Famous Gutters Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Gutters poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous gutters poems. These examples illustrate what a famous gutters poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...sh, in ridin graith,
Gaed hoddin by their cotters;
There swankies young, in braw braid-claith,
Are springing owre the gutters.
The lasses, skelpin barefit, thrang,
In silks an’ scarlets glitter;
Wi’ sweet-milk cheese, in mony a whang,
An’ farls, bak’d wi’ butter,
Fu’ crump that day.
When by the plate we set our nose,
Weel heaped up wi’ ha’pence,
A greedy glowr black-bonnet throws,
An’ we maun draw our tippence.
Then in we go to see the show:
On ev’ry side they’re ga...Read more of this...
by
Burns, Robert
...aring! like a molten mass
Turned, from some infernal furnace, on a plain devoid of grass.
Miles and miles of thirsty gutters -- strings of muddy waterholes
In the place of "shining rivers" (walled by cliffs and forest boles).
"Range!" of ridgs, gullies, ridges, barren! where the madden'd flies --
Fiercer than the plagues of Egypt -- swarm about your blighted eyes!
Bush! where there is no horizon! where the buried bushman sees
Nothing. Nothing! but the maddening samene...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...sleep,
Hurls down the heavy rain, night after night,
Thanking the season's all-resistless might;
And, when the gutters choke, its gargoyles four
From granite mouths in anger spit and pour
Upon the hated ivy hour by hour.
As to the sword rust is, so lichens are
To towering citadel with which they war.
Alas! for Corbus—dreary, desolate,
And yet its woes the winters mitigate.
It rears itself among convulsive throes
That shake its ruins when th...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...our sleep,
Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?
When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters
And the horror of our fall is written plain,
Every secret, self-revealing on the aching white-washed ceiling,
Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?
We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung,
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for ...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...iant road the ringing sleighs would go.
Now, Main Street bordered with autumn leaves, it
was a pleasant thing,
And its gutters were gay with dandelions early in the Spring;
I like to think of it white with frost or dusty in the heat,
Because I think it is humaner than any other street.
A city street that is busy and wide is ground by
a thousand wheels,
And a burden of traffic on its breast is all it ever feels:
It is dully conscious of weight and speed and of work that neve...Read more of this...
by
Kilmer, Joyce
...le, over down,
Where bugs bite not,
Where lodgers fight not,
Where below your chairmen drink not,
Where beside your gutters stink not;
But all is fresh and clean and gay,
And merry lambkins sport and play,
And they toss with rakes uncommonly short hay,
Which looks as if it had been sown only the other day,
And where oats are twenty-five shillings a boll, they say;
But all's one for that, since I must and will away....Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
.... The rain turned the streets inward, like
drowned lungs, upon themselves and I was hurrying to work,
meeting swollen gutters at the intersections.
I saw Trout Fishing in America Shorty passed out in the
front window of a Filipino laundromat. He was sitting in
his wheelchair with closed eyes staring out the window.
There was a tranquil expression on his face. He almost
looked human. He had probably fallen asleep while he was
having his brains washed in one of the ma...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...friends.”
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.
“For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it is not too late.
I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”
And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression ... ...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’c...Read more of this...
by
Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
...th, some of them want a man, some
of them are hardly thinking at all. enough
and not enough. arcs and pilgrims, oranges
gutters, ferns, antibodies, boxes of
tissue paper.
in the most decent sometimes sun
there is the softsmoke feeling from urns
and the canned sound of old battleplanes
and if you go inside and run your finger
along the window ledge you'll find
dirt, maybe even earth.
and if you look out the window
there will be the day, and as you
get older you'll keep lookin...Read more of this...
by
Bukowski, Charles
...rice in its low moist field;
Over the sharp-peak’d farm house, with its scallop’d scum and slender
shoots from the gutters;
Over the western persimmon—over the long-leav’d corn—over the
delicate blue-flower flax;
Over the white and brown buckwheat, a hummer and buzzer there with the rest;
Over the dusky green of the rye as it ripples and shades in the breeze;
Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged
limbs;
Walking the path ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...ys strike them with black and red
striped agates.
The glass marbles spit crimson when they are hit, and slip into
the gutters
under rushing brown water. I smell tulips and narcissus
in the air,
but there are no flowers anywhere, only white dust whipping up the
street,
and a girl with a gay Spring hat and blowing skirts. The
dust and the wind
flirt at her ankles and her neat, high-heeled patent leather shoes. Tap,
tap,
the little heels pat the pavement, and the wind rust...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...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 houseto...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...ple sweep about
in the sky?
Boom! The sound swings against the rain. Boom,
again! After it, only water
rushing in the gutters, and the turmoil from the spout of the gargoyle.
Silence. Ripples and mutters. Boom!
The room is damp, but warm. Little flashes swarm about
from the firelight.
The lustres of the chandelier are bright, and clusters of rubies
leap in the bohemian glasses on the `etagere'. Her hands
are restless,
but the white masses of her hair are quite still. Boo...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to you hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
--your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over s...Read more of this...
by
Ondaatje, Michael
...you read, in prose or verse,
Of the awful `city urchin who would greet you with a curse'.
There are golden hearts in gutters, though their owners lack the fat,
And we'll back a teamster's offspring to outswear a city brat.
Do you think we're never jolly where the trams and buses rage?
Did you hear the gods in chorus when `Ri-tooral' held the stage?
Did you catch a ring of sorrow in the city urchin's voice
When he yelled for Billy Elton, when he thumped the floor for R...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
..."Closing time."
The wet was pelting on the pane
And something broke inside my brain,
I heard the rain drip from the gutters
And Silas putting up the shutters,
While one by one the drinkers went;
I got a glimpse of what it meant,
How she and I had stood before
In some old town by some old door
Waiting intent while someone knocked
Before the door for ever locked;
She was so white that I was scared,
A gas jet, turned the wrong way, flared,
And Silas snapped the bar...Read more of this...
by
Masefield, John
...?'
The parted lips replied, 'I seek your help,
For I am Aengus, and I am crossed in love.'
'How may a mortal whose life gutters out
Help them that wander with hand clasping hand,
Their haughty images that cannot wither,
For all their beauty's like a hollow dream,
Mirrored in streams that neither hail nor rain
Nor the cold North has troubled?'
He replied,
'I am from those rivers and I bid you call
The children of the Maines out of sleep,
And set them digging under Bual's hill...Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...utters?
When you cannot feel your palace, just your empty billfold,
How will you harvest the gold of azure vaults and gutters?
You should, to earn your bread today
Like a choir boy with a censer to wave,
Sings hymns with feeling but without belief.
Or, a starving rip-off artist, selling your charm
And your laughter shades the tears so no one sees the harm
In bringing to bloom an ordinary rat, a vulgar thief....Read more of this...
by
Baudelaire, Charles
...not be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.
There little black twigs do not think to bud,
Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.
This woman who meets me in windows--she is neat.
So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.
how shyly she superimposes her neat self
On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.
She is deferring to reality.
It is I. It is I--
Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.
The incalculable malice of the everyday.
FIRST VOICE:
How ...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
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