Famous Steerage Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Steerage poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous steerage poems. These examples illustrate what a famous steerage poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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to new America.
I am burdened with the truck and chimera, hope,
acquired in the sweating sick-excited passage
in steerage, strange and estranged
Hence I must descry and describe the kingdom of emotion.
For I am a poet of the kindergarten (in the city)
and the cemetery (in the city)
And rapture and ragtime and also the secret city in the
heart and mind
This is the song of the natural city self in the 20th century.
It is true but only partly true that a city is a "ty...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...e the absolute best of what God made.
Or--our first simile--though you prove me doomed
To a viler berth still, to the steerage-hole,
The sheep-pen or the pig-stye, I should strive
To make what use of each were possible;
And as this cabin gets upholstery,
That hutch should rustle with sufficient straw.
But, friend, I don't acknowledge quite so fast
I fail of all your manhood's lofty tastes
Enumerated so complacently,
On the mere ground that you forsooth can find
...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Robert
...It is stuffy in the steerage where the second-classers sleep,
For there's near a hundred for'ard, and they're stowed away like sheep, --
They are trav'lers for the most part in a straight 'n' honest path;
But their linen's rather scanty, an' there isn't any bath --
Stowed away like ewes and wethers that is shore 'n' marked 'n' draft.
But the shearers of the shearers always...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...ter
Or late at night
Sweet under the differently-swung stars,
When the chance sight
Of a girl doing her laundry in the steerage
Ramifies endlessly.
This is being young,
Assumption of the startled century
Like new store clothes,
The huge decisions printed out by feet
Inventing where they tread,
The random windows conjuring a street....Read more of this...
by
Larkin, Philip
...od girl's eyes, until you've settled down.
It's hard to go away alone and leave old chums behind-
It's hard to travel steerage when your tastes are more refined-
To reach a place when times are bad, and to be standing there,
No money in your pocket nor a decent rag to wear.
But be forced from that fond clasp, from that last clinging kiss-
By poverty! There is on earth no harder thing than this....Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...he stood;
Each call for needful rest repell'd,
With dying hand the rudder held,
Till in his fall with fateful sway
The steerage of the realm gave way.
Then--while on Britain's thousand plains
One polluted church remains,
Whose peaceful bells ne'er sent around
The bloody tocsin's maddening sound,
But still upon the hallow'd day
Convoke the swains to praise and pray;
While faith and civil peace are dear,
Grace this cold marble with a tear:--
He who preserved them, PITT, lies h...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...d smoothly to the deuce.
Some are wanderers by profession, `turning up' and gone as soon,
Travelling second-class, or steerage (when it's cheap they go saloon);
Free from `ists' and `isms', troubled little by belief or doubt --
Lazy, purposeless, and useless -- knocking round and hanging out.
They will take what they can get, and they will give what they can give,
God alone knows how they manage -- God alone knows how they live!
They are nearly always hard-up, but are ...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...led
To keep those flour bins full!
We've been in many countries,
We've sailed on many seas;
We've travelled in the steerage
And lived on land at ease.
We've seen the world together
Through laughter and through tears –
And not been far from baker's bread
These five and thirty years.
The flats are green as ever,
The creeks go rippling through;
The Mudgee Hills are showing
Their deepest shades of blue;
Those mountains in the distance
That ever held a charm
Are ...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...rmy
The thunder of skies and the sea's sullen sound,
The coaster or liner, the English or foreign,
The state-room or steerage the wide world round.
And the old hag she seemed troubled
As she bent above the bed,
"He will dream things and he'll see things
To come true when he is dead.
He will see things all too plainly,
And his fellows will deride,
For his mothers they were gipsies
All on his good mother's side."
And my dreams are strange dreams, are day dreams, a...Read more of this...
by
Lawson, Henry
...them arms to ward the blow.
Envy has owned it was his doing,
To save that hapless land from ruin;
While they who at the steerage stood,
And reaped the profit, sought his blood.
To save them from their evil fate,
In him was held a crime of state.
A wicked monster on the bench,
Whose fury blood could never quench
- As vile and profligate a villain
As modern Scroggs, or old Tresilian;
Who long all justice had discarded,
Nor feared he God, nor man regarded -
Vowed on the Dean hi...Read more of this...
by
Swift, Jonathan
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