Famous Flakes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Boys

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 HAS there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
If there has, take him out, without making a noise.
Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
Old Time is a liar! We're twenty to-night!

We're twenty! We're twenty! Who says we are more?
He's tipsy,-- young jackanapes!-- show him the door!
"Gray temples at twenty?"-- Yes ! white if we please;
Where the snow-flakes...Read more of this...

Impossibilities: To His Friend

by Robert Herrick
 My faithful friend, if you can see
The fruit to grow up, or the tree;
If you can see the colour come
Into the blushing pear or plum;
If you can see the water grow
To cakes of ice, or flakes of snow;
If you can see that drop of rain
Lost in the wild sea once again;
If you can see how dreams do creep
Into the...Read more of this...

The Battle of Bannockburn

by William Topaz McGonagall
 Sir Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn
Beat the English in every wheel and turn,
And made them fly in great dismay
From off the field without delay. 

The English were a hundred thousand strong,
And King Edward passed through the Lowlands all along.
Determined to conquer Scotland, it was his desire,
And then to restore it to his own empire. 

King Edward brought numerous waggons...Read more of this...

Prelude

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Between the green bud and the red
Youth sat and sang by Time, and shed
From eyes and tresses flowers and tears,
From heart and spirit hopes and fears,
Upon the hollow stream whose bed
Is channelled by the foamless years;
And with the white the gold-haired head
Mixed running locks, and in Time's ears
Youth's dreams hung singing, and Time's truth
Was half not harsh in the...Read more of this...

Snow flakes

by Emily Dickinson
 Snow flakes.

I counted till they danced so
Their slippers leaped the town,
And then I took a pencil
To note the rebels down.
And then they grew so jolly
I did resign the prig,
And ten of my once stately toes
Are marshalled for a jig!...Read more of this...

They dropped like Flakes

by Emily Dickinson
 They dropped like Flakes --
They dropped like Stars --
Like Petals from a Rose --
When suddenly across the June
A wind with fingers -- goes --

They perished in the Seamless Grass --
No eye could find the place --
But God can summon every face
Of his Repealless -- List....Read more of this...

The Contretemps

by Thomas Hardy
 A forward rush by the lamp in the gloom,
And we clasped, and almost kissed;
But she was not the woman whom
I had promised to meet in the thawing brume
On that harbour-bridge; nor was I he of her tryst. 

So loosening from me swift she said:
"O why, why feign to be
The one I had meant - to whom I have sped
To...Read more of this...

Snow-Flakes

by Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
I wonder what they are,
  These pretty, wayward things,
That o'er the gloomy earth
  The wind of heaven flings.
Each one a tiny star,
  And each a perfect gem;
What magic in the art
  That thus has fashioned them.
What beauty in the flake
  That falls upon my hand;
And yet this tiny thing
  My will cannot command.
No two...Read more of this...

The Progress of Spring

by Alfred Lord Tennyson
 THE groundflame of the crocus breaks the mould, 
Fair Spring slides hither o'er the Southern sea, 
Wavers on her thin stem the snowdrop cold 
That trembles not to kisses of the bee: 
Come Spring, for now from all the dripping eaves 
The spear of ice has wept itself away, 
And hour by hour unfolding woodbine leaves 
O'er his uncertain...Read more of this...

The Height of Land

by Duncan Campbell Scott
 Here is the height of land:
The watershed on either hand
Goes down to Hudson Bay
Or Lake Superior;
The stars are up, and far away
The wind sounds in the wood, wearier
Than the long Ojibwa cadence
In which Potàn the Wise
Declares the ills of life
And Chees-que-ne-ne makes a mournful sound
Of acquiescence. The fires burn low
With just sufficient glow
To light the flakes of ash that...Read more of this...

For The Last Wolverine

by James Dickey
 They will soon be down

To one, but he still will be
For a little while still will be stopping

The flakes in the air with a look,
Surrounding himself with the silence
Of whitening snarls. Let him eat
The last red meal of the condemned

To extinction, tearing the guts

From an elk. Yet that is not enough
For me. I would have him eat

The heart, and,...Read more of this...

His Dream Of The Skyland

by Li Po
 The seafarers tell of the Eastern Isle of Bliss,
It is lost in a wilderness of misty sea waves.
But the Sky-land of the south, the Yueh-landers say,
May be seen through cracks of the glimmering cloud.
This land of the sky stretches across the leagues of heaven;
It rises above the Five Mountains and towers over the Scarlet Castle,

While, as if staggering before...Read more of this...

Rinaldo.*

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 [This Cantata was written for Prince Frederick 
of Gotha, and set to music by Winter, the Prince singing the part 
of Rinaldo.--See the Annalen.]

 (* See Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto XVI.)

CHORUS.

To the strand! quick, mount the bark!

If no favouring zephyrs blow,

Ply the oar and nimbly row,
And with zeal your prowess mark!

O'er the sea we thus career.

RINALDO.


Oh, let me linger...Read more of this...

A Celebration

by William Carlos (WCW) Williams
 A middle-northern March, now as always— 
gusts from the South broken against cold winds— 
but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, 
it moves—not into April—into a second March, 

the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping 
upon the mold: this is the shadow projects the tree 
upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. 

So...Read more of this...

Snow-Flakes

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft and slow
Descends the snow....Read more of this...

Birds at Winter Nightfall (Triolet)

by Thomas Hardy
 Around the house the flakes fly faster, 
And all the berries now are gone 
From holly and cotoneaster 
Around the house. The flakes fly!--faster 
Shutting indoors that crumb-outcaster 
We used to see upon the lawn 
Around the house. The flakes fly faster, 
And all the berries now are gone!...Read more of this...

News For The Delphic Oracle

by William Butler Yeats
 I

There all the golden codgers lay,
There the silver dew,
And the great water sighed for love,
And the wind sighed too.
Man-picker Niamh leant and sighed
By Oisin on the grass;
There sighed amid his choir of love
Tall pythagoras.
plotinus came and looked about,
The salt-flakes on his breast,
And having stretched and yawned awhile
Lay sighing like the rest.

 II

Straddling each a dolphin's back
And steadied by a...Read more of this...

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

by Percy Bysshe Shelley
 I
The everlasting universe of things 
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters--with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods...Read more of this...

Some Rainbow -- coming from the Fair!

by Emily Dickinson
 Some Rainbow -- coming from the Fair!
Some Vision of the World Cashmere --
I confidently see!
Or else a Peacock's purple Train
Feather by feather -- on the plain
Fritters itself away!

The dreamy Butterflies bestir!
Lethargic pools resume the whir
Of last year's sundered tune!
From some old Fortress on the sun
Baronial Bees -- march -- one by one --
In murmuring platoon!

The Robins stand as thick...Read more of this...

Marine Snow At Mid-Depths And Down

by Thomas Lux
 As you descend, slowly, falling faster past
you this snow,
ghostly, some flakes bio-
luminescent (you plunge,
and this lit snow doesn't land
at your feet but keeps falling below
you): single-cell-plant chains, shreds
of zooplankton's mucus food traps,
fish fecal pellets, radioactive fallouts,
sand grains, pollen....And inside
these jagged falling islands
live more microlives,
which feed creatures
on the way down
and all the way down. And you,
in your sinking isolation
booth, you...Read more of this...

Quia Multum Amavit

by Algernon Charles Swinburne
 Am I not he that hath made thee and begotten thee,
I, God, the spirit of man?
Wherefore now these eighteen years hast thou forgotten me,
From whom thy life began?
Thy life-blood and thy life-breath and thy beauty,
Thy might of hands and feet,
Thy soul made strong for divinity of duty
And service which was sweet.
Through the red sea brimmed with blood didst thou...Read more of this...

The Land

by Rudyard Kipling
 When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,
In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,
He called to him Hobdenius-a Briton of the Clay,
Saying: "What about that River-piece for layin'' in to hay?"

And the aged Hobden answered: "I remember as a lad
My father told your father that she wanted dreenin' bad.
An' the more that you neeglect her the less you'll...Read more of this...

Winter Sleep

by Elinor Wylie
 When against earth a wooden heel 
Clicks as loud as stone on steel, 
When stone turns flour instead of flakes, 
And frost bakes clay as fire bakes, 
When the hard-bitten fields at last 
Crack like iron flawed in the cast, 
When the world is wicked and cross and old, 
I long to be quit of the cruel cold.

Little birds...Read more of this...

Winter-song

by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, who would be sad tho' the sky be a-graying,
And meadow and woodlands are empty and bare;
For softly and merrily now there come playing,
The little white birds thro' the winter-kissed air.
The squirrel's enjoying the rest of the thrifty,
He munches his store in the old hollow tree;
Tho' cold is the blast and the snow-flakes are drifty
He fears the white flock not...Read more of this...

Trebetherick

by John Betjeman
 We used to picnic where the thrift
Grew deep and tufted to the edge;
We saw the yellow foam flakes drift
In trembling sponges on the ledge
Below us, till the wind would lift
Them up the cliff and o’er the hedge.
Sand in the sandwiches, wasps in the tea,
Sun on our bathing dresses heavy with the wet,
Squelch of the bladder-wrack waiting for the sea,
Fleas...Read more of this...

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