10 Best Famous Nape Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Nape poems. This is a select list of the best famous Nape poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Nape poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of nape poems.

• All Famous Nape Poems

 He was the sort of man
who wouldn't hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
He was not my patron.
He preferred full granaries, I battle.
My roar meant slaughter.
Yet here we are together
in the same museum.
That's not what I see, though, the fitful
crowds of staring children
learning the lesson of multi-
cultural obliteration, sic transit
and so on.

I see the temple where I was born
or built, where I held power.
I see the desert beyond,
where the hot conical tombs, that look
from a distance, frankly, like dunces' hats,
hide my jokes: the dried-out flesh
and bones, the wooden boats
in which the dead sail endlessly
in no direction.

What did you expect from gods
with animal heads?
Though come to think of it
the ones made later, who were fully human
were not such good news either.
Favour me and give me riches,
destroy my enemies.
That seems to be the gist.
Oh yes: And save me from death.
In return we're given blood
and bread, flowers and prayer,
and lip service.

Maybe there's something in all of this
I missed. But if it's selfless
love you're looking for,
you've got the wrong goddess.

I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise.

 (Translated from the French by Edouard Rodti)

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire

 You waste the attention of your eyes, 
the glittering labour of your hands, 
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves 
of which you'll taste not a morsel; 
you are free to slave for others-- 
you are free to make the rich richer. 

The moment you're born 
they plant around you 
mills that grind lies 
lies to last you a lifetime. 
You keep thinking in your great freedom 
a finger on your temple 
free to have a free conscience. 

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape, 
your arms long, hanging, 
your saunter about in your great freedom: 
you're free 
with the freedom of being unemployed. 

You love your country 
as the nearest, most precious thing to you. 
But one day, for example, 
they may endorse it over to America, 
and you, too, with your great freedom-- 
you have the freedom to become an air-base. 

You may proclaim that one must live 
not as a tool, a number or a link 
but as a human being-- 
then at once they handcuff your wrists. 
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned 
and even hanged. 

There's neither an iron, wooden 
nor a tulle curtain 
in your life; 
there's no need to choose freedom: 
you are free. 
But this kind of freedom 
is a sad affair under the stars.

 Good Father!… ’Twas an eve in middle June,
And war was waged anew 
By great Napoleon, who for years had strewn 
Men’s bones all Europe through. 

Three nights ere this, with columned corps he’d crossed
The Sambre at Charleroi, 
To move on Brussels, where the English host 
Dallied in Parc and Bois. 

The yestertide we’d heard the gloomy gun 
Growl through the long-sunned day
From Quatre-Bras and Ligny; till the dun 
Twilight suppressed the fray; 

Albeit therein—as lated tongues bespoke— 
Brunswick’s high heart was drained, 
And Prussia’s Line and Landwehr, though unbroke,
Stood cornered and constrained. 

And at next noon-time Grouchy slowly passed 
With thirty thousand men: 
We hoped thenceforth no army, small or vast, 
Would trouble us again.

My hut lay deeply in a vale recessed, 
And never a soul seemed nigh 
When, reassured at length, we went to rest— 
My children, wife, and I. 

But what was this that broke our humble ease?
What noise, above the rain, 
Above the dripping of the poplar trees 
That smote along the pane? 

—A call of mastery, bidding me arise, 
Compelled me to the door,
At which a horseman stood in martial guise— 
Splashed—sweating from every pore. 

Had I seen Grouchy? Yes? Which track took he? 
Could I lead thither on?— 
Fulfilment would ensure gold pieces three,
Perchance more gifts anon. 

“I bear the Emperor’s mandate,” then he said, 
“Charging the Marshal straight 
To strike between the double host ahead 
Ere they co-operate,

“Engaging Bl?cher till the Emperor put 
Lord Wellington to flight, 
And next the Prussians. This to set afoot 
Is my emprise to-night.” 

I joined him in the mist; but, pausing, sought
To estimate his say, 
Grouchy had made for Wavre; and yet, on thought, 
I did not lead that way. 

I mused: “If Grouchy thus instructed be, 
The clash comes sheer hereon;
My farm is stript. While, as for pieces three, 
Money the French have none. 

“Grouchy unwarned, moreo’er, the English win, 
And mine is left to me— 
They buy, not borrow.”—Hence did I begin
To lead him treacherously. 

By Joidoigne, near to east, as we ondrew, 
Dawn pierced the humid air; 
And eastward faced I with him, though I knew 
Never marched Grouchy there.

Near Ottignies we passed, across the Dyle 
(Lim’lette left far aside), 
And thence direct toward Pervez and Noville 
Through green grain, till he cried: 

“I doubt thy conduct, man! no track is here
I doubt they gag?d word!” 
Thereat he scowled on me, and pranced me near, 
And pricked me with his sword. 

“Nay, Captain, hold! We skirt, not trace the course 
Of Grouchy,” said I then:
“As we go, yonder went he, with his force 
Of thirty thousand men.” 

—At length noon nighed, when west, from Saint-John’s-Mound, 
A hoarse artillery boomed, 
And from Saint-Lambert’s upland, chapel-crowned,
The Prussian squadrons loomed. 

Then to the wayless wet gray ground he leapt; 
“My mission fails!” he cried; 
“Too late for Grouchy now to intercept, 
For, peasant, you have lied!”

He turned to pistol me. I sprang, and drew 
The sabre from his flank, 
And ’twixt his nape and shoulder, ere he knew, 
I struck, and dead he sank. 

I hid him deep in nodding rye and oat—
His shroud green stalks and loam; 
His requiem the corn-blade’s husky note— 
And then I hastened home…. 

—Two armies writhe in coils of red and blue, 
And brass and iron clang
From Goumont, past the front of Waterloo, 
To Pap’lotte and Smohain. 

The Guard Imperial wavered on the height; 
The Emperor’s face grew glum; 
“I sent,” he said, “to Grouchy yesternight,
And yet he does not come!” 

’Twas then, Good Father, that the French espied, 
Streaking the summer land, 
The men of Bl?cher. But the Emperor cried, 
“Grouchy is now at hand!” 

And meanwhile Vand’leur, Vivian, Maitland, Kempt, 
Met d’Erlon, Friant, Ney; 
But Grouchy—mis-sent, blamed, yet blame-exempt— 
Grouchy was far away. 

Be even, slain or struck, Michel the strong,
Bold Travers, Dnop, Delord, 
Smart Guyot, Reil-le, l’Heriter, Friant. 
Scattered that champaign o’er. 

Fallen likewise wronged Duhesme, and skilled Lobau 
Did that red sunset see;
Colbert, Legros, Blancard!… And of the foe 
Picton and Ponsonby; 

With Gordon, Canning, Blackman, Ompteda, 
L’Estrange, Delancey, Packe, 
Grose, D’Oyly, Stables, Morice, Howard, Hay,
Von Schwerin, Watzdorf, Boek, 

Smith, Phelips, Fuller, Lind, and Battersby, 
And hosts of ranksmen round… 
Memorials linger yet to speak to thee 
Of those that bit the ground!

The Guards’ last column yielded; dykes of dead 
Lay between vale and ridge, 
As, thinned yet closing, faint yet fierce, they sped 
In packs to Genappe Bridge. 

Safe was my stock; my capple cow unslain;
Intact each cock and hen; 
But Grouchy far at Wavre all day had lain, 
And thirty thousand men. 

O Saints, had I but lost my earing corn 
And saved the cause once prized!
O Saints, why such false witness had I borne 
When late I’d sympathized!… 

So, now, being old, my children eye askance 
My slowly dwindling store, 
And crave my mite; till, worn with tarriance,
I care for life no more. 

To Almighty God henceforth I stand confessed, 
And Virgin-Saint Marie; 
O Michael, John, and Holy Ones in rest, 
Entreat the Lord for me!

 Having picked the final datum
From the universe
And fixed it in its column,
Named the causes of infinity,
Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary i, it seems

The body aches
To come too,
To the light,
Transmit the grace of gravity,
Express in its own algebra
The symmetries of awe and fear,
The shudder up the spine,
The knowing passing like a cool wind
That leaves the nape hairs leaping.

 And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us onward with bellying canvas,
Crice's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day's end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o'er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wreteched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour
Then prayed I many a prayer to the sickly death's-heads;
As set in Ithaca, sterile bulls of the best
For sacrifice, heaping the pyre with goods,
A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bell-sheep.
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; with shouting,
Pallor upon me, cried to my men for more beasts;
Slaughtered the herds, sheep slain of bronze;
Poured ointment, cried to the gods,
To Pluto the strong, and praised Proserpine;
Unsheathed the narrow sword,
I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead,
Till I should hear Tiresias.
But first Elpenor came, our friend Elpenor,
Unburied, cast on the wide earth,
Limbs that we left in the house of Circe,
Unwept, unwrapped in the sepulchre, since toils urged other.
Pitiful spirit. And I cried in hurried speech:
"Elpenor, how art thou come to this dark coast?
"Cam'st thou afoot, outstripping seamen?"
 And he in heavy speech:
"Ill fate and abundant wine. I slept in Crice's ingle.
"Going down the long ladder unguarded,
"I fell against the buttress,
"Shattered the nape-nerve, the soul sought Avernus.
"But thou, O King, I bid remember me, unwept, unburied,
"Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed:
"A man of no fortune, and with a name to come.
"And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows."

And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban,
Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first:
"A second time? why? man of ill star,
"Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?
"Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever
"For soothsay."
 And I stepped back,
And he strong with the blood, said then: "Odysseus
"Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,
"Lose all companions." Then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outwards and away
And unto Crice.
 Venerandam,
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, oricalchi, with golden
Girdle and breat bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicidia. So that:

 God knows how our neighbor managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way
He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
With a penny slot

For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,
About to be
Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;
Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,
Mire-smirched, blowzy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-
cruise--
Bloat tun of milk
On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk
To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast
Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black
compost,
Fat-rutted eyes
Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood
must

Thus wholly engross
The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,
Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat
By a grisly-bristled
Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.

But our farmer whistled,
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,
And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,
Slowly, grunt
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument
Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want
Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,
Proceeded to swill
The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking
continent.

 And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!


PAINT me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.

Display me Aeolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne’s hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.

Morning stirs the feet and hands
(Nausicaa and Polypheme).
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.

This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs

Jackknifes upward at the knees
Then straightens out from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the female temperament
And wipes the suds around his face.

(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun.)

Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.

The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced,
Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste

Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.

But Doris, towelled from the bath,
Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat.

 High-heels were struggling with a full-length dress
So that, between the wind and the terrain,
At times a shining stocking would be seen,
And gone too soon. We liked that foolishness.

Also, at times a jealous insect's dart
Bothered out beauties. Suddenly a white
Nape flashed beneath the branches, and this sight
Was a delicate feast for a young fool's heart.

Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling,
The women who hung dreaming on our arms
Spoke in low voices, words that had such charms
That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling.

 She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles

He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment

She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her

He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous

Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up

And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it

They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step

And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible

And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire

She gives him his teeth, tying the the roots to the centrepin of his body

He sets the little circlets on her fingertips

She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk

He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth

She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck

He sinks into place the inside of her thighs

So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.