An acrostic poem is a poem in which the first letter of each line, read from top to bottom, spells a word, a name or a message. The hidden word is usually the poem's subject or the person it is written for. The 30 acrostic poem examples below start with famous ones by Ben Jonson, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll, then give new acrostics for names, themes and kids, and finish with the variations: telestichs, double acrostics, mesostics and an A-to-Z abecedarian.
The bold letters in each poem show where the hidden word runs. The older poems are public domain; the new ones were written for this page.
| Section | What you'll find | Poems |
|---|---|---|
| SectionKinds of acrostic | What you'll findWhere the hidden word can run | Poems— |
| SectionFamous acrostic poems | What you'll findBen Jonson, Blake, Poe, Carroll | Poems1–6 |
| SectionName acrostics | What you'll findA grandmother, a new baby, a teacher, yourself | Poems7–12 |
| SectionWord and theme acrostics | What you'll findWinter, hope, coffee, a deadline | Poems13–20 |
| SectionAcrostics for kids | What you'll findA cat, a frog, pizza, the moon, a snow day | Poems21–25 |
| SectionVariations | What you'll findTelestich, double acrostic, mesostics, A to Z | Poems26–30 |
Kinds of acrostic
The standard acrostic uses the first letters of the lines, and most of the poems on this page do. The other kinds move the hidden word somewhere else.
| Kind | Where the hidden word runs | Examples below |
|---|---|---|
| KindAcrostic | Where the hidden word runsFirst letters of the lines | Examples below1, 2, 3, 5 and most of the new poems |
| KindTelestich | Where the hidden word runsLast letters of the lines | Examples below26 |
| KindDouble acrostic | Where the hidden word runsTwo hidden words at once, such as first and last letters | Examples below6, 27 |
| KindMesostic | Where the hidden word runsDown the middle of the lines, with the spine letters in capitals | Examples below28, 29 |
| KindAbecedarian | Where the hidden word runsThe alphabet in order, one letter per line or stanza | Examples below30 |
| KindDiagonal | Where the hidden word runsFirst letter of line 1, second of line 2, third of line 3… | Examples below4 |
Famous acrostic poems
Six classics in the order they were written, from a Jacobean comedy to a Victorian dedication. Five are complete as printed; Blake's is one stanza of the four in "London." In most of them the acrostic is a private message: the poem works for any reader, and the hidden name is for one.
Volpone, childless, rich, feigns sick, despairs,
Offers his state to hopes of several heirs,
Lies languishing: his parasite receives
Presents of all, assures, deludes; then weaves
Other cross plots, which ope themselves, are told.
New tricks for safety are sought; they thrive: when bold,
Each tempts the other again, and all are sold.
Read down the first letters: VOLPONE, the play's title and its scheming hero. Jonson opened the printed play with its plot summary as an acrostic on the title, in two rhymed couplets and a closing triplet. The custom goes back to the plot summaries attached to the Roman comedies of Plautus, which also spell out their titles. It is the most practical acrostic here: seven lines, the whole plot, and the name of the play down the side.
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
Read the initials: HEAR. The stanza is about sounds, a cry and a sigh, and the Academy of American Poets reads the acrostic as a way of underlining them. Intended or not, it is the subtlest kind of acrostic: one a reader can meet a dozen times without noticing.
Elizabeth it is in vain you say
“Love not” — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L. E. L.
Zantippe's talents had enforced so well:
Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,
Breathe it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried
To cure his love — was cured of all beside —
His folly — pride — and passion — for he died.
Read down the first letters: ELIZABETH. Poe wrote it in the album of his cousin Elizabeth Herring and signed it "E. A. P."; he never published it, and the full text was first printed in 1905. "L. E. L." was the signature of the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon. "Zantippe" is Xanthippe, the shrewish wife of Socrates, misspelled to get a Z. As Poe's editor Thomas Ollive Mabbott noted, "emendation would spoil the acrostic." Even Poe let the constraint win once.
For her these lines are penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Læda,
Shall find her own sweet name that, nestling, lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly this rhyme, which holds a treasure
Divine — a talisman — an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure;
The words — the letters themselves. Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor.
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre
If one could merely understand the plot.
Enwritten upon this page whereon are peering
Such eager eyes, there lies, I say, perdu,
A well-known name, oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets; as the name is a poet's, too.
Its letters, although naturally lying —
Like the knight Pinto (Mendez Ferdinando) —
Still form a synonym for truth. Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle though you do the best you can do.
A diagonal acrostic, and the cleverest poem on this page. The bold letters spell FRANCES SARGENT OSGOOD, read on a slant: the first letter of line 1, the second letter of line 2, the third of line 3 and so on, counting letters only. Osgood was the poet Poe wrote it for. It was first printed in 1846 as "To Her Whose Name Is Written Below"; this is his 1849 text. The poem tells you exactly how to solve it ("the letters themselves") and then tells you that you can't.
A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.
Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.
Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?
Read down the first letters: ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. The boat and the evening of July recall the trip of 4 July 1862, when Carroll and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed the three Liddell sisters up the river from Folly Bridge in Oxford to Godstow and the story of Alice began. Alice was ten. The poem stands on its own as a meditation on memory, and the acrostic turns it into a letter to one reader.
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?
Bowed to the earth with bitter woe,
Or laughing at some raree-show,
We flutter idly to and fro.
Man's little Day in haste we spend,
And, from its merry noontide, send
No glance to meet the silent end.
A double acrostic in a book dedication. Read down the first letters and you get ISA BOWMAN; read the first three letters of each stanza and you get her name again, in pieces: Isa, Bow, Man. Isa Bowman was the young actress who played Alice in the 1888 stage revival, and Carroll dedicated the novel to her the following year.
Older still, and in prose
The idea is much older than any of these. Psalm 119 is an abecedarian: 22 stanzas of eight verses, one stanza for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, with every verse in a stanza beginning with that letter. The first four chapters of Lamentations and Proverbs 31:10–31 run through the alphabet too. Chaucer's "An ABC", a prayer he translated from French, gives each letter of the medieval alphabet its own eight-line stanza. And in prose, Vladimir Nabokov's story "The Vane Sisters" (written in 1951, published in 1958) hides a message from its two dead sisters in the first letters of the words of its last paragraph.
Name acrostic poems
The most common acrostic, and the easiest to write badly. The usual fix: give each letter a fact about the person, not an adjective. These six use real-sounding details and let the sentences run across lines.
Rolls out dough on Sundays, flour to the elbow,
orders the grandchildren out of the kitchen
so she can slip them the warm ends anyway,
and keeps every card we ever drew her in a shoebox marked “Important.”
Ten fingers, all accounted for at 4:12 a.m.,
hiccups that shake the whole blanket,
eyes not yet sure what color they'll settle on,
one fist around my thumb as if he's known me for years.
On the first day she learned all thirty names,
kept a jar of pencils for anyone who forgot,
answered “Why?” as if it were the best question yet,
found the one book that kept Marcus reading past midnight,
opened the window when the radiator roared,
read our worst essays twice before she wrote a word.
The ROSA and OKAFOR poems are one long sentence each, so the letters never feel like a list. Small numbers (4:12 a.m., thirty names) do more than any adjective could, and the THEO poem never once says "love".
Middle child, middle seat, middle of every argument,
allergic to cats and in love with them anyway,
yes to every road trip, no to every roller coaster,
always the one who remembers where we parked.
Jonah turns thirty in a kitchen full of
old friends and one burnt lasagna,
nobody brave enough to mention it,
all of us eating it anyway, because
he made it, and he looks so pleased.
Down in the garage, the radio still tuned to the game,
a coffee can of screws he sorted by size,
dust on the workbench where his elbows used to rest.
The self-portrait is the classic school prompt, and the trick is the same: "allergic to cats and in love with them anyway" says more than "awesome". The JONAH poem shows how much a line break can do in an acrostic: "full of / old friends" lands the letter O mid-sentence. The memorial names no feeling at all, just three things he left behind.
Acrostic poems about words and themes
When the hidden word is a subject rather than a name, the job is to show it without saying it. Each of these gives the word's letters to concrete things: a season, a feeling, a habit, a job.
Wool socks drying on the radiator,
ice in the birdbath, the sparrows confused,
nine o'clock and already dark as midnight,
the kettle on again,
everyone home early,
reading under the same blanket.
Out past the breakers a gull rides the swell,
calm as a cork, while
every wave that reaches the beach
arrives in a hurry and leaves
nothing but foam where my footprints were.
Half a loaf of bread left on a neighbor's step,
one light on in the hospital window at 3 a.m.,
pea shoots in an egg carton on the sill,
every seed packet stamped with next year's date.
Five years since we shared a zip code,
rarely a call, and then
in March a text at midnight: “Remember the lake?”
Every word of it, I write back,
not one thing forgotten,
down to the rope swing and your terrible sunburn.
HOPE is the hardest word on the page, because it is abstract. The poem never uses it; four objects carry it instead, which is show, don't tell squeezed into four lines. OCEAN runs a single sentence through all five letters, so the line breaks fall mid-thought and pull you down the margin.
Cold by the time I remember it,
on the desk beside chapter nine,
four cups since breakfast,
five if you count the one I knocked over,
each one reheated and forgotten again,
exactly like the first.
Late on a Tuesday the radiators knock,
index cards still wait in an old oak drawer,
boys sleep on their backpacks,
rain runs down the tall windows,
a librarian pushes the last cart of returns,
reading the first page of each before it goes back,
yes, even the cookbooks.
Due at five. It's four fifteen.
Every sentence from this morning
annoys me now, and the cursor
drums its fingers on the page.
Last paragraph: cut.
Introduction: cut.
Now the kicker. Now the headline.
Eleven seconds to spare.
Every page comes back
dense with red,
initials in the margin,
three question marks where my best line was,
one word underlined twice: “Why?”
Rightly.
The last two are for anyone who writes on deadline. DEADLINE speeds up as it goes, breaking into two- and three-word verdicts, so the form acts out the panic. EDITOR saves its one-word turn for the last letter, the acrostic version of a punchline.
Acrostic poems for kids
Short words, one picture per line and a little joke at the end. These work as models for a classroom: read one aloud, then hand out the letters of a new word.
Curled on my homework,
asleep on my math,
tail over the answer.
Fat and green on a lily pad,
ribbits at the moon,
opens his mouth,
gulp! There goes the fly.
Pepperoni in a circle,
in the middle, cheese that stretches
zigzag from the plate,
zooming to my chin,
and the crust for the dog.
Mom says it follows our car,
only when we're driving home,
over the bridge and the gas station,
never once getting lost.
Snow day!
No alarm,
only pancakes,
wet mittens on the heater by noon.
CAT, FROG, PIZZA, MOON and SNOW. The double Z in PIZZA is the kind of letter children dread, and the poem solves it with two motion words that belong together. If you teach acrostics, our lesson plan template has room for a warm-up, the modeled poem and a sharing round.
Telestichs, double acrostics and mesostics
Five variations that hide the word somewhere other than the left margin, from the last letters of the lines to the alphabet itself.
The house goes quiet after
the last coat leaves the hook, and the
dishes can wait. I put my feet up on two chairs
and let the evening go out like a light.
Read down the last letters of the lines: REST, running down the right edge. A telestich is harder to write than an acrostic, because the last word of a line is the one you least want to bend: it carries the line's weight and, in rhymed verse, its rhyme. Here every ending is an ordinary word, which keeps the trick invisible.
Sails lean all morning toward the docks,
Each gull holds still on the wind, then a flick,
And the harbor turns silver under the sky.
SEA down the left, SKY down the right, and the poem sits between them the way a harbor does. Every line has two fixed letters, so three lines is a sensible length for a first attempt.
A mesostic runs the hidden word down the middle of the lines. The composer John Cage used the form extensively, printing the spine letters in capitals and adding rules about the letters between them. The looser rule, often called the 50% mesostic, says that between one spine letter and the next, the next letter may not appear; a stricter version bars the previous spine letter too. Both poems here follow the looser rule.
28. A mesostic on DRAFT (original)
yesterDay's page
cRossed out
pAragraph by paragraph,
oFfice coffee gone cold,
and sTill no ending29. A mesostic on INK (original)
a desk lIght
oNe page
blacK coffeeRead down the capitals: DRAFT in the first, INK in the second. Check the DRAFT poem against the looser rule: no r between the D and the R, no a between the R and the A, no f before the F, no t before the T. "Paragraph" gets past the F only because English spells that sound ph.
Alarm at six.
Black coffee,
cat on the keyboard,
draft open where I left it,
every sentence worse than I remembered.
Fix one.
Get up,
hover at the fridge,
ignore the phone,
just one paragraph,
keep going,
lunch at the desk,
midafternoon slump,
no, not a nap,
one more page,
print it,
quietly cross out half,
read the rest aloud,
save,
tea,
undo the last hour,
very slowly redo it,
walk the dog,
x out the adverbs,
yawn,
zero words to go.
Read down the first letters: the alphabet, A to Z, one letter per line. The abecedarian is one of the oldest kinds of acrostic, the shape of Psalm 119, and the most demanding, because the alphabet decides the order of everything. Q, X and Z are the hard letters; here they become an adverb ("quietly"), a verb ("x out") and a number ("zero").
How to write a good acrostic
- Choose a short word that matters
A name, or a word of three to six letters, is plenty for a first acrostic. The word should be the poem's subject or the person it is for, so that finding it means something.
- Write about the subject first
Before you touch the letters, spend ten minutes listing details: habits, objects, places, a sentence the person always says. The acrostic is a sorting job you do afterward, and it is far easier with twenty details to choose from.
- Put the letters down the margin
Write the word vertically, one letter per line, then match details to letters. A detail that starts with the wrong letter can often be turned around: "her shoebox of cards" becomes "keeps every card in a shoebox" for a K.
- Let sentences run across lines
The end of a line is not the end of a thought. Running one sentence across several letters, as ROSA and OCEAN do, is one of the clearest differences between a poem and a word puzzle.
- Solve the hard letters
For Q, X, Z and the second of a double letter, reach for a number ("Zero", "Quarter past six"), a name, a quotation or an interjection ("Yes," "No,"). Avoid the dictionary rescue: a xylophone that has nothing to do with the poem is worse than a plain line.
- Read it with the margin covered
Hide the first letters with your hand and read the lines as a poem. If they only make sense as a puzzle, keep revising. Then read down the margin one last time to check the word is still spelled right.
For a second reader, open the Strokes Assistant beside the draft and ask whether the lines still read as a poem with the first letters ignored.
The most common acrostic mistake
The adjective ladder: one flattering word per letter, usually capitalized, usually interchangeable with any other name's.
Marvelous
Outstanding
Magnificent
Made my lunch every school day for twelve years,
once with a note that just said “Courage,”
mailed me that same note when I started my first job.
The first could be about anyone's mother, or a car. The second could only be about one person. Two smaller faults travel with the ladder: opening line after line with "And", "All" or "Always", and bending a line to fit a letter until it says something untrue. For other forms with a built-in constraint, try blackout poetry, where the words are found rather than chosen, or the limerick examples, where the rhyme does the steering.
Frequently asked questions
Does an acrostic poem have to rhyme?
No. Many modern acrostics don't rhyme, and rhyme makes an already constrained poem much harder to write. Older ones often did: Lewis Carroll's acrostic at the end of Through the Looking-Glass rhymes in groups of three lines, and Ben Jonson's plot summary of Volpone rhymes in couplets with a closing triplet. Use rhyme only if the lines still sound natural with it.
How do you write an acrostic poem about yourself?
Write your name down the margin, then give each letter one specific fact about you instead of an adjective: a habit, a place, a food, something you always say. "Allergic to cats and in love with them anyway" says more than "Awesome". Let some sentences run over two lines, and read the poem with the margin covered to check it still sounds like you.
What if the name or word is long?
Use a first name or a nickname, keep each line short, or give each letter a short stanza instead of a single line. Carroll's poem at the end of Through the Looking-Glass spells a 21-letter name, ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL, and stays easy to read because its lines are short and grouped in threes, so the name unfolds over seven small stanzas.
