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Famous Cellars Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Cellars poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous cellars poems. These examples illustrate what a famous cellars poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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by Dryden, John
...g to trade:
And, that his noble style he might refine,
No Rechabite more shunn'd the fumes of wine.
Chaste were his cellars; and his shrieval board
The grossness of a city feast abhorr'd:
His cooks, with long disuse, their trade forgot;
Cool was his kitchen, though his brains were hot.
Such frugal virtue malice may accuse;
But sure 'twas necessary to the Jews:
For towns once burnt, such magistrates require
As dare not tempt God's providence by fire.
With spiritual...Read more of this...



by Tebb, Barry
...ired grass

Among the fork lift trucks

And oil-skinned scavengers.





36



Over the Hollows

Weeds on filled-in cellars

Cracked window-sills

At crazy angles

Are megaliths to memory.





37



By the railway cutting

Chained and padlocked

Rusty gates made

My private garden

Of threaded lupins

Pink and blue.





38



My Madeleine

Was Angel Cake

In Marks and Sparks.





39



By what was once

Ben’s Cycle Shop

I stop and stare

Across Leeds Nine
...Read more of this...

by Tebb, Barry
...s a Band of Hope Treat with

Margaret and me and everything for free.





7



South Leeds was poverty and poetry, cellars

Beneath, mysterious and magical stone step

Paths to paradise, concrete floors with earth

Showing moon craters through, stone breasts

Of an Indian goddess, a rusty cobbler’s last

And green wire-mesh keeping safe.





8



Every other week coalmen with grimed faces

And flashing eye-whites heaved half-hundred

Weight sacks, the grate’s chains...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...m the mountains
Point the rods of fortune-tellers;
Youth perpetual dwells in fountains,--
Not in flasks, and casks, and cellars.

Claudius, though he sang of flagons
And huge tankards filled with Rhenish,
From that fiery blood of dragons
Never would his own replenish.

Even Redi, though he chaunted
Bacchus in the Tuscan valleys,
Never drank the wine he vaunted
In his dithyrambic sallies.

Then with water fill the pitcher
Wreathed about with classic fables;
Ne'er F...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...dreamed; for every knight 
Had whatsoever meat he longed for served 
By hands unseen; and even as he said 
Down in the cellars merry bloated things 
Shouldered the spigot, straddling on the butts 
While the wine ran: so glad were spirits and men 
Before the coming of the sinful Queen.' 

Then spake the Queen and somewhat bitterly, 
`Were they so glad? ill prophets were they all, 
Spirits and men: could none of them foresee, 
Not even thy wise father with his signs 
And w...Read more of this...



by Dickinson, Emily
...Spirit never shows.
What Terror would enthrall the Street
Could Countenance disclose

The Subterranean Freight
The Cellars of the Soul --
Thank God the loudest Place he made
Is license to be still....Read more of this...

by Marvell, Andrew
...
Frighted the midwife and the mother tore. 
A thousand hands she has and thousand eyes, 
Breaks into shops and into cellars pries, 
And on all trade like cassowar she feeds: 
Chops off the piece wheres'e'er she close the jaw, 
Else swallows all down her indented maw. 
She stalks all day in streets concealed from sight 
And flies, like bats with leathern wings, by night; 
She wastes the country and on cities preys. 
Her, of a female harpy, in dog days, 
Black Birch...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...eft. Now he goes right.
He is buiding a city, a city of flesh.
He's an industrialist. He has starved in cellars
and, ladies and gentlemen, he's been broken by iron,
by the blood, by the metal, by the triumphant
iron of his mother's death. But he begins again.
Now he constructs me. He is consumed by the city.
>From the glory of words he has built me up.
>From the wonder of concrete he has molded me.
He has given me six hundred street sig...Read more of this...

by Masters, Edgar Lee
...nd tortured in soul because they could not admire
Equally him and me.
Now every gardener knows that plants grown in cellars
Or under stones are twisted and yellow and weak.
And no mother would let her baby suck
Diseased milk from her breast.
Yet preachers and judges advise the raising of souls
Where there is no sunlight, but only twilight,
No warmth, but only dampness and cold --
Preachers and judges!...Read more of this...

by Untermeyer, Louis
...declining: Those that hold
The stars and moons, together with all those
Containing rain and fire and sullen weather;
Cellars of dew-fall higher than the brim;
Huge arsenals with centuries of snows;
Infinite rows of storms and swarms of seraphim....
Divided now are winds and waters. Sea and land,
Tohu and Bohu, light and darkness, stand
Upright on either hand.
And down this terrible aisle,

While heaven's ranges roar aghast,
Pours a vast file of strange and hidden ...Read more of this...

by Lowell, Amy
...looks at
the burning Cathedral. Now the streets are swarming with 
people.
They seek shelter and crowd into the cellars. They shout 
and call,
and over all, slowly and without force, the rain drops into the 
city.
Boom! And the steeple crashes down among the people. Boom! Boom, 
again!
The water rushes along the gutters. The fire roars and 
mutters. Boom!...Read more of this...

by von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...ghts appear'd to fly.
They led his footsteps all astray,
Up, down, through many a narrow way

Through ruin'd desert cellars.

When lo! he stood within a hall,

With hollow eyes. and grinning all;
They bade him taste the fare.

A hundred guests sat there.
He saw his sweetheart 'midst the throng,
Wrapp'd up in grave-clothes white and long;

She turn'd, and----*

1774.
(* This ballad is introduced in Act II. of Claudine 
of Villa Bella, where it is su...Read more of this...

by Merwin, W S
...one walls

now in the courtyard where I have returned with you
we drink the wine of visitors
the temperature of the cellars

dusk is welling
out of the dried blood of the masonry
no hour remains on the sundial
by now the owls of the tower corners
are waking on their keepers' fists
but it is still day
out in the air
and three falcons appear there
over the courtyard

no feathers on heads or breasts
and they fly down to us
to our wrists and between them
then h...Read more of this...

by Shelley, Percy Bysshe
...- let no imposter heap;
Weave robes, -- let not the idle wear;
Forge arms, in your defence to bear.

Shrink to your cellars, holes, and cells;
In halls ye deck another dwells.
Why shake the chains ye wrought? Ye see
The steel ye tempered glance on ye.

With plough and spade and hoe and loom,
Trace your grave, and build your tomb,
And weave your winding-sheet, till fair
England be your sepulchre!...Read more of this...

by Darwish, Mahmoud
...
No night in our night lit up by the shelling 
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us 
In the darkness of cellars. 

*** 
Here there is no "I". 
Here Adam remembers the dust of his clay. 

*** 
On the verge of death, he says: 
I have no trace left to lose:
Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand. 
Soon I shall penetrate my life, 
I shall be born free and parentless, 
And as my name I shall choose azure letters..Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...t—therefore watch Germany
And read the future. We wish, of course, that our women
Would die like biting rats in the cellars, our men like wolves on the mountain:
It will not be so. Our men will curse, cringe, obey;
Our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate....Read more of this...

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