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Famous Interior Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Milosz, Czeslaw
...
Great statues of sitting women-goddesses,
In draped robes, marked it with a rhythm.
Color embraced me like the interior of a purple-brown flower
Of unheard-of size. I walked, liberated
From worries, pangs of conscience, and fears.
I knew I was there as one day I would be.
I woke up serene, thinking that this dream
Answers my question, often asked:
How is it when one passes the last threshold?...Read more of this...



by Sexton, Anne
...er Betsy's 
story, the April night of the civilian air crash 
and her sudden name misspelled in the evening paper, 
the interior of shock and the paper gone in the trash 
ten years now. She used the return ticket I gave her. 
This was the rude kill of her; two planes cracking 
in mid-air over Washington, like blind birds. 
And the picking up afterwards, the morticians tracking 
bodies in the Potomac and piecing them like boards 
to make a leg or a face. There ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ovements, growths—a few noticed, myriads unnoticed, 
Through Mannahatta’s streets I walking, these things gathering;
On interior rivers, by night, in the glare of pine knots, steamboats wooding up; 
Sunlight by day on the valley of the Susquehanna, and on the valleys of the Potomac and
 Rappahannock, and the valleys of the Roanoke and Delaware; 
In their northerly wilds, beasts of prey haunting the Adirondacks, the hills—or
 lapping
 the
 Saginaw waters to drink; 
In a loneso...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...c scheme, the immigrants, 
The Union, always swarming with blatherers, and always sure and impregnable, 
The unsurvey’d interior, log-houses, clearings, wild animals, hunters, trappers;
Surrounding the multiform agriculture, mines, temperature, the gestation of new States, 
Congress convening every Twelfth-month, the members duly coming up from the uttermost
 parts; 
Surrounding the noble character of mechanics and farmers, especially the young men, 
Responding their manners,...Read more of this...

by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...found myself ashamed 
Of a long staring at him, and as often 
Essayed the dictionary on the table, 
Wondering if in its interior
There was an uncompanionable word 
To say just what was creeping in my hair, 
At which my scalp would shrink,—at which, again, 
I would arouse myself with a vain scorn, 
Remembering that all this was in New York—
As if that were somehow the banishing 
For ever of all unseemly presences— 
And listen to the story of my friend, 
Who, as I feared, was n...Read more of this...



by Whitman, Walt
...rooping lids, as waiting, ponder’d, 
Turning from all the samples, all the monuments of heroes. 

While through the interior vistas,
Noiseless uprose, phantasmic (as, by night, Auroras of the North,) 
Lambent tableaux, prophetic, bodiless scenes, 
Spiritual projections. 

In one, among the city streets, a laborer’s home appear’d, 
After his day’s work done, cleanly, sweet-air’d, the gaslight burning,
The carpet swept, and a fire in the cheerful stove. 

In one, th...Read more of this...

by Stevens, Wallace
...Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interior
Of the wheels move, they appall me ---
The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! Like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some was or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to t...Read more of this...

by Ginsberg, Allen
...e at the counter with his nervous breakdown 
 smiling cowardly at the customers, 
nor the grayish-green whale's stomach interior loft 
 where we keep the baggage in hideous racks, 
hundreds of suitcases full of tragedy rocking back and 
 forth waiting to be opened, 
nor the baggage that's lost, nor damaged handles, 
 nameplates vanished, busted wires & broken 
 ropes, whole trunks exploding on the concrete 
 floor, 
nor seabags emptied into the night in the final 
 warehouse....Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...ls are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, i...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...c inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same; 
Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that
 concerns
 them, 
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles. 

To me the sea is a continual miracle;
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships, with men
 in
 them, 
What stranger miracles are there?...Read more of this...

by Lewis, C S
...to man that barb'd sublimity 
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be. 
Yet here, within this tiny, charmed interior, 
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares 
With living men some secrets in a privacy 
Forever ours, not theirs....Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...rnful criticisms. 

O me repellent and ugly! 
To these proud laws of the air, the water, and the ground, proving my interior Soul
 impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me. 

O to attract by more than attraction! 
How it is I know not—yet behold! the something which obeys none of the rest, 
It is offensive, never defensive—yet how magnetic it draws. 

17
O joy of suffering!
To struggle against great odds! to meet enemies undaunted! 
To be en...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...earn
your first climb up Mount San Salvatore;
this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes,
the yankee girl, the iron interior
of her sweet body. You let the Count choose
your next climb. You went together, armed
with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches
and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed
by the thick woods of briars and bushes,
nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo
up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated
with his coat off as you waded through top ...Read more of this...

by Whitman, Walt
...ntless linked hands—namely, the Northeasterner’s, and the
 Northwesterner’s, and the Southwesterner’s, and those of the interior, and all
 their
 brood, 
These shall be masters of the world under a new power, 
They shall laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder of the world.

The most dauntless and rude shall touch face to face lightly, 
The dependence of Liberty shall be lovers, 
The continuance of Equality shall be comrades. 

These shall tie and band stronge...Read more of this...

by Tate, James
...eads, burn roots, 
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous, 
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love, 
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating, 
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology 
of it, the withering, shrivelling, 
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder 
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris, 
wireworms are worse than their parents, 
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads, 
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently 
at me, the me w...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...The Rev. Isaiah Bunter has disappeared into the interior of the Solomon Islands, and it is feared that he may have been devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerable revival of religious customs among the Polynesians.--A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered.

It was Isaiah Bunter
Who sailed to the world's end,
And spread religion in a way
That he did not intend....Read more of this...

by Chaucer, Geoffrey
...of mighty Mars the Red?
All painted was the wall in length and brede* *breadth
Like to the estres* of the grisly place *interior chambers
That hight the great temple of Mars in Thrace,
In thilke* cold and frosty region, *that
There as Mars hath his sovereign mansion.
In which there dwelled neither man nor beast,
With knotty gnarry* barren trees old *gnarled
Of stubbes sharp and hideous to behold;
In which there ran a rumble and a sough*, *groaning noise
As though a storm ...Read more of this...

by Emerson, Ralph Waldo
...upon the Pyramids; 
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky  
As on its friends with kindred eye; 
For out of Thought's interior sphere  
These wonders rose to upper air; 40 
And Nature gladly gave them place  
Adopted them into her race  
And granted them an equal date 
With Andes and with Ararat. 

These temples grew as grows the grass; 45 
Art might obey but not surpass. 
The passive Master lent his hand 
To the vast soul that o'er him planned; 
And the ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
.... V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.
257. V. The Tempest, as above.
264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of
the finest among Wren's interiors. See The Proposed Demolition
of Nineteen City Churches (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.).
266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here.
From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in turn.
V. Gutterdsammerung, III. i: the
Rhine-d...Read more of this...

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