Poems About New York

Table of Contents

1. New York

   by Richard Hovey

   The low line of the walls that lie outspread
   Miles on long miles, the fog and smoke and slime,
   The wharves and ships with flags of every clime,
   The domes and steeples rising overhead!
   it is not these. Rather it is the tread
   Of the million heavy feet that keep sad time
   To heavy thoughts, the want that mothers crime,
   The weary toiling for a bitter bread,
   The perishing of poets for renown,
   The shriek of shame from the concealing waves.
   Ah, me ! how many heart-beats day by day
   Go to make up the life of the vast town!
   O myriad dead in unremembered graves!
   O torrent of the living down Broadway!
   

2. Brooklyn Bridge

   by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

   
   

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   No lifeless thing of iron and stone,
   But sentient, as her children are,
   Nature accepts you for her own,
   Kin to the cataract and the star.
   

   She marks your vast, sufficing plan,
   Cable and girder, bolt and rod,
   And takes you, from the hand of man,
   As some new handiwork of God.
   

   You thrill through all your chords of steel
   Responsive to the living sun,
   And quickening in your nerves you feel
   Life with its conscious currents run.
   

   Your anchorage upbears the march
   Of time and the eternal powers.
   The sky admits your perfect arch.
   The rock respects your stable towers.
   

3. Autumn Dusk in Central Park

   by Evelyn Scott

   
   

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   Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering blue silver;
   Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their keels.
   The trees float upward in gray and green flames.
   Clouds, swans, boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
   After some gray old women who lift their gaunt forms
   From falling shrouds of leaves.
   

   Thin fingered twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
   Crackling skeletons shine.
   Along the smutted horizon of Fifth Avenue
   The hooded houses watch heavily
   With oily gold eyes.
   

4. Evening: New York

   by Sara Teasdale

   Blue dust of evening over my city,
   Over the ocean of roofs and the tall towers
   Where the window-lights, myriads and myriads,
   Bloom from the walls like climbing flowers.
   

5. The Lights of New York

   by Sara Teasdale

   The lightning spun your garment for the night
   Of silver filaments with fire shot thru,
   A broidery of lamps that lit for you
   The steadfast splendor of enduring light.
   The moon drifts dimly in the heaven's height,
   Watching with wonder how the earth she knew
   That lay so long wrapped deep in dark and dew,
   Should wear upon her breast a star so white.
   The festivals of Babylon were dark
   With flaring flambeaux that the wind blew down;
   The Saturnalia were a wild boy's lark
   With rain-quenched torches dripping thru the town—
   But you have found a god and filched from him
   A fire that neither wind nor rain can dim.
   

6. Sunset: Battery Park

   by Evelyn Scott

   From cliffs of houses,
   Sunlit windows gaze down upon me
   Like undeniable eyes,
   Millions of bronze eyes,
   Unassailable,
   Obliterating all they see:
   The warm contiguous crowd in the street below
   Chills,
   Mists,
   Drifts past those hungry eyes of Eternity,
   Melts seaward and deathward
   To the ocean.
   

7. From Brooklyn

   by Evelyn Scott

   
   

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   Along the shore
   A black net of branches
   Tangles the pulpy yellow lamps.
   The shell-colored sky is lustrous with the fading sun.
   Across the river Manhattan floats—
   Dim gardens of fire—
   And rushing invisible toward me through the fog,
   A hurricane of faces.
   

8. The New Colossus

   

   Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883 to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty (completed in 1886), the poem was later engraved on the lower pedastal of the statue in 1903. The statue written about by Lazarus would become one of the most famous symbols of freedom in America, especially significant to immigrants just arriving at New York Harbor and beholding this "land of the free" for the first time.

   
   

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   Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
   With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
   Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
   A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
   Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
   Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
   Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
   The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
   "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
   With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
   Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
   The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
   Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
   I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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