Famous Closets Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Dinner at the Who's Who

...hat woman who’ll 

 graciously take her place 
at the table and won’t tell her hosts:
I looked into your bedroom 

 and closets, smelled your 
“Obsession” and “Brut,” sat 
on your bed, imagined you 

 in those spotless sheets, looked 
long into the sad eyes of your son
staring at your walls from his frame.

 I tried to smile at myself 
in your mirrors, wondering if you 
smile that way too: those resilient 

 little smiles one smiles 
at one’s self before facing the day, 
or a...Read more of this...
by Bosselaar, Laure-Anne


Her Kind

..., quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where y...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

Hymns Of The Marshes

...ach within
The wide sea-marshes of Glynn; --

Beautiful glooms, soft dusks in the noon-day fire, --
Wildwood privacies, closets of lone desire,
Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves, --
Cells for the passionate pleasure of prayer to the soul that grieves,
Pure with a sense of the passing of saints through the wood,
Cool for the dutiful weighing of ill with good; --

O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the vine,
While the riotous noon-day sun of ...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

Inspiration From A Visitation Of My Muse

...from childhood

Of Hunwick Village with its single cobbled street

Of squat stone cottages and paved yards

With earth closets and stacks of sawn logs

Perfuming the air with their sap

In a way only French poets could say

And that is why we have no word but clich?

‘Reflect’ or ‘make come alive’ or other earthbound

Anglicanisms; yet it is there in Valery Larbaud

‘J’ai senti pour la premiere fois toute la douceur de vivre’-

I experienced for the first time all the joy of...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

Love In A Life

...t as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest,—who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see,—with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert


Street Cries

...t the souls of men;
Thou tossest girls to lions and boys to flames;
Thou hew'st Crusader down by Saracen;
Thou buildest closets full of secret shames;
Indifferent cruel, thou dost blow the blaze
Round Ridley or Servetus; all thy days
Smell scorched; I would

"-- Thou base-born Accident of time and place --
Bigot Pretender unto Judgment's throne --
Bastard, that claimest with a cunning face
Those rights the true, true Son of Man doth own
By Love's authority -- thou Rebel cold
...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

The Mary Gloster

...anted cabins with marble and maple and all,
And Brussels an' Utrecht velvet, and baths and a Social Hall,
And pipes for closets all over, and cutting the frames too light,
But M'Cullough he died in the Sixties, and ---- Well, I'm dying to-night...
I knew -- I knew what was coming, when we bid on the Byfleet's keel --
They piddled and piffled with iron, I'd given my orders for steel!
Steel and the first expansions. It paid, I tell you, it paid,
When we came with our nine-knot ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Reason Why The Closet-Man Is Never Sad

...This is the house of the closet-man. There are no rooms, 
just hallways and closets.
 Things happen in rooms. He does not like things to 
happen . . . Closets, you take things out of closets, 
you put things into closets, and nothing happens . . . 

 Why do you have such a strange house? 

 I am the closet-man, I am either going or coming, and I 
am never sad. 

 But why do you have such a strange house? 

 I am never sad . . ....Read more of this...
by Edson, Russell

The Room

...t is an old story, the way it happens
sometimes in winter, sometimes not.
The listener falls to sleep,
the doors to the closets of his unhappiness open

and into his room the misfortunes come --
death by daybreak, death by nightfall,
their wooden wings bruising the air,
their shadows the spilled milk the world cries over.

There is a need for surprise endings;
the green field where cows burn like newsprint,
where the farmer sits and stares,
where nothing, when it happens, is ...Read more of this...
by Gregory, Rg

Where We Live Now

...the dark. 

7 

Why do you love me? he says. 
Because. Because. 
You're best to me, she purrs. 

In the kitchen, in the closets, 
behind the doors, above the toilets, 
the calendars are eating it up. 

One blackened one watches you 
like another window. Why 
are you listening? it says. 

8 

No one says, There's a war. 
No one says, Children are burning. 
No one says, Bizniz as usual. 

But you have to take it all back. 
You have to hunt through your socks 
and dirty underwea...Read more of this...
by Levine, Philip

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