Famous House Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous House poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous house poems. These examples illustrate what a famous house poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Whitman, Walt
...what they have produced under their forms,
Takes the lesson with calmness, perceives the corpse slowly borne from the house,
Perceives that it waits a little while in the door—that it was fittest for its days,
That its life has descended to the stalwart and well-shaped heir who approaches,
And that he shall be fittest for his days.
Any period, one nation must lead,
One land must be the promise and reliance of the future.
These States are the amplest poem,
He...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...-
The Dews drew quivering and chill--
For only Gossamer, my Gown--
My Tippet--only Tulle--
We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground--
The Roof was scarcely visible--
The Cornice--in the Ground--
Since then--'tis Centuries--and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity-- ...Read more of this...
by
Dickinson, Emily
...14
One Sister have I in our house,
And one, a hedge away.
There's only one recorded,
But both belong to me.
One came the road that I came—
And wore my last year's gown—
The other, as a bird her nest,
Builded our hearts among.
She did not sing as we did—
It was a different tune—
Herself to her a music
As Bumble bee of June.
Today is far from Childhood—
...Read more of this...
by
Wilde, Oscar
...ows up the narrow lane;
Upon the half-thawed snow the bleating sheep
Press close against the hurdles, and the shivering house-dogs creep
From the shut stable to the frozen stream
And back again disconsolate, and miss
The bawling shepherds and the noisy team;
And overhead in circling listlessness
The cawing rooks whirl round the frosted stack,
Or crowd the dripping boughs; and in the fen the ice-pools crack
Where the gaunt bittern stalks among the reeds
And flaps his wings, ...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...air
Is emptied of thine hoary majesty.
Thy thunder, conscious of the new command,
Rumbles reluctant o'er our fallen house;
And thy sharp lightning in unpractised hands
Scorches and burns our once serene domain.
O aching time! O moments big as years!
All as ye pass swell out the monstrous truth,
And press it so upon our weary griefs
That unbelief has not a space to breathe.
Saturn, sleep on:---O thoughtless, why did I
Thus violate thy slumbrous solitude?
Why should...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ome notion of her mother—
What she bad thought was lovely, and what good.
This was her mother's childhood home;
The house one story high in front, three stories
On the end it presented to the road.
(The arrangement made a pleasant sunny cellar.)
Her mother's bedroom was her father's still,
Where she could watch her mother's picture fading.
Once she found for a bookmark in the Bible
A maple leaf she thought must have been laid
In wait for her there. She rea...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...d and harmony.
O to go back to the place where I was born!
To hear the birds sing once more!
To ramble about the house and barn, and over the fields, once more,
And through the orchard and along the old lanes once more.
5
O male and female!
O the presence of women! (I swear there is nothing more exquisite to me than the mere
presence
of women;)
O for the girl, my mate! O for the happiness with my mate!
O the young man as I pass! O I am sick after the friends...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...The three stood listening to a fresh access
Of wind that caught against the house a moment,
Gulped snow, and then blew free again—the Coles
Dressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,
Meserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.
Meserve was first to speak. He pointed backward
Over his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,
“You can just see it glancing off the roof
Making a great scroll upward toward the sky,
Long...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...gs to you.
I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with
perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it
is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
I will ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...rbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!
You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!
You doors and ascending steps! you arches!
You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings!
From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now ...Read more of this...
by
Chesterton, G K
...and a little scratching pen
Have dried and split the hearts of men,
Heart of the heroes, ride.
Up through an empty house of stars,
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
Take these; in memory of the hour
We strayed a space from home
And saw the smoke-hued hamlets, quaint
With Westland king and Westland saint,
And watched the western glory faint
Along the ...Read more of this...
by
Bridges, Robert Seymour
...olden freight.
6
While yet we wait for spring, and from the dry
And blackening east that so embitters March,
Well-housed must watch grey fields and meadows parch,
And driven dust and withering snowflake fly;
Already in glimpses of the tarnish'd sky
The sun is warm and beckons to the larch,
And where the covert hazels interarch
Their tassell'd twigs, fair beds of primrose lie.
Beneath the crisp and wintry carpet hid
A million buds but stay their blossoming;
And trus...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...;Is sick, and makes a piteous moan, As if her very life would fail. There's not a house within a mile, No hand to help them in distress; Old Susan lies a bed in pain, And sorely puzzled are the twain, For what she ails they cannot guess. And Betty's husband's at the wood, Where by the week he doth abide, A woodman in the distan...Read more of this...
by
Chaucer, Geoffrey
...have richess,
That cause is of his murder or great sickness.
And some man would out of his prison fain,
That in his house is of his meinie* slain. *servants
Infinite harmes be in this mattere.
We wot never what thing we pray for here.
We fare as he that drunk is as a mouse.
A drunken man wot well he hath an house,
But he wot not which is the right way thither,
And to a drunken man the way is slither*. *slippery
And certes in this world so fare we....Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...es, to ruin driven,
Were exiled from their native heaven.—
O! if yet worse mishap and woe
My master's house must undergo,
Or aught but weal to Ellen fair
Brood in these accents of despair,
No future bard, sad Harp! shall fling
Triumph or rapture from thy string;
One short, one final strain shall flow,
Fraught with unutterable woe,
Then shivered shall thy fragments lie,
Thy master cast him down and die!'
I...Read more of this...
by
Blake, William
...lf up, till he sees all things thro'
narrow chinks of his cavern.
PLATE 15
A Memorable Fancy
I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which
knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.
In the first chamber was a Dragon-Man, clearing away the
rubbish from a caves mouth; within, a number of Dragons were
hollowing the cave,
In the second chamber was a Viper folding round the rock & the
cave, and others adorning it with gold silver and preciou...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...tion
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the sprin...Read more of this...
by
Miller, Alice Duer
...feel it must
Go to that idle, insolent eldest son?
Well, in the end it went to neither one.
XIV
A red brick manor-house in Devon,
In a beechwood of old grey trees,
Ivy climbing to the clustered chimneys,
Rustling in the wet south breeze.
Gardens trampled down by Cromwell's army,
Orchards of apple-trees and pears,
Casements that had looked for the Armada,
And a ghost on the stairs.
XV
Johnnie's mother, the Lady Jean,
Child of a penniless Scottish peer,...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...d with cries.
It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.
FIRST VOICE:
Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.
The swifts are back. They are shrieking like paper rockets.
I hear the sound of the hours
Widen and die in the hedgerows. I hear the moo of cows.
The colors replenish themselves, and the wet
Thatch smokes in the sun.
The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.
I am reassured. I am reassured.
These are the clear b...Read more of this...
by
Akhmatova, Anna
...great divine generosity
And of our former riches.
Unification
I'll leave your quiet yard and your white house -
Let life be empty and with light complete.
I'll sing the glory to you in my verse
Like not one woman has sung glory yet.
And that dear girlfriend you remember
In heaven you created for her sight,
I'm trading product that is very rare -
I sell your tenderness and loving light.
Song about Song
So many stones have been thr...Read more of this...
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