Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Stub Poems by Famous Poets

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

See also:

by Dunmore, Helen
...ll the things you are not yet.
You are words without paper, pages
sighing in summer forests, gardens
where builders stub out their rubble 
and plastic oozes its sweat.
All the things you are, you are not yet.

Not yet the lonely window in midwinter
with the whine of tea on an empty stomach,
not yet the heating you can't afford and must wait for,
tamping a coin in on each hour.
Not the gorgeous shush of restaurant doors
and their interiors, always so much small...Read more of this...



by Wignesan, T
...arent wrappers cling
To slippery hands jingling the inexact change
That mounted the trustful fisherman's credit:
The stub legged fisher of diplomat
And cool cat
And the prostitutes' confidant;
Each shivering pimp's warming pan.

Then at five-thirty
The bowels of Hyde Park
Improperly growled and shunted
And shook the half-night-long
Lazily swaggering double deckers,
Suddenly as in a rude recollection,
To break and pull, grind and swing away
And around, drawi...Read more of this...

by Lorde, Audre
...re words like stapled wagers 
in a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
and come whatever will all chances 
the stub remains 
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. 
Some words live in my throat 
breeding like adders. Other know sun 
seeking like gypsies over my tongue 
to explode through my lips 
like young sparrows bursting from shell. 
Some words 
bedevil me 

Love is word, another kind of open. 
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame 
I am Blac...Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ith his arms.
The interpreter translates, “I was a friend of Kornilov, he asks me what to do and I tell him.”
A stub of a man, this Mohammedan colonel … a projectile shape … a bald head hammered …
“Does he fight or do they put him in a cannon and shoot him at the enemy?”
This fly-by-night, this bull-roarer who knows everybody.
“I write forty books, history of Islam, history of Europe, true religion, scientific farming, I am the Roosevelt of the Caucasus, I go to A...Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...ok

Behind the door, no room for books or bags -
'I'll take it.' So it happens that I lie
Where Mr Bleaney lay, and stub my fags
On the same saucer-souvenir, and try

Stuffing my ears with cotton-wool, to drown
The jabbering set he egged her on to buy.
I know his habits - what time he came down,
His preference for sauce to gravy, why

He kept on plugging at the four aways -
Likewise their yearly frame: the Frinton folk
Who put him up for summer holidays,
And Christmas...Read more of this...



by Sandburg, Carl
...e and put up skyscrapers, threw out rails and wires, feelers to the salt sea: now the smokestacks bite the skyline with stub teeth.

In an early year the call of a wild duck woven in greens and purples: now the riveter’s chatter, the police patrol, the song-whistle of the steamboat.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake.
I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.. . .
What brothers the...Read more of this...

by Atwood, Margaret
...we are in thin
raincoats and rubber boots

On the disastrous ice, the wind rising

Nothing in our pockets

But a pencil stub, two oranges
Four Toronto streetcar tickets

and an elastic band holding a bundle
of small white filing cards
printed with important facts....Read more of this...

by Sandburg, Carl
...ne by one going up the hill and over the fence--one by
one four-footed pattering up and over--one by one wiggling
their stub tails as they take the short jump and go
over--one by one silently unless for the multitudinous
drumming of their hoofs as they move on and go over--
thousands and thousands of them in the grey haze of
evening just after sundown--one by one slanting in a
long line to pass over the hill--

I am the slow, long-legged Sleepyman and I love you
sheep in Pers...Read more of this...

by Jeffers, Robinson
...ss and deca-
 dence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stub-
 bornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: 
 shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thick-
 ening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there 
 are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so ...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...The sole one that would do.
He wandered on from pub to pub
 Yet never ceased to seek
With burning brain and pencil stub
 The Word Unique.

Said he: 'I'll nail it down or die.
 Oh Heaven help me, pray!'
And then a heavy car dashed by,
 And he was in the way.
They rushed him to the hospital,
 And though his chance was bleak,
He cried: 'I'll croak, but find I shall
 The Word Unique.'

They reckoned he was off his head,
 And could be it was so;
For as they be...Read more of this...

by Frost, Robert
...saw no men there and no bones of men there.
I armed myself against such bones as might be
With the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle
I picked up off the straw-dust-covered floor.
Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.
The door was still because I held it shut
While I thought what to do that could be done—
About the house—about the people not there.
This house in one year fallen to decay
Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses
Fallen to ruin in...Read more of this...

by Sexton, Anne
...there was no one there.

For fourty years this experimental
woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows
where its stub branches held and its spokes fell.
It was a place of parallel trees, their lives
filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know
our sameness and how our sameness survives.

Outside of us the village cars followed
the white line we had carefully walked
two nights before toward our single beds.
We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fe...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Stub poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs