Famous Suburban Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Black Bonnet

...ied wall 
The congregation's seen -- 
White nothings where the shadows fall, 
Black blots against the green. 
The dull, suburban people meet 
And buzz in little groups, 
While down the white steps to the street 
A quaint old figure stoops. 

And then along my picket fence 
Where staring wallflowers grow -- 
World-wise Old Age, and Common-sense! -- 
Black Bonnet, nodding slow. 
But not alone; for on each side 
A little dot attends 
In snowy frock and sash of pride, 
And these ...Read more of this...
by Lawson, Henry


Freddy

...friend cal tell.
But all the same I don't care much for his meelyoo I mean
I don't anheimate mich in the ha-ha well-off suburban scene
Where men are few and hearts go tumptytum
In the tennis club lub lights poet very dumb.
But there never was a boy like Freddy
For a haystack's ivory tower of bliss
Where speaking sub specie humanitatis
Freddy and me can kiss.
Exhiled from his meelyoo
Exhiled from mine
There's all Tom Tiddler's time pocket
For his love and mine....Read more of this...
by Smith, Stevie

Ionicus

...ling feet and shoulders bowed 
Beneath the weight of happier days, 
He lagged among the heedless crowd, 
Or crept along suburban ways. 
But still through all his heart was young, 
A courage, a pride, a rapture, sprung 
Of the strength and splendour of England's war. 

From ill-requited toil he turned 
To ride with Picton and with Pack, 
Among his grammars inly burned 
To storm the Afghan mountain-track. 
When midnight chimed, before Quebec 
He watched with Wolfe till he morni...Read more of this...
by Newbolt, Sir Henry

London Voluntaries IV: Out of the Poisonous East

...by his ancient watch -- to part
From books and women and talk and drink and art.
And you go humbly after him
To a mean suburban lodging: on the way
To what or where
Not Death, who is old and very wise, can say:
And you -- how should you care
So long as, unreclaimed of hell,
The Wind-Fiend, the insufferable,
Thus vicious and thus patient, sits him down
To the black job of burking London Town?...Read more of this...
by Henley, William Ernest

Marginalia

...ks

Of moor momentoes vased in unsunny Surrey.

Can you believe it? Some arseholes letting off fireworks 

On the moor? Suburban excesses spread like the sores

Of syphilis and more regulations in a decade of Blair

Than in the century before.

"Shop your neighbours. Prove it. Bring birth certificates to A&E

If you want NHS treatment free. Be careful not to bleed to death

While finding the certificate. Blunkett wants us all to have ID

Photo cards, genetic codes, DNA databa...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry


Memories of West Street and Lepke

...and preferred fallen fruit.
He tried to convert Bioff and Brown,
the Hollywood pimps, to his diet.
Hairy, muscular, suburban,
wearing chocolate double-breasted suits,
they blew their tops and beat him black and blue.

I was so out of things, I'd never heard
of the Jehovah's Witnesses.
"Are you a C.O.?" I asked a fellow jailbird.
"No," he answered, "I'm a J.W."
He taught me the "hospital tuck,"
and pointed out the T-shirted back
of Murder Incorporated's Czar Lepk...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert

My Aviary

...to say
His fishy carcase has no virtue in it
The gunning idiot's wortless hire to pay.

He knows you! "sportsmen" from suburban alleys,
Stretched under seaweed in the treacherous punt;
Knows every lazy, shiftless lout that sallies
Forth to waste powder-- as he says, to "hunt."

I watch you with a patient satisfaction,
Well pleased to discount your predestined luck;
The float that figures in your sly transaction
Will carry back a goose, but not a duck.

Shrewd is our bird; no...Read more of this...
by Holmes, Oliver Wendell

Paradise Regained: The Fourth Book

...ns, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And Eloquence, native to famous wits
Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,
City or suburban, studious walks and shades.
See there the olive-grove of Academe,
Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird
Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;
There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound
Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites
To studious musing; there Ilissus rowls
His whispering stream. Within the walls then view 
The schools of anc...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

Reverie with Fries

...
get me to those Peloponnesian beaches
where I’d preen all day with a jug of ouzo
in my bikini.

Would I miss the gummy suburban vinyl,
hanker for the Happiest Meal on Main Street?
—Wouldn’t one spectacular shrug suffice for
begging the question?...Read more of this...
by Taylor, Marilyn L

School Smell

...Must learn each other.

But it’s there

Ready to spring out

Like a coiled snake skin still envenomed

After years by a suburban hearth.

It was fifteen years ago

But I still remember Smigger,

Our greying old headmaster

In his spats and striped trousers,

The last in our town to wear them,

And his northern accent,

Heavy as Sunday.

"Now then you lads,

I’m not having this

Or I’ll tan you all,"

He’d bawl at a mill-hand’s boy

For drawing cunts on the lavatory wall.



O...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

The Ancient Town of Leith

...ls there are, beautiful and clean;
And for himself, he is a very good man,
And to deny it there's few people can. 

The suburban villas of Leith are elegant and grand,
With accommodation that might suit the greatest lady in the land;
And the air is pure and good for the people's health,
And health, I'm sure, is better by far than wealth. 

The Links of Leith are beautiful for golfers to play,
After they have finished the toils of the day;
It is good for their health to play a...Read more of this...
by McGonagall, William Topaz

The Old Lowe House Staten Island

...Another prospect pleased the builder's eye, 
And Fashion tenanted (where Fashion wanes) 
Here in the sorrowful suburban lanes 
When first these gables rose against the sky. 
Relic of a romantic taste gone by, 
This stately monument alone remains, 
Vacant, with lichened walls and window-panes 
Blank as the windows of a skull. But I, 
On evenings when autumnal winds have stirred 
In the porch-vines, to this gray oracle 
Have laid a wondering ear and oft-times heard, 
A...Read more of this...
by Seeger, Alan

The World State

...t's nearest. 

This compromise has long been known, 
 This scheme of partial pardons, 
In ethical societies 
 And small suburban gardens— 

The villas and the chapels where 
 I learned with little labour 
The way to love my fellow-man 
 And hate my next-door neighbour....Read more of this...
by Chesterton, G K

To A Sad Daughter

...except that each
one we know is
in our blood.
Don't recall graves.
Memory is permanent.
Remember the afternoon's
yellow suburban annunciation.
Your goalie
in his frightening mask
dreams perhaps
of gentleness....Read more of this...
by Ondaatje, Michael

To An Old Danish Song-book

...,
When in dreamy youth I wandered
By the Baltic,--

When I paused to hear
The old ballad of King Christian
Shouted from suburban taverns
In the twilight.

Thou recallest bards,
Who in solitary chambers,
And with hearts by passion wasted,
Wrote thy pages.

Thou recallest homes
Where thy songs of love and friendship
Made the gloomy Northern winter
Bright as summer.

Once some ancient Scald,
In his bleak, ancestral Iceland,
Chanted staves of these old ballads
To the Vikings.

On...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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