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Best Famous Cased Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Cased poems. This is a select list of the best famous Cased poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Cased poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of cased poems.

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Written by Ogden Nash | Create an image from this poem

A Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor

 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 sift into the lift
As a knife in the sheath is slipped,
Stealthy and swift into the lift
As a vampire into a crypt.

Old Maxie, the elevator boy,
Was reading an ode by Shelley,
But he dropped the ode as it were a toad
When the gun jammed into his belly.
There came a whisper as soft as mud
In the bed of an old canal:
"Take me up to the suite of Pinball Pete,
The rat who betrayed my gal."

The lift doth rise with groans and sighs
Like a duchess for the waltz,
Then in middle shaft, like a duchess daft,
It changes its mind and halts.
The bum bites lip as the landlocked ship
Doth neither fall nor rise,
But Maxie the elevator boy
Regards him with burning eyes.
"First, to explore the thirteenth floor,"
Says Maxie, "would be wise."

Quoth the bum, "There is moss on your double cross,
I have been this way before,
I have cased the joint at every point,
And there is no thirteenth floor.
The architect he skipped direct
From twelve unto fourteen,
There is twelve below and fourteen above,
And nothing in between,
For the vermin who dwell in this hotel
Could never abide thirteen."

Said Max, "Thirteen, that floor obscene,
Is hidden from human sight;
But once a year it doth appear,
On this Walpurgis Night.
Ere you peril your soul in murderer's role,
Heed those who sinned of yore;
The path they trod led away from God,
And onto the thirteenth floor,
Where those they slew, a grisly crew,
Reproach them forevermore.

"We are higher than twelve and below fourteen,"
Said Maxie to the bum,
"And the sickening draft that taints the shaft
Is a whiff of kingdom come.
The sickening draft that taints the shaft
Blows through the devil's door!"
And he squashed the latch like a fungus patch,
And revealed the thirteenth floor.

It was cheap cigars like lurid scars
That glowed in the rancid gloom,
The murk was a-boil with fusel oil
And the reek of stale perfume.
And round and round there dragged and wound
A loathsome conga chain,
The square and the hep in slow lock step,
The slayer and the slain.
(For the souls of the victims ascend on high,
But their bodies below remain.)

The clean souls fly to their home in the sky,
But their bodies remain below
To pursue the Cain who each has slain
And harry him to and fro.
When life is extinct each corpse is linked
To its gibbering murderer,
As a chicken is bound with wire around
The neck of a killer cur.

Handcuffed to Hate come Doctor Waite
(He tastes the poison now),
And Ruth and Judd and a head of blood
With horns upon its brow.
Up sashays Nan with her feathery fan
From Floradora bright;
She never hung for Caesar Young
But she's dancing with him tonight.

Here's the bulging hip and the foam-flecked lip
Of the mad dog, Vincent Coll,
And over there that ill-met pair,
Becker and Rosenthal,
Here's Legs and Dutch and a dozen such
Of braggart bullies and brutes,
And each one bends 'neath the weight of friends
Who are wearing concrete suits.

Now the damned make way for the double-damned
Who emerge with shuffling pace
From the nightmare zone of persons unknown,
With neither name nor face.
And poor Dot King to one doth cling,
Joined in a ghastly jig,
While Elwell doth jape at a goblin shape
And tickle it with his wig.

See Rothstein pass like breath on a glass,
The original Black Sox kid;
He riffles the pack, riding piggyback
On the killer whose name he hid.
And smeared like brine on a slavering swine,
Starr Faithful, once so fair,
Drawn from the sea to her debauchee,
With the salt sand in her hair.

And still they come, and from the bum
The icy sweat doth spray;
His white lips scream as in a dream,
"For God's sake, let's away!
If ever I meet with Pinball Pete
I will not seek his gore,
Lest a treadmill grim I must trudge with him
On the hideous thirteenth floor."

"For you I rejoice," said Maxie's voice,
"And I bid you go in peace,
But I am late for a dancing date
That nevermore will cease.
So remember, friend, as your way you wend,
That it would have happened to you,
But I turned the heat on Pinball Pete;
You see - I had a daughter, too!"

The bum reached out and he tried to shout,
But the door in his face was slammed,
And silent as stone he rode down alone
From the floor of the double-damned.


Written by Robert Frost | Create an image from this poem

Brown's Descent

 Brown lived at such a lofty farm
 That everyone for miles could see
His lantern when he did his chores
 In winter after half-past three.

And many must have seen him make
 His wild descent from there one night,
’Cross lots, ’cross walls, ’cross everything,
 Describing rings of lantern light.

Between the house and barn the gale
 Got him by something he had on
And blew him out on the icy crust
 That cased the world, and he was gone!

Walls were all buried, trees were few:
 He saw no stay unless he stove
A hole in somewhere with his heel.
 But though repeatedly he strove

And stamped and said things to himself,
 And sometimes something seemed to yield,
He gained no foothold, but pursued
 His journey down from field to field.

Sometimes he came with arms outspread
 Like wings, revolving in the scene
Upon his longer axis, and
 With no small dignity of mien.

Faster or slower as he chanced,
 Sitting or standing as he chose,
According as he feared to risk
 His neck, or thought to spare his clothes,

He never let the lantern drop.
 And some exclaimed who saw afar
The figures he described with it,
 ”I wonder what those signals are

Brown makes at such an hour of night!
 He’s celebrating something strange.
I wonder if he’s sold his farm,
 Or been made Master of the Grange.”

He reeled, he lurched, he bobbed, he checked;
 He fell and made the lantern rattle
(But saved the light from going out.)
 So half-way down he fought the battle

Incredulous of his own bad luck.
 And then becoming reconciled
To everything, he gave it up
 And came down like a coasting child.

“Well—I—be—” that was all he said,
 As standing in the river road,
He looked back up the slippery slope
 (Two miles it was) to his abode.

Sometimes as an authority
 On motor-cars, I’m asked if I
Should say our stock was petered out,
 And this is my sincere reply:

Yankees are what they always were.
 Don’t think Brown ever gave up hope
Of getting home again because
 He couldn’t climb that slippery slope;

Or even thought of standing there
 Until the January thaw
Should take the polish off the crust.
 He bowed with grace to natural law,

And then went round it on his feet,
 After the manner of our stock;
Not much concerned for those to whom,
 At that particular time o’clock,

It must have looked as if the course
 He steered was really straight away
From that which he was headed for—
 Not much concerned for them, I say:

No more so than became a man—
 And politician at odd seasons.
I’ve kept Brown standing in the cold
 While I invested him with reasons;

But now he snapped his eyes three times;
 Then shook his lantern, saying, “Ile’s
’Bout out!” and took the long way home
 By road, a matter of several miles.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

Three Songs For Mayday Morning

 ( I )


for ‘JC’ of the TLS

Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam

Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there

Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,

Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone – 

Vague sad memories of mam n’dad

Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.

Hosannas of sweet May mornings

Whitsun glory of lilac blooming

Sixty years on I run and run

From death, from loss, from everyone.

Which are the paths I never ventured down,

Or would they, too, be vain?

O for the secret anima of Leeds girlhood

A thousand times better than snide attacks in the TLS

By ‘JC’. **** you, Jock, you should be ashamed,

Attacking Brenda Williams, who had a background

Worse than yours, an alcoholic schizophrenic father

And an Irish immigrant mother who died when Brenda was fifteen

But still she managed to read Proust on her day off

As a library girl, turned down by David Jenkins,

‘As rising star of the left’ for a place at Leeds

To read theology started her as a protest poet

Sitting out on the English lawn, mistaken for a snow sculpture

In the depths of winter.

Her sit-in protest lasted seven months,

Months, eight hours a day, her libellous verse scorching

The academic groves of Leeds in sheets by the thousand,

Mailed through the university's internal post. She called

The VC 'a mouse from the mountain'; Bishop of Durham to-be

David Jenkins a wimp and worse and all in colourful verse

And 'Guntrip's Ghost' went to every VC in England in a

Single day. When she sat on the English lawn Park Honan

Flew paper aeroplanes with messages down and

And when she was in Classics they took away her chair

So she sat on the floor reading Virgil and the Chairman of the

Department sent her an official Christmas card

'For six weeks on the university lawn, learning the

Hebrew alphabet'.





And that was just the beginning: in Oxford Magdalen College

School turned our son away for the Leeds protest so she

Started again, in Magdalen Quad, sitting through Oxford's

Worst ever winter and finally they arrested her on the

Eve of the May Ball so she wrote 'Oxford from a Prison

Cell' her most famous poem and her protest letter went in

A single day to every MP and House of Lords Member and

It was remembered years after and when nobody nominated

Her for the Oxford Chair she took her own and sat there

In the cold for almost a year, well-wishers pinning messages

To the tree she sat under - "Tityre, tu patulae recubans

Sub tegmine fagi" and twelve hundred and forty dons had

"The Pain Clinic" in a single day and she was fourteen

Times in the national press, a column in "The Guardian"

And a whole page with a picture in the 'Times Higher' -

"A Well Versed Protester"

JC, if you call Myslexia’s editor a ‘kick-**** virago’

You’ve got to expect a few kicks back.

All this is but the dust

We must shake from our feet

Purple heather still with blossom

In Haworth and I shall gather armfuls

To toss them skywards and you,

Madonna mia, I shall bed you there

In blazing summer by High Wythens,

Artist unbroken from the highest peak

I raise my hands to heaven.

( II )

Sweet Anna, I do not know you from Eve

But your zany zine in the post

Is the best I’ve ever seen, inspiring this rant

Against the cant of stuck-up cunts currying favour

I name no name but if the Dutch cap fits

Then wear it and share it.

Who thought at sixty one 

I’d have owned a watch 

Like this one, chased silver cased

Quartz reflex Japanese movement

And all for a fiver at the back of Leeds Market

Where I wander in search of oil pastels

Irish folk and cheap socks.

The TLS mocks our magazine

With its sixties Cadillac pink

Psychedelic cover and every page crimson

Orange or mauve, revolutionary sonnets 

By Brenda Williams from her epic ‘Pain Clinic’

And my lacerating attacks on boring Bloodaxe

Neil Ghastly and Anvil’s preciosity and all the

Stuck-up ****-holes in their cubby-holes sending out

Rejection slip by rote – LPW
Written by Denise Levertov | Create an image from this poem

Pleasures

 I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board--

tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
the heart, but fragile, substance
belying design. Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow

in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.
Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

August 17th

 Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health.

Surely I will be disquieted
by the hospital, that body zone--
bodies wrapped in elastic bands,
bodies cased in wood or used like telephones,
bodies crucified up onto their crutches,
bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs,
bodies vomiting up their juice like detergent, Here in this house
there are other bodies.
Whenever I see a six-year-old
swimming in our aqua pool
a voice inside me says what can't be told...
Ha, someday you'll be old and withered
and tubes will be in your nose
drinking up your dinner.
Someday you'll go backward. You'll close
up like a shoebox and you'll be cursed
as you push into death feet first.

Here in the hospital, I say,
that is not my body, not my body.
I am not here for the doctors
to read like a recipe.
No. I am a daisy girl
blowing in the wind like a piece of sun.
On ward 7 there are daisies, all butter and pearl
but beside a blind man who can only
eat up the petals and count to ten.
The nurses skip rope around him and shiver
as his eyes wiggle like mercury and then
they dance from patient to patient to patient
throwing up little paper medicine cups and playing
catch with vials of dope as they wait for new accidents.
Bodies made of synthetics. Bodies swaddled like dolls
whom I visit and cajole and all they do is hum
like computers doing up our taxes, dollar by dollar.
Each body is in its bunker. The surgeon applies his gum.
Each body is fitted quickly into its ice-cream pack
and then stitched up again for the long voyage
back.


Written by Heather McHugh | Create an image from this poem

Ghoti

 The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence--
if not lexical, at least
phonetic; if not with Madonna

then at least with Mary Magdalene.
Instead we get the sheer
opacity of things: an accident
of incident, a tracery of history: the dung

inside the dungarees, the jock strap for a codpiece, and
the ruined patches bordering the lip. One boot (high-heeled) could make
Sorrento sorry, Capri corny, even little Italy
a little ill. Low-cased, a lover looks

one over--eggs without ease, semen without oars--
and there, on board, tricked out in fur and fin,
the landlubber who wound up captain. Where's it going,
this our (H)MS? More west? More forth? The quest

itself is at a long and short behest: it's wound
in winds. (Take rough from seas, and women from the shore,
unmentionables out of mind). We're here
for something rich, beyond

appearances. What do I mean? (What can one say?)
A minute of millenium, unculminating
stint, a stonishment: my god, what's
utterable? Gargah, gatto, goat. Us animals is made

to seine and trawl and drag and gaff
our way across the earth. The earth, it rolls.
We dig, lay lines, book arguably
perfect passages. But earth remains untranslated,

unplumbed. A million herring run where we
catch here a freckle, there a pock; the depths to which things live
words only glint at. Terns in flight work up
what fond minds might

call syntax. As for that
semantic antic in the distance, is it
whiskered fish, finned cat? Don't settle
just for two. Some bottomographies are

brooded over, and some skies swum through. . .
Written by Amy Lowell | Create an image from this poem

The Basket

 I
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies 
white and unspotted,
in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness 
sweep into
the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The 
air
is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, 
and beside it stand
two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.

See! She is coming, the young woman with the bright hair.
She swings a basket as she walks, which she places on the sill,
between the geranium stalks. He laughs, and crumples 
his paper
as he leans forward to look. "The Basket Filled with 
Moonlight",
what a title for a book!
The bellying clouds swing over the housetops.

He has forgotten the woman in the room with the geraniums. He 
is beating
his brain, and in his eardrums hammers his heavy pulse. She 
sits
on the window-sill, with the basket in her lap. And tap! She 
cracks a nut.
And tap! Another. Tap! Tap! Tap! The 
shells ricochet upon the roof,
and get into the gutters, and bounce over the edge and disappear.
"It is very *****," thinks Peter, "the basket was 
empty, I'm sure.
How could nuts appear from the atmosphere?"
The silver-blue moonlight makes the geraniums purple, 
and the roof glitters
like ice.

II
Five o'clock. The geraniums are very 
gay in their crimson array.
The bellying clouds swing over the housetops, and over the roofs 
goes Peter
to pay his morning's work with a holiday.
"Annette, it is I. Have you finished? Can 
I come?"
Peter jumps through the window.
"Dear, are you alone?"
"Look, Peter, the dome of the tabernacle is done. This 
gold thread
is so very high, I am glad it is morning, a starry sky would have
seen me bankrupt. Sit down, now tell me, is your story 
going well?"
The golden dome glittered in the orange of the 
setting sun. On the walls,
at intervals, hung altar-cloths and chasubles, and copes, and stoles,
and coffin palls. All stiff with rich embroidery, and 
stitched with
so much artistry, they seemed like spun and woven gems, or flower-buds
new-opened on their stems.

Annette looked at the geraniums, very red against the blue sky.
"No matter how I try, I cannot find any thread 
of such a red.
My bleeding hearts drip stuff muddy in comparison. Heigh-ho! See 
my little
pecking dove? I'm in love with my own temple. Only 
that halo's wrong.
The colour's too strong, or not strong enough. I don't 
know. My eyes
are tired. Oh, Peter, don't be so rough; it is valuable. I 
won't do
any more. I promise. You tyrannise, Dear, 
that's enough. Now sit down
and amuse me while I rest."
The shadows of the geraniums creep over the floor, 
and begin to climb
the opposite wall.

Peter watches her, fluid with fatigue, floating, and drifting,
and undulant in the orange glow. His senses flow towards 
her,
where she lies supine and dreaming. Seeming drowned in 
a golden halo.
The pungent smell of the geraniums is hard to bear.

He pushes against her knees, and brushes his lips across her languid 
hands.
His lips are hot and speechless. He woos her, quivering, 
and the room
is filled with shadows, for the sun has set. But she 
only understands
the ways of a needle through delicate stuffs, and the shock of one 
colour
on another. She does not see that this is the same, and 
querulously murmurs
his name.
"Peter, I don't want it. I am tired."
And he, the undesired, burns and is consumed.
There is a crescent moon on the rim of the sky.

III
"Go home, now, Peter. To-night is full 
moon. I must be alone."
"How soon the moon is full again! Annette, 
let me stay. Indeed, Dear Love,
I shall not go away. My God, but you keep me starved! You 
write
`No Entrance Here', over all the doors. Is it not strange, 
my Dear,
that loving, yet you deny me entrance everywhere. Would 
marriage
strike you blind, or, hating bonds as you do, why should I be denied
the rights of loving if I leave you free? You want the 
whole of me,
you pick my brains to rest you, but you give me not one heart-beat.
Oh, forgive me, Sweet! I suffer in my loving, and you 
know it. I cannot
feed my life on being a poet. Let me stay."
"As you please, poor Peter, but it will hurt me 
if you do. It will
crush your heart and squeeze the love out."
He answered gruffly, "I know what I'm about."
"Only remember one thing from to-night. My 
work is taxing and I must
have sight! I MUST!"
The clear moon looks in between the geraniums. On 
the wall,
the shadow of the man is divided from the shadow of the woman
by a silver thread.

They are eyes, hundreds of eyes, round like marbles! Unwinking, 
for there
are no lids. Blue, black, gray, and hazel, and the irises 
are cased
in the whites, and they glitter and spark under the moon. The 
basket
is heaped with human eyes. She cracks off the whites 
and throws them away.
They ricochet upon the roof, and get into the gutters, and bounce
over the edge and disappear. But she is here, quietly 
sitting
on the window-sill, eating human eyes.
The silver-blue moonlight makes the geraniums purple, 
and the roof shines
like ice.

IV
How hot the sheets are! His skin is 
tormented with pricks,
and over him sticks, and never moves, an eye. It lights 
the sky with blood,
and drips blood. And the drops sizzle on his bare skin, 
and he smells them
burning in, and branding his body with the name "Annette".
The blood-red sky is outside his window now. Is 
it blood or fire?
Merciful God! Fire! And his heart wrenches 
and pounds "Annette!"
The lead of the roof is scorching, he ricochets, 
gets to the edge,
bounces over and disappears.
The bellying clouds are red as they swing over 
the housetops.

V
The air is of silver and pearl, for the night is 
liquid with moonlight.
How the ruin glistens, like a palace of ice! Only two 
black holes swallow
the brilliance of the moon. Deflowered windows, sockets 
without sight.
A man stands before the house. He sees 
the silver-blue moonlight,
and set in it, over his head, staring and flickering, eyes of geranium 
red.

Annette!
Written by Sidney Lanier | Create an image from this poem

Martha Washington

 Written for the "Martha Washington Court Journal".



Down cold snow-stretches of our bitter time,
When windy shams and the rain-mocking sleet
Of Trade have cased us in such icy rime
That hearts are scarcely hot enough to beat,
Thy fame, O Lady of the lofty eyes,
Doth fall along the age, like as a lane
Of Spring, in whose most generous boundaries
Full many a frozen virtue warms again.
To-day I saw the pale much-burdened form
Of Charity come limping o'er the line,
And straighten from the bending of the storm
And flush with stirrings of new strength divine,
Such influence and sweet gracious impulse came
Out of the beams of thine immortal name!

Book: Reflection on the Important Things