Famous Flaps Poems by Famous Poets

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

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The Working Party

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Three hours ago he blundered up the trench, 
Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; 
Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls 
With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk. 
He couldn't see the man who walked in front; 
Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet 
Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing 
Wretchedly where...Read more of this...

Tristia

by Osip Mandelstam
 I have studied the Science of departures,
in night’s sorrows, when a woman’s hair falls down.
The oxen chew, there’s the waiting, pure,
in the last hours of vigil in the town,
and I reverence night’s ritual cock-crowing,
when reddened eyes lift sorrow’s load and choose
to stare at distance, and a woman’s crying
is mingled with the singing of the Muse.

Who knows, when the word...Read more of this...

Frost at Midnight

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud---and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
`Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This...Read more of this...

Afterwards

by Thomas Hardy
 When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
 And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
 "He was a man who used to notice such things"? 

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
 The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon...Read more of this...

Song from Aella

by Thomas Chatterton
 O SING unto my roundelay, 
O drop the briny tear with me; 
Dance no more at holyday, 
Like a running river be: 
 My love is dead, 
 Gone to his death-bed 
All under the willow-tree. 

Black his cryne as the winter night, 
White his rode as the summer snow, 
Red his face as the morning light, 
Cold he...Read more of this...

A Country Life

by Randall Jarrell
 A bird that I don't know,
Hunched on his light-pole like a scarecrow,
Looks sideways out into the wheat
The wind waves under the waves of heat.
The field is yellow as egg-bread dough
Except where (just as though they'd let
It live for looks) a locust billows
In leaf-green and shade-violet,
A standing mercy.
The bird calls twice, "Red clay, red clay";
Or else he's saying, "Directly, directly."
If...Read more of this...

Spring Day

by Amy Lowell
 Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is 
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and 
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It 
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of...Read more of this...

My Aviary

by Oliver Wendell Holmes
 THROUGH my north window, in the wintry weather,--
My airy oriel on the river shore,--
I watch the sea-fowl as they flock together
Where late the boatman flashed his dripping oar.

The gull, high floating, like a sloop unladen,
Lets the loose water waft him as it will;
The duck, round-breasted as a rustic maiden,
Paddles and plunges, busy, busy still.

I see the solemn gulls in...Read more of this...

The Concert

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 In memory of Dimitri Mitropoulos


The harpist believes there is music
in the skeletons of fish

The French horn player believes
in enormous golden snails

The piano believes in nothing
and grins from ear to ear

Strings are scratching their bellies
openly, enjoying it

Flutes and oboes complain
in dialects of the same tongue

Drumsticks rattle a calfskin
from the sleep of another life

because the supernatural crow
on the podium flaps his...Read more of this...

November

by William Cullen Bryant
 The landscape sleeps in mist from morn till noon;
And, if the sun looks through, 'tis with a face
Beamless and pale and round, as if the moon,
When done the journey of her nightly race,
Had found him sleeping, and supplied his place.
For days the shepherds in the fields may be,
Nor mark a patch of sky— blindfold they trace,
The plains, that seem...Read more of this...

Round

by Weldon Kees
 "Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortssoz is dead.
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."

Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cezanne
Would break out in the quiet streets...Read more of this...

Elm

by Sylvia Plath
for Ruth Fainlight


I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone...Read more of this...

A Working Party

by Siegfried Sassoon
 Three hours ago he blundered up the trench, 
Sliding and poising, groping with his boots; 
Sometimes he tripped and lurched against the walls 
With hands that pawed the sodden bags of chalk. 
He couldn't see the man who walked in front; 
Only he heard the drum and rattle of feet 
Stepping along barred trench boards, often splashing 
Wretchedly where...Read more of this...

A Grief

by Barry Tebb
 Rivers, tow paths, caravan parks

From Kirkstall to Keighley

The track’s ribbon flaps

Like Margaret’s whirling and twirling

At ten with her pink-tied hair

And blue-check patterned frock

O my lost beloved



Mills fall like doomed fortresses

Their domes topple, stopped clocks

Chime midnight forever and ever

Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls

Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,

Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture

O my lost beloved

In...Read more of this...

Le Manteau De Pascal

by Jorie Graham
 I have put on my great coat it is cold.

It is an outer garment.

Coarse, woolen.

Of unknown origin.

 *

It has a fine inner lining but it is 
as an exterior that you see it — a grace.

 *

I have a coat I am wearing. It is a fine admixture.
The woman who threw the threads in the two directions
has made, skillfully,...Read more of this...

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