Famous Drip Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Over The Parapet

by Robert William Service
 All day long when the shells sail over
 I stand at the sandbags and take my chance;
But at night, at night I'm a reckless rover,
 And over the parapet gleams Romance.
Romance! Romance! How I've dreamed it, writing
 Dreary old records of money and mart,
Me with my head chuckful of fighting
 And the blood of vikings to thrill my heart.

But...Read more of this...

Evening Hawk

by Robert Penn Warren
 From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.
His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion 
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

The head of each stalk...Read more of this...

The Basket

by Amy Lowell
 I
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies 
white and unspotted,
in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness 
sweep into
the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The 
air
is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.
See how the roof glitters, like ice!
Over there, a slice of yellow...Read more of this...

The Daguerreotype

by William Vaughn Moody
 This, then, is she, 
My mother as she looked at seventeen, 
When she first met my father. Young incredibly, 
Younger than spring, without the faintest trace 
Of disappointment, weariness, or tean 
Upon the childlike earnestness and grace 
Of the waiting face. 
Those close-wound ropes of pearl 
(Or common beads made precious by their use) 
Seem heavy for so slight...Read more of this...

God lay dead in heaven

by Stephen Crane
 God lay dead in heaven;
Angels sang the hymn of the end;
Purple winds went moaning,
Their wings drip-dripping
With blood
That fell upon the earth.
It, groaning thing,
Turned black and sank.
Then from the far caverns
Of dead sins
Came monsters, livid with desire.
They fought,
Wrangled over the world,
A morsel.
But of all sadness this was sad --
A woman's arms tried to shield
The head of a sleeping man
From the...Read more of this...

How the old Mountains drip with Sunset

by Emily Dickinson
 How the old Mountains drip with Sunset
How the Hemlocks burn --
How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder
By the Wizard Sun --

How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet
Till the Ball is full --
Have I the lip of the Flamingo
That I dare to tell?

Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows --
Touching all the Grass
With a departing -- Sapphire -- feature...Read more of this...

We Aint Got No Money Honey But We Got Rain

by Charles Bukowski
 call it the greenhouse effect or whatever
but it just doesn't rain like it used to.
I particularly remember the rains of the 
depression era.
there wasn't any money but there was
plenty of rain.
it wouldn't rain for just a night or
a day,
it would RAIN for 7 days and 7
nights
and in Los Angeles the storm drains
weren't built to carry off taht much
water
and the...Read more of this...

Tableau at Twilight

by Ogden Nash
 I sit in the dusk. I am all alone.
Enter a child and an ice-cream cone.

A parent is easily beguiled
By sight of this coniferous child.

The friendly embers warmer gleam,
The cone begins to drip ice cream.

Cones are composed of many a vitamin.
My lap is not the place to bitamin.

Although my raiment is not chinchilla,
I flinch to see it become vanilla.

Coniferous child,...Read more of this...

On an Invitation to the United States

by Thomas Hardy
 I 

My ardours for emprize nigh lost 
Since Life has bared its bones to me, 
I shrink to seek a modern coast 
Whose riper times have yet to be; 
Where the new regions claim them free 
From that long drip of human tears 
Which peoples old in tragedy 
Have left upon the centuried years. 

II 

For, wonning in these...Read more of this...

Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Here in the midnight, where the dark mainland and island
Shadows mingle in shadow deeper, profounder,
Sing we the hymns of the churches, while the dead water
Whispers before us.

Thunder is travelling slow on the path of the lightning;
One after one the stars and the beaming planets
Look serene in the lake from the edge of the storm-cloud,
Then have they vanished.

While our canoe,...Read more of this...

To One denied the drink

by Emily Dickinson
 To One denied the drink
To tell what Water is
Would be acuter, would it not
Than letting Him surmise?

To lead Him to the Well
And let Him hear it drip
Remind Him, would it not, somewhat
Of His condemned lip?...Read more of this...

In a Wood

by Thomas Hardy
 Pale beech and pine-tree blue, 
Set in one clay, 
Bough to bough cannot you 
Bide out your day? 
When the rains skim and skip, 
Why mar sweet comradeship, 
Blighting with poison-drip 
Neighborly spray? 

Heart-halt and spirit-lame, 
City-opprest, 
Unto this wood I came 
As to a nest; 
Dreaming that sylvan peace 
Offered the harrowed ease— 
Nature a soft release 
From...Read more of this...

The Seas Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart..

by Denise Levertov
 Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return
to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair
chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time
regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent
and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone
to show you how your longing waits alone.
What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?

Enter...Read more of this...

Aisling

by Paul Muldoon
 I was making my way home late one night
this summer, when I staggered
into a snow drift.

Her eyes spoke of a sloe-year,
her mouth a year of haws.

Was she Aurora, or the goddess Flora,
Artemidora, or Venus bright,
or Anorexia, who left
a lemon stain on my flannel sheet?

It's all much of a muchness.

In Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital
a kidney machine
supports the latest hunger-striker
to have...Read more of this...

Electra On Azalea Path

by Sylvia Plath
 The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering --
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had...Read more of this...

Children of the Moon

by W. E. B. Du Bois
I am dead;
Yet somehow, somewhere,
In Time's weird contradiction, I
May tell of that dread deed, wherewith
I brought to Children of the Moon
Freedom and vast salvation.
I was a woman born,
And trod the streaming street,
That ebbs and flows from Harlem's hills,
Through caves and cañons limned in light,
Down to the twisting sea.
That night of nights,
I stood alone and at the End,
Until the sudden highway...Read more of this...

The Prairie

by Rudyard Kipling
 I see the grass shake in the sun for leagues on either hand,
I see a river loop and run about a treeless land --
An empty plain, a steely pond, a distance diamond-clear,
And low blue naked hills beyond. And what is that to fear?"

"Go softly by that river-side or, when you would depart,
You'll find its every winding tied and knotted...Read more of this...

The Revenge Of Hamish

by Sidney Lanier
 It was three slim does and a ten-tined buck in the bracken lay;
And all of a sudden the sinister smell of a man,
Awaft on a wind-shift, wavered and ran
Down the hill-side and sifted along through the bracken and passed that way.

Then Nan got a-tremble at nostril; she was the daintiest doe;
In the print of her velvet flank on the...Read more of this...

Milking Time

by Robert William Service
 There's a drip of honeysuckle in the deep green lane;
There's old Martin jogging homeward on his worn old wain;
There are cherry petals falling, and a cuckoo calling, calling,
And a score of larks (God bless 'em) . . . but it's all pain, pain.
For you see I am not really there at all, not at all;
For you see I'm in...Read more of this...

Dreamland

by Edgar Allan Poe
 By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE- out of TIME.

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the tears that...Read more of this...

Sea Rose

by Hilda Doolittle
 Rose, harsh rose, 
marred and with stint of petals, 
meagre flower, thin, 
sparse of leaf, 

more precious 
than a wet rose 
single on a stem -- 
you are caught in the drift. 

Stunted, with small leaf, 
you are flung on the sand, 
you are lifted 
in the crisp sand 
that drives in the wind. 

Can the spice-rose 
drip such...Read more of this...

Sestina: Altaforte

by Ezra Pound
 LOQUITUR: En Bertans de Born. Dante Alighieri put this man in hell
for that he was a stirrer up of strife. Eccovi! Judge ye! Have I dug
him up again? The scene is at his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his
jongleur. "The Leopard," the device of Richard Coeur de Lion.

I

Damn it all! all this our South stinks peace.
You whoreson dog, Papiols, come!...Read more of this...

Silver Filigree

by Elinor Wylie
 The icicles wreathing 
On trees in festoon 
Swing, swayed to our breathing: 
They're made of the moon.

She's a pale, waxen taper; 
And these seem to drip 
Transparent as paper 
From the flame of her tip.

Molten, smoking a little, 
Into crystal they pass; 
Falling, freezing, to brittle 
And delicate glass.

Each a sharp-pointed flower, 
Each a brief stalactite 
Which hangs for...Read more of this...

The Ivy-Wife

by Thomas Hardy
 I LONGED to love a full-boughed beech
And be as high as he:
I stretched an arm within his reach,
And signalled unity.
But with his drip he forced a breach,
And tried to poison me.

I gave the grasp of partnership
To one of other race--
A plane: he barked him strip by strip
From upper bough to base;
And me therewith; for gone my grip,
My arms could...Read more of this...

Trickle Drops

by Walt Whitman
 TRICKLE, drops! my blue veins leaving! 
O drops of me! trickle, slow drops, 
Candid, from me falling—drip, bleeding drops, 
From wounds made to free you whence you were prison’d, 
From my face—from my forehead and lips,
From my breast—from within where I was conceal’d—press forth, red drops—confession drops;

Stain every page—stain every song I sing, every word I say, bloody drops;...Read more of this...

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