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Famous Flap Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...is a world of words: Quiet we call
"Silence"- which is the merest word of all.
All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings-
But ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high
The eternal voice of God is passing by,
And the red winds are withering in the sky:-

"What tho 'in worlds which sightless cycles run,
Linked to a little system, and one sun-
Where all my love is folly and the crowd
Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud,
The storm, ...Read more of this...
by Poe, Edgar Allan



...November too!

II.

I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!

III.

Till the young ones whisper, finger on lip,
``There he is at it, deep in Greek:
``Now then, or never, out we slip
``To cut from the hazels by the creek
``A mainmast for our ship!''

IV.

I shall be at it indeed, my friends:
Greek puts already on either si...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...ght with his foes;
 The ache of the stiffened fingers, the cut of the snowshoe thong;
Cheeks black-raw through the hood-flap, eyes that tingled and closed,
 And ever to urge and cheer him quavered the madman's song.

Colder it grew and colder, till the last heat left the earth,
 And there in the great stark stillness the bale fires glinted and gleamed,
And the Wild all around exulted and shook with a devilish mirth,
 And life was far and forgotten, the ghost of a joy once dre...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...O'Neill Roe

What a thrill ----
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they one?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to...Read more of this...
by Plath, Sylvia
...n the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;—a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth w...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)



...mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'r enjoys,
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight
In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,
As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impote...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander
...sh with granite maw, 
 The sleet upon the griffins spits, and all 
 The Saurian monsters, answering to the squall, 
 Flap wings; while through the broken ceiling fall 
 Torrents of rain upon the forms beneath, 
 Dragons and snak'd Medusas gnashing teeth 
 In the dismantled rooms. Like armored knight 
 The granite Castle fights with all its might, 
 Resisting through the winter. All in vain, 
 The heaven's bluster, January's rain, 
 And those dread elemental powers w...Read more of this...
by Hugo, Victor
...shing of great rivers
Through their palisades of pine-trees,
And the thunder in the mountains,
Whose innumerable echoes
Flap like eagles in their eyries;-
Listen to these wild traditions,
To this Song of Hiawatha!
Ye who love a nation's legends,
Love the ballads of a people,
That like voices from afar off
Call to us to pause and listen,
Speak in tones so plain and childlike,
Scarcely can the ear distinguish
Whether they are sung or spoken;-
Listen to this Indian Legend,
To th...Read more of this...
by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...sheaths of silver envelopes

Mutually exchanged. I open your missives

Like undressing a girl in my teens

Undoing the flap like a recalcitrant

Bra strap, the letters stiff as nipples

While I stroke the creviced folds

Of amber and mauve and lick

As I stick stamps like the ********

Of a reluctant virgin, urgent for

Defloration and the pulse of ******....Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...tiously, never taking my eyes off of him.
His right eyelid was twitching guiltily, or at least anxiously,
and his smock flapping slightly in the wind.
Several members of our party were mingling with the nurses
down by the duck pond, and my grip on the situation
was loosening, the planks in my picnic platform were rotting.
I was thinking about the potato salad in an unstable environment.
A weeping spell was about to overtake me.
I was very close to howling and gnashing the gla...Read more of this...
by Taylor, Edward
...Be dead and done than anyone who lives a life like that.
Though critic-scarred a humble bard I feel I'd rather be,
Than flap and flit and shriek and spit through all a century.

So feathered friend, until the end you may divide my den,
And make a mess, which (more or less) I clean up now and then.
But I prefer the doom to share of dead and gone compeers,
Than parrot be, and live to see ten times a hundred years....Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
...h the coo.
Loose droop the leaves, and down the sleepy roadway
Sometimes pipes a chaffinch; loose droops the blue.
Cows flap a slow tail knee-deep in the river,
Breathless, given up to sun and gnat and fly.
Nowhere is she seen; and if I see her nowhere,
Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky.

O the golden sheaf, the rustling treasure-armful!
O the nutbrown tresses nodding interlaced!
O the treasure-tresses one another over
Nodding! O the girdle slack about the wais...Read more of this...
by Meredith, George
...es, spoke with me on the shore;
While you were running down the sands, and made
The dimpled flounce of the sea-furbelow flap,
Good man, to please the child. She brought strange news.
Why were you silent when I spoke to-night?
I had set my heart on your forgiving him
Before you knew. We MUST forgive the dead.' 

`Dead! who is dead?' 

`The man your eye pursued.
A little after you had parted with him,
He suddenly dropt dead of heart-disease.' 

`Dead? he? of heart-disease? what...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...s, the clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowballs; 
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs; 
The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside, borne to the hospital;
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall; 
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star, quickly working his passage to
 the centre of the crowd; 
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes; 
What groans of over-fed or half-starv’d who fall sun-...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt
...plaintive moan, 
I mourn for thy captivity, 
And in thy woes forget mine own. 

To see thee stand prepared to fly, 
And flap those useless wings of thine, 
And gaze into the distant sky, 
Would melt a harder heart than mine. 

In vain-in vain! Thou canst not rise: 
Thy prison roof confines thee there; 
Its slender wires delude thine eyes, 
And quench thy longings with despair. 

Oh, thou wert made to wander free 
In sunny mead and shady grove, 
And, far beyond the rolling sea...Read more of this...
by Bronte, Anne
...thorn spray, 
I nibble it leaf by leaf away. 

Down beneath grow dandelions,
Daisies, old-man’s-looking-glasses; 
Rooks flap croaking across the lane. 
I eat and swallow and eat again. 

Here come raindrops helter-skelter; 
I munch and nibble unregarding:
Hawthorn leaves are juicy and firm. 
I’ll mind my business: I’m a good worm. 

When I’m old, tired, melancholy, 
I’ll build a leaf-green mausoleum 
Close by, here on this lovely spray,
And die and dream the ages away. 

Some...Read more of this...
by Graves, Robert
...they stuck on his fist a rough-foot merlin!
(Hark, the wind's on the heath at its game!
Oh for a noble falcon-lanner
To flap each broad wing like a banner,
And turn in the wind, and dance like flame!)
Had they broached a white-beer cask from Berlin
---Or if you incline to prescribe mere wine
Put to his lips, when they saw him pine,
A cup of our own Moldavia fine,
Cotnar for instance, green as May sorrel
And ropy with sweet,---we shall not quarrel.

IV.

So, at home, the sick ...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...-dog's maw, 
The hair was tangled round his jaw. 
But close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf, 
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf, 
Who had stolen from the hills, but kept away, 
Scared by the dogs, from the human prey; 
But he seized on his share of a steed that lay, 
Pick'd by the birds, on the sands of the bay. 

XVII. 

Alp turn'd him from the sickening sight: 
Never had shaken his nerves in fight; 
Be he better could brook to behold the dying, 
Deep in the tide of ...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)
...open in heaven again: 
drafts wheeze, clouds wrap their ripped pages 
around roofs and trees. Like wet flags, shutters 
flap and fold. Even light is blown out of town,
its last angles caught in sopped
newspaper wings and billowing plastic — 
all this in one American street. 
 Elsewhere, somewhere, a tide 
recedes, incense is lit, an infant 
sucks from a nipple, a grenade
shrieks, a man buys his first cane. 
 Think of it: the worlds in this world. 


 Yesterday, while a Chines...Read more of this...
by Bosselaar, Laure-Anne
...sadly scowling,
To whom she speaks, and he replies with howling.

When he hath ceas'd his ill-resounding noise,
Another flap-mouth'd mourner, black and grim,
Against the welkin volleys out his voice;
Another, and another, answer him,
Clapping their proud tails to the ground below,
Shaking their scratch'd ears, bleeding as they go.

Look, how the world's poor people are amazed
At apparitions, signs, and prodigies,
Whereon with fearful eyes they long have gazed,
Infusing them w...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things