs were straight out and
...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...were all quite alive, but nervous. I doubt if
they will ever want vanilla pudding again.
ROOM 208, HOTEL
TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
Half a block from Broadway and Columbus is Hotel Trout
Fishing in America, a cheap hotel. It is very old and run by
some Chinese. They are young and ambitious Chinese and
the lobby is filled with the smell of Lysol.
The Lysol sits like another guest on the stuffed furniture
reading a copy of the Chronicle...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...t had all been taken care of, years
in advance.
"It would still be dark outside and the yellow wallpaper in
the hotel room would be running back off the light bulb. I'd
put my clothes on and go down to the restaurant where my
stepfather cooked all night.
"I'd have breakfast, hot cakes, eggs and whatnot. Then
he'd make my lunch for me and it would always be the same
thing: a piece of pie and a stone-cold pork sandwich. After-
wards I'd walk to sc...Read more of this...
by
Joyce, James
...n Chimpden first took the floor
(Chorus) With his bucketshop store
Down Bargainweg, Lower.
So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And 'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited
company
With the bailiff's bom at the door,
(Chorus) Bimbam at the door.
Then he'll bum no more.
Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island
The hooker of that hammerfast viking
And Gall's curse...Read more of this...
by
Sexton, Anne
...and washed through the rigamarole
of talking boxes and the electric bed.
I laughed to see the private iron in that hotel.
Today the yellow leaves
go *****. You ask me where they go I say today believed
in itself, or else it fell.
Today, my small child, Joyce,
love your self's self where it lives.
There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
why did I let you grow
in another place. You did not know my voice
when I came back to call. All th...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...what I was, betrayed by
those I trusted. The one word
my mouth must open to is why.
JACK DAUVILLE:
from a hotel in Tampa, Florida
From Orleansville we drove
south until we reached the hills,
then east until
the road stopped. I was nervous
and couldn't eat. Thomas took
over, told us when to think
and when to ****.
We turned north and reached Blida
by first dawn and the City
by morning, having dumped our
weapons beside an empty
...Read more of this...
by
Walcott, Derek
...oman.
I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok
crystallize in The Twelve. Was between
the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana
one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags
using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their
noise ceased as foam sinks into sand.
They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one
with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets,
and the echo of power at the end of the street.Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sai...Read more of this...
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