Famous Stopping Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Stopping poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous stopping poems. These examples illustrate what a famous stopping poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Philip Larkin
Once i am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting seats and stone
and little books; sprawlings of flowers cut
For Sunday brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense musty unignorable silence
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless I take off
My cylce-clips in awkward revrence...Read more of this...
by
John Crowe Ransom
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all
Her wars were bruited in our high window.
We looked among orchard trees and beyond
Where she took arms against her shadow,
Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping...Read more of this...
by
Rudyard Kipling
"The Mother Hive"-- Actions and Reactions
A Farmer of the Augustan Age
Perused in Virgil's golden page
The story of the secret won
From Proteus by Cyrene's son--
How the dank sea-god showed the swain
Means to restore his hives again.
More briefly, how a slaughtered bull
Breeds honey by the bellyful.
The egregious rustic put to death
A bull by stopping of its breath,
Disposed the carcass in a...Read more of this...
by
Carl Sandburg
THERE is something terrible
about a hurdy-gurdy,
a gipsy man and woman,
and a monkey in red flannel
all stopping in front of a big house
with a sign “For Rent” on the door
and the blinds hanging loose
and nobody home.
I never saw this.
I hope to God I never will.
Whoop-de-doodle-de-doo.
Hoodle-de-harr-de-hum.
Nobody home? Everybody home.
Whoop-de-doodle-de-doo.
Mamie Riley married Jimmy Higgins last night: Eddie Jones died...Read more of this...
by
D. H. Lawrence
The five old bells
Are hurrying and eagerly calling,
Imploring, protesting
They know, but clamorously falling
Into gabbling incoherence, never resting,
Like spattering showers from a bursten sky-rocket dropping
In splashes of sound, endlessly, never stopping.
The silver moon
That somebody has spun so high
To settle the question, yes or no, has caught
In the net of the night’s balloon,
And sits...Read more of this...
by
Lam Quang My
I tire of stopping wings of summer
You the slow run down of autumn
No boats at anchor in the sea of eyes
The shade of clouds floats melancholy
Does something wait for us
Upon the far horizon…
Winter sits upon the long-drawn barricade
The stones ache under circled wheels
Breeze borne images of mountain thorn and timeless place
Far off singing soothes nostalgic soul
Does someone wait for...Read more of this...
by
William Butler Yeats
There was a man whom Sorrow named his Friend,
And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming,
Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming
And humming Sands, where windy surges wend:
And he called loudly to the stars to bend
From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they
Among themselves laugh on and sing alway:
And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend
Cried...Read more of this...
by
Marriott Edgar
Joe Dunn were a bobby for football
He gave all his time to that sport,
He played for the West Wigan Whippets,
On days when they turned out one short.
He’d been member of club for three seasons
And had grumbled again and again,
Cos he found only time that they’d used him,
Were when it were pouring with...Read more of this...
by
James Dickey
Memory: I can take my head and strike it on a wall on Cumberland Island
Where the night tide came crawling under the stairs came up the first
Two or three steps and the cottage stood on poles all night
With the sea sprawled under it as we dreamed of the great fin circling
Under the bedroom floor. In...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
The unsettled trees seem to share
My tensions of body and mind:
Unable to move before the shell of the wind,
Yielding as much as their nature allows,
They will break if pushed too far,
Splinter to show the white flesh of their wood
And sweet transparencies of sap.
If 1 am pushed too far I will show
The world our wounds, our nine months’ child
In his...Read more of this...
by
Richard Brautigan
Yup.
A long lazy September look
in the mirror
say it's true.
I'm 31
and my nose is growing
old.
It starts about 1/2
an inch
below the bridge
and strolls geriatrically
down
for another inch or so:
stopping.
Fortunately, the rest
of the nose is comparatively
young.
I wonder if girls
will want me with an
old nose.
I can hear them now
the heartless bitches!
"He's cute
but his nose
is old."...Read more of this...
by
Fleda Brown
Sometimes I feel her easing further into her grave,
resigned, as always, and I have to come to her rescue.
Like now, when I have so much else to do. Not that
she'd want a poem. She would have been proud, of course,
of all its mystery, involving her, but scared a little.
Her eyes would have filled with tears....Read more of this...
by
Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it *****
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The...Read more of this...
by
Philip Levine
Seven years ago I went into
the High Sierras stunned by the desire
to die. For hours I stared into a clear
mountain stream that fell down
over speckled rocks, and then I
closed my eyes and prayed that when
I opened them I would be gone
and somewhere a purple and golden
thistle would overflow with light.
I...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
THESE, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers,
(For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world—but soon I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side—now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences,...Read more of this...
by
Sylvia Plath
(1)
This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.
How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.
Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?
I have two legs, and I move smilingly..
A sandy damper kills the vibrations;
It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices
Waving and crutchless, half their old size.
The...Read more of this...
by
Andrew Marvell
Oblig'd by frequent visits of this man,
Whom as Priest, Poet, and Musician,
I for some branch of Melchizedeck took,
(Though he derives himself from my Lord Brooke)
I sought his Lodging; which is at the Sign
Of the sad Pelican; Subject divine
For Poetry: There three Stair Cases high,
Which signifies his triple property,
I found at last a Chamber, as 'twas said,
But seem'd a Coffin...Read more of this...
by
Walt Whitman
1
COME, my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready;
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp edged axes? Pioneers! O pioneers!
2
For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We, the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend, Pioneers! O pioneers!
3
O...Read more of this...
by
Czeslaw Milosz
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a...Read more of this...
by
Rabindranath Tagore
Come to my garden walk, my love. Pass by the fervid flowers that
press themselves on your sight. Pass them by, stopping at some
chance joy, which like a sudden wonder of sunset illumines, yet
elude.
For lover's gift is shy, it never tells its name, it flits
across the shade, spreading a shiver of joy along the dust.
Overtake it or miss it for...Read more of this...
by
Wang Wei
Not know incense store temple
Few enter cloud peaks
Ancient trees no person path
Deep hills what place bell
Spring sound choke sheer rock
Sun colour cold green pines
Dusk empty pool bend
Peace meditation control fierce dragon
I did not know the incense storing temple,
I walked a few miles into the clouded peaks.
No man on the...Read more of this...
by
Philip Larkin
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and...Read more of this...
by
Robert Browning
(PIANO DI SORRENTO.)
Fortu, Frotu, my beloved one,
Sit here by my side,
On my knees put up both little feet!
I was sure, if I tried,
I could make you laugh spite of Scirocco;
Now, open your eyes—
Let me keep you amused till he vanish
In black from the skies,
With telling my memories over
As you tell your beads;
All the memories plucked at Sorrento
—The flowers,...Read more of this...
by
Charles Bukowski
George was lying in his trailer, flat on his back, watching a small portable T.V. His
dinner dishes were undone, his breakfast dishes were undone, he needed a shave, and ash
from his rolled cigarettes dropped onto his undershirt. Some of the ash was still burning.
Sometimes the burning ash missed the undershirt and hit his skin, then he cursed, brushing
it away....Read more of this...
by
Edgar Lee Masters
Do the boys and girls still go to Siever's
For cider, after school, in late September?
Or gather hazel nuts among the thickets
On Aaron Hatfield's farm when the frosts begin?
For many times with the laughing girls and boys
Played I along the road and over the hills
When the sun was low and the air was cool,
Stopping to club the walnut tree
Standing leafless...Read more of this...
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