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Famous Pianos Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Butler, Ellis Parker
...To be a great musician you must be a man of moods,
You have to be, to understand sonatas and etudes.
To execute pianos and to fiddle with success,
With sympathy and feeling you must fairly effervesce;
It was so with Paganini, Remenzi and Cho-pang,
And so it was with Peterkin Von Gabriel O’Lang.

Monsieur O’Lang had sympathy to such a great degree.
No virtuoso ever lived was quite so great as he;
He was either very happy or very, very sad;
He was always feeling...Read more of this...



by Milosz, Czeslaw
...two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion....Read more of this...

by Aldington, Richard
...The shop where I bought transfers, 
And the piano and gramaphone shop 
Where I used to stand 
Staring at the huge shiny pianos and at the pictures 
Of a white dog looking into a gramaphone. 

How dull and greasy and grey and sordid it was! 
On wet days -- it was always wet -- 
I used to kneel on a chair 
And look at it from the window. 

The dirty yellow trams 
Dragged noisily along 
With a clatter of wheels and bells 
And a humming of wires overhead. 
They threw ...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...med to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though—

I thought if I could only live
Till that first Shout got by—
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me—

I dared not meet the Daffodils—
For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own—

I wished the Grass would hurry—
So—when 'twas time to see—
He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch—to look at me—

I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they'd stay away
...Read more of this...

by Dickinson, Emily
...omed to Him grown,
He hurts a little, though --

I thought If I could only live
Till that first Shout got by --
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me --

I dared not meet the Daffodils --
For fear their Yellow Gown
Would pierce me with a fashion
So foreign to my own --

I wished the Grass would hurry --
So -- when 'twas time to see --
He'd be too tall, the tallest one
Could stretch -- to look at me --

I could not bear the Bees should come,
I wished they'd stay a...Read more of this...



by Masters, Edgar Lee
...Who carved this shattered harp on my stone?
I died to you, no doubt. But how many harps and pianos
Wired I and tightened and disentangled for you,
Making them sweet again -- with tuning fork or without?
Oh well! A harp leaps out of the ear of a man, you say,
But whence the ear that orders the length of the strings
To a magic of numbers flying before your thought
Through a door that closes against your breathless wonder?
Is there no Ear round the ea...Read more of this...

by Levine, Philip
...in 1983
in a hotel in Perugia. A good man,
Arthur, he survived graduate school,
later came home to Detroit and sold
pianos right through the Depression.
He loaned my brother a used one
to compose his hideous songs on,
which Arthur thought were genius.
What an imagination Arthur had!...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...e Tenderloin, is here no more; the red-lights are gone; the ring of shovels handling scrap iron replaces the banging of pianos and the bawling songs of pimps.Chicago, 1915....Read more of this...

by Reeser, Jennifer
...In my dream, Celebrity, four pianos
scored the room, and you -- on an antique sofa
near two dark-haired innocents -- asked that I play
something immortal.

Dust motes grayed the air, and a sage-green shadow
draped the walls in color like sifted powder.
I agreed, but wandered, untold, too many
keys to consider....Read more of this...

by Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

He was my North, my South, my East and West, 
My working week and my Sunda...Read more of this...

by Paterson, Andrew Barton
...beer, 
It show you Leichhardt track!" 

And loud from every squatter's door 
Each pioneering swell 
Will hear the wild pianos roar 
The strains of "Daisy Bell". 

The watchers in those forests vast 
Will see, at fall of night, 
Commercial travellers bounding past 
And darting out of sight. 

About their path a fearful fate 
Will hover always near. 
A dreadful scourge that lies in wait -- 
The Longreach Horehound Beer! 

And then, to crown this tale of guilt, 
The...Read more of this...

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