10 of the Scariest Poems Ever Written

Are you looking for something so terrifying that you can’t sleep? We have a collection of scary poems that will really freak you out.

scary poems

While the moon is full and the night is dark, you and your kids can read some of our spine-tingling, frightening, and spooky poetry.

When you read horror poetry in the dark, it might frighten the living crap out of you.

Though few individuals enjoy reading poetry that makes our skin crawl.

Poetry has the power to affect us, to make us think, to change the way we perceive the world, and even to make us laugh.

While all poetry may be frightening, scary poetry becomes deeper and creepier, and the author is only happy if the poem can make the reader feel the most terror and misery.

Let’s read this spooky poetry out loud before the fire goes out. When the light fades, you wouldn’t want to remain here.

Here is a carefully chosen selection of scary poems from well-known writers.

1. ‘The Shadow on the Stone by Thomas Hardy

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening…

The poem “The Shadow on the Stone,” which Hardy began in 1913 while working on some of his best poems in response to the passing of his estranged first wife Emma, was influenced by a Neolithic stone block in the grounds of Hardy’s house, Max Gate.

Hardy imagines that his ex-wife is standing behind him while she toils away in the garden.

He considers turning around but chooses against it because he would rather keep the potential that Emma’s spirit is watching him rather than turn around and dash that desire.

2. ‘Field of Skulls by Mary Karr

Have you ever tried gazing into the pitch-black night as it gets late? According to Karr, if you do this, “forms” including the “field of skulls” that gives her poem its name will emerge from your mind and assume complete shape before your eyes.”

3. I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain by Emily Dickinson

And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space–began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here…

This poem is unnerving in part because it paints such a vivid image of mental degeneration.

It is a poem about becoming crazy, about losing one’s sense of reality, and about feeling one’s sanity ebb away.

The speaker hears a constant “treading-treading,” which reminds her of the pounding and turbulence going on within her head.

Following the creaking raise of a box lid analogous to a coffin lid, the mourners at this mental funeral sit down, and the ceremony begins with a drumbeat and a sound that the speaker likens to a bell (suggesting the tolling of a funeral bell to proclaim someone’s death).

4. ‘Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Is the night chilly and dark?

The night is chilly, but not dark.

The thin gray cloud is spread on high,

It covers but not hides the sky…

If your name is Christabel and you venture out into the woods today or tonight, you’d best use caution.

Coleridge’s famous poem is one of the major Gothic poems in English literature.

It has everything, including intriguing people, spooky nighttime encounters, and even two ladies who end up sharing a bed—if that’s your thing for Halloween.

The poem is mostly about the encounter between the title character and Geraldine, who claims to have fled from a group of guys who had kidnapped her.

Coleridge finished the first two sections of the poem in 1800, but Wordsworth persuaded his friend to omit them from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads that was released that year.

As a result, the incomplete “Christabel” wasn’t published until 1816.

5. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning

My first thought was, he lied in every word,

That hoary cripple, with a malicious eye

Askance to watch the working of his lie

On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

Suppression of the glee, that purs’d and scor’d

Its edge, at one more victim gain’d thereby…

This outstanding theatrical monologue, which was initially published in 1855, recasts the Victorian love for medievalism into a far darker frame by describing the protagonist Roland’s search for the fabled Dark Tower.

To get beyond writer’s block in the early 1850s, Browning uses his fevered imagination to conjure up a fantastic dream world.

Shakespeare’s King Lear provided the inspiration for Browning’s grotesquely Gothic poem’s title, while the poem’s portrayal of Roland served as the basis for Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.

6. ‘The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door…

This Gothic poetry is among the spookiest in the English language and, because of its tragic love narrative, is also one of the saddest.

We can’t help but hold our breath in expectation because of the way Poe sets the scene—the speaker is alone, and it’s midnight when someone knocks on the door.

8. Fungi from Yuggoth by H. P. Lovecraft

The place was dark and dusty and half-lost

In tangles of old alleys near the quays,

Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,

And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed…

Perhaps no collection of spooky poems would be complete without a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, the father of “strange” literature and the maestro of supernatural terror (1890–1937).

This poem is a part of his lengthier sequence Fungi from Yuggoth, which comprises 36 sonnets and describes how someone comes into possession of an old book-filled knowledge that enables them to enter parallel universes.

You could have nightmares for weeks because of how expertly the cosmic horror atmosphere has been constructed.

9. A Child’s Nightmare by Robert Graves

With its depiction of some bizarre purring monster, a “hideous nightmare thing,” that would hover over the speaker’s bed when he was a tiny kid and purr and say the one word, “Cat!” this poem from the author of I, Claudius and Goodbye to All That should unnerve the most dedicated cat-lover.

10. ‘The Snowman on the Moor by Sylvia Plath

The poem “The Snowman on the Moor,” by Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), joins our list of the top ten scariest poems because it has more than its fair share of unpleasant Gothic motifs and tropes.

It concerns a woman who deserts her husband to travel the moors only to be tracked down and brought back home by him.

An appropriately spooky poem is created by comparing the woman to a ghost, describing the “giant” husband as “corpse-like,” and mentioning the collection of women’s skulls he wears in his belt.

I hope you enjoyed reading this scary poem. Check if you can find any additional poetry on this page.

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