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Famous Staring Poems by Famous Poets

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

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by Graves, Robert
...r>. Cat!..."

Morphia drowsed, again I lay
In a crater by High Wood:
He was there with straddling legs,
Staring eyes as big as eggs,
Purring as he lapped my blood,
His black bulk darkening the day,
With a voice cruel and flat,
"Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat! ... Cat!..." he said, "Cat! ... Cat!..."

When I'm shot through heart and head,
And there's no choice but to die,
The last word I'll hear, no...Read more of this...



by Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...would. The decencies
Forbade that I should look at him for ever, 
Yet many a time I 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...Read more of this...

by García Lorca, Federico
...The moon came into the forge
in her bustle of flowering nard.
The little boy stares at her, stares.
The boy is staring hard.
In the shaken air
the moon moves her amrs,
and shows lubricious and pure,
her breasts of hard tin.
"Moon, moon, moon, run!
If the gypsies come,
they will use your heart
to make white necklaces and rings."
"Let me dance, my little one.
When the gypsies come,
they'll find you on the anvil
with your lively eyes closed tight.
"M...Read more of this...

by Bidart, Frank
...

And so I made myself an Easterner,
finding it, after all, more like me
than I had let myself hope.

 And now, staring into the embittered face of 
 my father,

again, for two weeks, as twice a year,
 I was back.

 The waitress asked us if we wanted a drink.
Grimly, I waited until he said no...



Before the tribunal of the world I submit the following
document:

 Nancy showed it to us,
in her apartment at the model,
as she waited month by month
f...Read more of this...

by Aldington, Richard
...and the shops for women, 
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 ...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...
Still furious and more furious grows the fray.
The yellow sun makes ghastlier still the sight
Of painted corpses, staring in its light.
No longer slaves, but comrades of their griefs, 
The squaws augment the forces of their chiefs.
They chant weird dirges in a minor key, 
While from the narrow door of wigwam and tepee



XXIII.
Cold glittering eyes above cold glittering steel
Their deadly purpose and their hate reveal.
The click of pistols and the crack ...Read more of this...

by Hugo, Victor
...lone, 
 The guest expected should be living one! 
 The seven lights from seven arms make glow 
 Almost with life the staring eyes that show 
 On the dim frescoes—and along the walls 
 Is here and there a stool, or the light falls 
 O'er some long chest, with likeness to a tomb. 
 Yet was displayed amid the mournful gloom 
 Some copper vessels, and some crockery ware. 
 The door—as if it must, yet scarcely dare— 
 Had opened widely to the night's fresh air. 
 
 No ...Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...g, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we ...Read more of this...

by Bukowski, Charles
...he
dictator.

cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of 
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the 
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the 
dark.
the less i needed
the better i 
felt.

maybe the other life had worn me 
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had 
slipped away into 
sorrow.

I could never accept
life...Read more of this...

by Brautigan, Richard
...

 his glass, so he wouldn't cut his face. His head would always

 jump up and look startled around the bar, people staring at

 it. He'd get up then, and take it home.

 The next morning Mr. Norris went down to a sporting

 goods store and charged his equipment. He charged a 9 x 9

 foot dry finish tent with an aluminum center pole. Then he

 charged an Arctic sleeping bag filled with eiderdown and an

 air mattress and an air pillow to go with the sl...Read more of this...

by Akhmatova, Anna
...execution.
There are now only dusty flowers,
The chinking of the thurible,
Tracks from somewhere into nowhere
And, staring me in the face
And threatening me with swift annihilation,
An enormous star.
[1939]

VI

Weeks fly lightly by. Even so,
I cannot understand what has arisen,
How, my son, into your prison
White nights stare so brilliantly.
Now once more they burn,
Eyes that focus like a hawk,
And, upon your cross, the talk
Is again of death.
[1939....Read more of this...

by Berman, David
...by my desk
I stare out when I am stuck
though the outdoors has rarely inspired me to write
and I don't know why I keep staring at it.

My childhood hasn't made good material either
mostly being a mulch of white minutes
with a few stand out moments,
popping tar bubbles on the driveway in the summer
a certain amount of pride at school
everytime they called it "our sun"
and playing football when the only play
was "go out long" are what stand out now.

If squeezed for mo...Read more of this...

by Wilde, Oscar
...stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:
And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud
In which their convict lies.

The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.

Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life's appointed bourne:
And a...Read more of this...

by Chesterton, G K
...f Britain say."

A proud man was the Roman,
His speech a single one,
But his eyes were like an eagle's eyes
That is staring at the sun.

"Dig for me where I die," he said,
"If first or last I fall--
Dead on the fell at the first charge,
Or dead by Wantage wall;

"Lift not my head from bloody ground,
Bear not my body home,
For all the earth is Roman earth
And I shall die in Rome."

Then Alfred, King of England,
Bade blow the horns of war,
And fling the Golden Drago...Read more of this...

by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...ho bare it, and it past. 
But every knight beheld his fellow's face 
As in a glory, and all the knights arose, 
And staring each at other like dumb men 
Stood, till I found a voice and sware a vow. 

`I sware a vow before them all, that I, 
Because I had not seen the Grail, would ride 
A twelvemonth and a day in quest of it, 
Until I found and saw it, as the nun 
My sister saw it; and Galahad sware the vow, 
And good Sir Bors, our Lancelot's cousin, sware, 
And Lancel...Read more of this...

by Aiken, Conrad
...heartstrings
With the sudden hand of desire.

And one goes late in the streets, and thinks of murder;
And one lies staring, and thinks of death.
And one, who has suffered, clenches her hands despairing,
And holds her breath . . .

Who are all these, who flow in the veins of the city,
Coil and revolve and dream,
Vanish or gleam?
Some mount up to the brain and flower in fire.
Some are destroyed; some die; some slowly stream.

And the new are born wh...Read more of this...

by Strand, Mark
...ent is like a hopeless cause.
If only we could stop reading.
"He never wanted to read another book
and she kept staring into the street.
The cars were still there,
the deep shade of trees covered them.
The shades were drawn in the new house.
Maybe the man who lived there,
the man she loved, was reading
the story of another life.
She imagine a bare parlor,
a cold fireplace, a man sitting
writing a letter to a woman
who has sacrificed her life for love.<...Read more of this...

by Byron, George (Lord)
...in full Parliament, 'a rancorous renegado'? 

4thly, Is he not poet laureate, with his own lines on Martin the regicide staring him in the face? 

And 5thly, Putting the four preceding items together, with what conscience dare he call the attention of the laws to the publications of others, be they what they may? 

I say nothing of the cowardice of such a proceeding, its meanness speaks for itself; but I wish to touch upon the motive, which is neither more nor less than that ...Read more of this...

by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)
..., and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. 
 "My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
 "What...Read more of this...

by Padel, Ruth
...l, every last gold atom
Of your body, was engraved in me 
Already. Don't tell me that was dream! When you came in, 
Staring round in your stripey coat and brocade 
Vest, I nearly died! I fainted, I was flame! I recognized
The you I'd always listened to alone, when I wrote
Or tried to wrestle my scatty soul into calm.
*
"Wasn't it you who slipped through the transparent
Darkness to my bed and whispered love? Aren't you
My guardian angel? Or is this arrant
Seeming, hall...Read more of this...

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things