Get Your Premium Membership

Best Famous Skyscraper Poems

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

Search and read the best famous Skyscraper poems, articles about Skyscraper poems, poetry blogs, or anything else Skyscraper poem related using the PoetrySoup search engine at the top of the page.

See Also:
Written by John Ashbery | Create an image from this poem

Syringa

 Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky.
Of course, Eurydice was a part Of this.
Then one day, everything changed.
He rends Rocks into fissures with lament.
Gullies, hummocks Can't withstand it.
The sky shudders from one horizon To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather, Not vivid performances of the past.
" But why not? All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were, But it is the nature of things to be seen only once, As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along Somehow.
That's where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade; She would have even if he hadn't turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people, These other ones, call life.
Singing accurately So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulizes The different weights of the things.
But it isn't enough To just go on singing.
Orpheus realized this And didn't mind so much about his reward being in heaven After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and The way music passes, emblematic Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it And say it is good or bad.
You must Wait till it's over.
"The end crowns all," Meaning also that the "tableau" Is wrong.
For although memories, of a season, for example, Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure That stalled moment.
It too is flowing, fleeting; It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal, Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt, Harsh strokes.
And to ask more than this Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow, Powerful stream, the trailing grasses Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action No more than this.
Then in the lowering gentian sky Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares.
The horses Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks, "I'm a maverick.
Nothing of this is happening to me, Though I can understand the language of birds, and The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.
" But how late to be regretting all this, even Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late! To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours, Replies that these are of course not regrets at all, Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared, Or got where it was going, it is no longer Material for a poem.
Its subject Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward That the meaning, good or other, can never Become known.
The singer thinks Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness Which must in turn flood the whole continent With blackness, for it cannot see.
The singer Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved Of the evil burthen of the words.
Stellification Is for the few, and comes about much later When all record of these people and their lives Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them.
"But what about So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion.
But they lie Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name In whose tale are hidden syllables Of what happened so long before that In some small town, one different summer.


Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Skyscraper

 BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick- layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.
) On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.
Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.
Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.
One by one the floors are emptied.
.
.
The uniformed elevator men are gone.
Pails clang.
.
.
Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues.
Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money.
The sign speaks till midnight.
Darkness on the hallways.
Voices echo.
Silence holds.
.
.
Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors.
Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets.
.
.
Steel safes stand in corners.
Money is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Portrait

 (For S.
A.
)TO write one book in five years or five books in one year, to be the painter and the thing painted, … where are we, bo? Wait—get his number.
The barber shop handling is here and the tweeds, the cheviot, the Scotch Mist, and the flame orange scarf.
Yet there is more—he sleeps under bridges with lonely crazy men; he sits in country jails with bootleggers; he adopts the children of broken-down burlesque actresses; he has cried a heart of tears for Windy MacPherson’s father; he pencils wrists of lonely women.
Can a man sit at a desk in a skyscraper in Chicago and be a harnessmaker in a corn town in Iowa and feel the tall grass coming up in June and the ache of the cottonwood trees singing with the prairie wind?
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Prayers of Steel

 LAY me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

The Skyscraper Loves Night

 ONE by one lights of a skyscraper fling their checkering cross work on the velvet gown of night.
I believe the skyscraper loves night as a woman and brings her playthings she asks for, brings her a velvet gown, And loves the white of her shoulders hidden under the dark feel of it all.
The masonry of steel looks to the night for somebody it loves, He is a little dizzy and almost dances … waiting … dark …


Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

People Who Must

 I PAINTED on the roof of a skyscraper.
I painted a long while and called it a day’s work.
The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cop’s whistle never let up all afternoon.
They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way— Those people on the go or at a standstill; And the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass, Where the black tides ran around him And he kept the street.
I painted a long while And called it a day’s work.

Book: Reflection on the Important Things