Famous Space Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucers Tale Of The Flowre And The Lefe

by John Keats
 This pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honied lines so freshly interlace,
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops
Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And, by the wandering melody, may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh! what a power has white Simplicity!
What mighty power...Read more of this...

In The Same Space

by Constantine P Cavafy
 The surroundings of home, centers, neighorhood
which I see and where I walk; for years and years.

I have created you in joy and in sorrows:
with so many circumstances, with so many things.

And you have become all feeling, for me....Read more of this...

Riprap

by Gary Snyder
 Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
 placed solid, by hands
In coice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
 in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
 riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
 straying planets,
These poems, people,
 lost ponies with
Dragging saddles--
 and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
 four-dimensional
Game of Go.
 ants and pebbles
In the...Read more of this...

But Outer Space

by Robert Frost
 But outer Space,
At least this far,
For all the fuss
Of the populace
Stays more popular
Than populous...Read more of this...

Abt Vogler

by Robert Browning
 Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build,
Bidding my organ obey, calling its keys to their work,
Claiming each slave of the sound, at a touch, as when Solomon willed
Armies of angels that soar, legions of demons that lurk,
Man, brute, reptile, fly,--alien of end and of aim,
Adverse, each from the other heaven-high, hell-deep removed,--
Should rush into sight at...Read more of this...

The Violent Space (Or When Your Sister Sleeps Around For Money)

by Etheridge Knight
 Exchange in greed the ungraceful signs. Thrust
The thick notes between green apple breasts.
Then the shadow of the devil descends,
The violent space cries and angel eyes,
Large and dark, retreat in innocence and in ice. 
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)

The violent space cries silently,
Like you cried wide years ago
In another space, speckled by the sun
And the leaves of a green...Read more of this...

Prelude to Space

by C S Lewis
 An Epithaliamium

So Man, grown vigorous now,
Holds himself ripe to breed,
Daily devises how
To ejaculate his seed
And boldly fertilize
The black womb of the unconsenting skies.

Some now alive expect
(I am told) to see the large,
Steel member grow erect,
Turgid with the fierce charge
Of our whole planet's skill,
Courage, wealth, knowledge, concentrated will,

Straining with lust to stamp
Our likeness on the abyss-
Bombs, gallows, Belsen camp,
Pox, polio,...Read more of this...

To-day is but a breathing space, quaff wine!

by Omar Khayyam
To-day is but a breathing space, quaff wine!
Thou wilt not see again this life of thine;
So, as the world becomes the spoil of time,
Offer thyself to be the spoil of wine!...Read more of this...

That V.C

by Andrew Barton Paterson
 'Twas in the days of front attack; 
This glorious truth we'd yet to learn it -- 
That every "front" has got a back. 
And French was just the man to turn it. 
A wounded soldier on the ground 
Was lying hid behind a hummock; 
He proved the good old proverb sound -- 
An army travels on its stomach. 

He...Read more of this...

Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars

by Emile Verhaeren
Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars; that which the night conceals or shows between its veils is mingled with the fervour of our exalted being. Those who live with love live with eternity.
It matters not that their reason approve or scoff, and, upright on its high walls, hold out to them, along the quays and harbours, its bright torches;...Read more of this...

Blackberrying

by Sylvia Plath
 Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for...Read more of this...

To John Hamilton Reynolds

by John Keats
 O that a week could be an age, and we
Felt parting and warm meeting every week,
Then one poor year a thousand years would be,
The flush of welcome ever on the cheek:
So could we live long life in little space,
So time itself would be annihilate,
So a day's journey in oblivious haze
To serve ourjoys would lengthen and dilate.
O to arrive each...Read more of this...

Behind the Arras

by Bliss Carman
 I like the old house tolerably well, 
Where I must dwell 
Like a familiar gnome; 
And yet I never shall feel quite at home. 
I love to roam. 
Day after day I loiter and explore 
From door to door; 
So many treasures lure 
The curious mind. What histories obscure 
They must immure! 

I hardly know which room I care...Read more of this...

Snow and Ice

by Quincy Troupe
 ice sheets sweep this slick mirrored dark place
space as keys that turn in tight, trigger
pain of situations
where we move ever so slowly
so gently into time — traced agony
the bright turning of imagination
so slowly
grooved through revolving doors, opening up to enter
mountains where spirits walk voices, ever so slowly
swept by cold, breathing fire
as these elliptical moments of illusion
link fragile loves sunk...Read more of this...

A Lovers Quarrel

by Robert Browning
 I.

Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey,

II.

Runnels, which rillets swell,
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love...Read more of this...

Inner Space

by Dejan Stojanovic
Entering a cell, penetrating deep 
As a flying saucer 
To find a new galaxy 
Would be an honorable task 
For a new scientist interested 
More in the inner state of the soul 
Than in outer space.
...Read more of this...

Ladies And Gentlemen In Outer Space

by Ron Padgett
 Here is my philosophy:
Everything changes (the word "everything"
has just changed as the
word "change" has: it now
means "no change") so
quickly that it literally surpasses my belief,
charges right past it
like some of the giant
ideas in this area.
I had no beginning and I shall have
no end: the beam of light
stretches out before and behind
and I cook the vegetables
for a few minutes only,
the...Read more of this...

What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space

by Rainer Maria Rilke
 What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first...Read more of this...

The Space Heater

by Sharon Olds
 On the then-below-zero day, it was on,
near the patients' chair, the old heater
kept by the analyst's couch, at the end,
like the infant's headstone that was added near the foot
of my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almost
laughing satire of a fire's heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises-
I wanted...Read more of this...

Logos

by Aleister Crowley
 Out of the night forth flamed a star -mine own!
Now seventy light-years nearer as I urge
Constant my heart through the abyss unknown,
Its glory my sole guide while space surge
About me. Seventy light-yaers! As I near
That gate of light that men call death, its cold
Pale gleam begins to pulse, a throbbing sphere,
Systole and diastole of eager gold,
New life immortal, wartmth...Read more of this...

Dire Cure

by William Matthews
 "First, do no harm," the Hippocratic
Oath begins, but before she might enjoy
such balm, the docs had to harm her tumor.
It was large, rare, and so anomalous
in its behavior that at first they mis-
diagnosed it. "Your wife will die of it
within a year." But in ten days or so
I sat beside her bed with hot-and-sour
soup and heard an intern congratulate
her...Read more of this...

Written On A Blank Space At The End Of Chaucers Tale Of The Flowre And The Lefe

by John Keats
 This pleasant tale is like a little copse:
The honied lines so freshly interlace,
To keep the reader in so sweet a place,
So that he here and there full-hearted stops;
And oftentimes he feels the dewy drops
Come cool and suddenly against his face,
And, by the wandering melody, may trace
Which way the tender-legged linnet hops.
Oh! what a power has white Simplicity!
What mighty power...Read more of this...

Prayer XXIII

by Kahlil Gibran
 Then a priestess said, "Speak to us of Prayer." 

And he answered, saying: 

You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance. 

For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether? 

And if it is for your...Read more of this...

There is a solitude of space

by Emily Dickinson
 There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself --
Finite infinity....Read more of this...

Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,

by Fernando Pessoa
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,

In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;

The stray stars, whose innumerable light

Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;

The stream of time, known by birth-bursting bubbles;

The gulf of silence, empty even of nought;

Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles

Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:

When I think on this and that here I stand,

The...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Space poems.

Get a Premium Membership
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a Premium Membership.
Book: Diverse Voices: The Poetry of Human Rights and the Pursuit of Peace