Famous Stairway Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Stairway poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous stairway poems. These examples illustrate what a famous stairway poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
See also:
by
Vachel Lindsay
(Being a Chant of the American Soap-Box and the Russian Revolution.)
O market square, O slattern place,
Is glory in your slack disgrace?
Plump quack doctors sell their pills,
Gentle grafters sell brass watches,
Silly anarchists yell their ills.
Shall we be as weird as these?
In the breezes nod and wheeze?
Heaven's mass is sung,
Tomorrow's mass is sung
In a spirit tongue
By wind and...Read more of this...
by
Willa Cather
THROUGH halls of vanished pleasure,
And hold of vanished power,
And crypt of faith forgotten,
A came to Ludlow tower.
A-top of arch and stairway,
Of crypt and donjan cell,
Of council hall, and chamber,
Of wall, and ditch, and well,
High over grated turrets
Where clinging ivies run,
A thousand scarlet poppies
Enticed the rising sun,
Upon the...Read more of this...
by
Margaret Atwood
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like...Read more of this...
by
Amy Lowell
I pray to be the tool which to your hand
Long use has shaped and moulded till it be
Apt for your need, and, unconsideringly,
You take it for its service. I demand
To be forgotten in the woven strand
Which grows the multi-coloured tapestry
Of your bright life, and through its tissues lie
A hidden, strong, sustaining, grey-toned band.
I wish to dwell around your daylight...Read more of this...
by
Conrad Aiken
From time to time, lifting his eyes, he sees
The soft blue starlight through the one small window,
The moon above black trees, and clouds, and Venus,—
And turns to write . . . The clock, behind ticks softly.
It is so long, indeed, since I have written,—
Two years, almost, your last is turning yellow,—
That these first words I write seem cold and...Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Not, where the stairway turns in the dark,
A hooded figure, shriveled under a flowing cloak!
Not yellow eyes in the room at night,
Staring out from a surface of cobweb gray!
And not the flap of a condor wing,
When the roar of life in your ears begins
As a sound heard never before!
But on a sunny afternoon,
By a country road,
Where purple rag-weeds bloom...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader's art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smile the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they...Read more of this...
by
Edwin Arlington Robinson
She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reason to refuse him.
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
I SALUTED a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled—so did I.
He crumpled the skin on his forehead,
frowning—so did I.
Everything I did he did.
I said, “Hello, I know you.”
And I was a liar to say so.
Ah, this looking-glass man!
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust—
Ah! he will go with me
Down the dark stairway
When nobody else is looking,
When...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you
when i was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a pecarious
upbringing.
I was hard as granite,I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.
I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women were something
to...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Hark to the Sourdough story, told at sixty below,
When the pipes are lit and we smoke and spit
Into the campfire glow.
Rugged are we and hoary, and statin' a general rule,
A genooine Sourdough story
Ain't no yarn for the Sunday School.
A Sourdough came to stake his claim in Heav'n one morning early.
Saint Peter cried: "Who waits outside them gates so bright...Read more of this...
by
Amy Levy
In through the porch and up the silent stair;
Little is changed, I know so well the ways;--
Here, the dead came to meet me; it was there
The dream was dreamed in unforgotten days.
But who is this that hurries on before,
A flitting shade the brooding shades among?--
She turned,--I saw her face,--O God, it wore
The face I used to wear when I...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
The mountains that enfold the vale
With walls of granite, steep and high,
Invite the fearless foot to scale
Their stairway toward the sky.
The restless, deep, dividing sea
That flows and foams from shore to shore,
Calls to its sunburned chivalry,
"Push out, set sail, explore!"
And all the bars at which we fret,
That seem to prison and control,
Are but the doors...Read more of this...
by
Duncan Campbell Scott
Tossed like a falcon from the hunter's wrist,
A sweeping plunge, a sudden shattering noise,
And thou hast dared, with a long spiral twist,
The elastic stairway to the rising sun.
Peril below thee and above, peril
Within thy car; but peril cannot daunt
Thy peerless heart: gathering wing and poise,
Thy plane transfigured, and thy motor-chant
Subduéd to a whisper -- then a silence, --
And thou...Read more of this...
by
Henry Van Dyke
I
Thou who hast made thy dwelling fair
With flowers beneath, above with starry lights,
And set thine altars everywhere,--
On mountain heights,
In woodlands dim with many a dream,
In valleys bright with springs,
And on the curving capes of every stream:
Thou who hast taken to thyself the wings
Of morning, to abide
Upon the secret places of the sea,
And on far islands, where the tide
Visits the...Read more of this...
by
Thomas Hardy
'TWAS a death-bed summons, and forth I went
By the way of the Western Wall, so drear
On that winter night, and sought a gate--
The home, by Fate,
Of one I had long held dear.
And there, as I paused by her tenement,
And the trees shed on me their rime and hoar,
I thought of the man who had left her lone--
Him who made...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
It's never quite right, he said, the way people look,
the way the music sounds, the way the words are
written.
It's never quite right, he said, all the things we are
taught, all the loves we chase, all the deaths we
die, all the lives we live,
they are never quite right,
they are hardly close to right,
these lives we live
one after the other,
piled there...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
DRUM on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like...Read more of this...
by
Robert Louis Stevenson
WHETHER upon the garden seat
You lounge with your uplifted feet
Under the May's whole Heaven of blue;
Or whether on the sofa you,
No grown up person being by,
Do some soft corner occupy;
Take you this volume in your hands
And enter into other lands,
For lo! (as children feign) suppose
You, hunting in the garden rows,
Or in the lumbered attic, or
The cellar - a nail-studded...Read more of this...
by
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,...Read more of this...
by
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader's art,
Nor tinkle of piano strings,
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs.
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace,
That they may render back
Artful thunder that conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of...Read more of this...
by
Vachel Lindsay
FOR A VERY LITTLE GIRL, NOT A YEAR OLD.
CATHARINE FRAZEE WAKEFIELD.
The sun gives not directly
The coal, the diamond crown;
Not in a special basket
Are these from Heaven let down.
The sun gives not directly
The plough, man's iron friend;
Not by a path or stairway
Do tools from Heaven descend.
Yet sunshine fashions all things
That cut or burn or fly;
And corn that...Read more of this...
by
John Betjeman
The flag that hung half-mast today
Seemed animate with being
As if it knew for who it flew
And will no more be seeing.
He loved each corner of the links-
The stream at the eleventh,
The grey-green bents, the pale sea-pinks,
The prospect from the seventh;
To the ninth tee the uphill climb,
A grass and sandy stairway,
And at the top the scent of thyme
And long extent...Read more of this...
by
Robert William Service
Alphonso Rex who died in Rome
Was quite a fistful as a kid;
For when I visited his home,
That gorgeous palace in Madrid,
The grinning guide-chap showed me where
He rode his bronco up the stair.
That stairway grand of marbled might,
The most majestic in the land,
In statured splendour, flight on flight,
He urged his steed with whip in hand.
No lackey could restrain him for
He...Read more of this...
by
Joy Harjo
Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore.It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us.Of course we noticed when she came in.We were Indian ruins.She
was the end of beauty.No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a...Read more of this...
Dont forget to view our wonderful member Stairway poems.