Famous Flayed Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Flayed poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous flayed poems. These examples illustrate what a famous flayed poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...e never had him;
He failed us, or escaped, or what you will, --
And there was that about him (God knows what, --
We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)
That made as many of us as had wits
More fond of all his easy distances
Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened --
Thereby acquiring much we knew before
About ourselves, and hitherto had held
Irrelevant, or not prime to ...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...or a funeral
He laughed and went,
Laughing to be so small
In the event.
Told of his own deceit
By many a tongue,
Flayed for his long defeat
By being young,
Lured by the fateful sweet
Of songs unsung—
Knowing it in his heart,
But knowing not
The secret of an art
That few forgot,
He played the twinkling part
That was his lot.
And when the twinkle died,
As twinkles do,
He pushed himself aside
And out of view:
Out with the wind and tide,
Before we knew....Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...well builds the flower-bright towns,
And a more sunlit land!
And Lincoln's men have come again.
Up from the South he flayed,
The grandsons of his foes arise
In his own cause arrayed.
They rise for freedom and clean laws
High laws, that shall endure.
Our God establishes his arm
And makes the battle sure!...Read more of this...
by
Lindsay, Vachel
...rat-droppings and coins.
After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to
the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed
for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named
Albion....Read more of this...
by
Hill, Geoffrey
...ay thought its depth worth wagering on
and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder
and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumb
the depths of Britain's dangling a scholar,
say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath,
now National Trust, a place where they got tin,
those gentlemen who silenced the men's oath
and killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in histor...Read more of this...
by
Harrison, Tony
...rutal mystery.
We meet in the streets
with our hands in our pockets
and snarl guiltily at each other
as if we had flayed a cloud
or two in our salad days.
Lots of things do blame us;
and in moments when I forget
how cruel we really should be
I often have to bite my tongue
to keep from being guilty....Read more of this...
by
O'Hara, Frank
...s that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?
Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses pa...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...ing my rope
Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:
Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,
The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,
I held the man for nothing in my arms....Read more of this...
by
Wright, James
...ake;
Hoped the Lord 'ud keep his thumb on the plummer-block.
Banged against the iron decks, bilges choked with coal;
Flayed and frozen foot and hand, sick of heart and soul;
Last we prayed she'd buck herself into judgment Day --
Hi! we cursed the Bolivar knocking round the Bay!
O her nose flung up to sky, groaning to be still --
Up and down and back we went, never time for breath;
Then the money paid at Lloyd's caught her by the heel,
And the stars ran round and round...Read more of this...
by
Kipling, Rudyard
...one in the house,
Where I came last with some hope, but not much,
After hours' overlooking from the cliffs
An emptiness flayed to the very stone.
I found no people that dared show themselves,
None not in hiding from the outward eye.
The time was autumn, but how anyone
could tell the time of year when every tree
That could have dropped a leaf was down itself
And nothing but the stump of it was left
Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;
And every tree up stood a rotting...Read more of this...
by
Frost, Robert
...ped. The moment he hit the water
he lost his tattered
bathing-togs
to the swimming pool's pack of dogs.
'Come in'; this flayed
coney would parade
and pirouette like honey on a spoon:
'Come on in; Paddy Muldoon.'
And although I have never learned to swim
I would willingly have followed him....Read more of this...
by
Muldoon, Paul
...ess,
Or when a zipper nips his loved one's back
Cannot restore the zipper to its track.
Another time, not wishing to be flayed,
She will not use him as a lady's maid.
Stove-wise he's the perpetual backward learner
Who can't turn on or off the proper burner.
If faced with washing up he never gripes,
But simply drops more dishes than he wipes.
She finds his absence preferable to his aid,
And thus all mealtime chores doth he evade.
He can, attempting to replace a fuse,
Black o...Read more of this...
by
Nash, Ogden
...laugh . . . but that hunched shape
The face one stone, like those Assyrian kings!
One sees in carvings, watching men flayed red
Horribly laughable in leaps and writhes;
That face -- utterly evil, clouded round
With evil like a smoke -- it turns smiles sour!
. . . And Nero there, the flabby cheeks astrain
And sweating agony . . . long agony . . .
Imperishable, unappeasable
For ever . . . well . . . it droops the mouth. Till I
Look up.
There's one blue patch no smok...Read more of this...
by
Benet, Stephen Vincent
...feed
The worms.And so I groaned, and spent my strength
Until, all passion spent, I lay full length
And quivered like a flayed and bleeding thing.
So lay till lifted on a great black wing
That had no mate nor flesh-apparent trunk
To hamper it; with me all time had sunk
Into oblivion; when I awoke
The wing hung poised above two cliffs that broke
The bowels of the earth in twain, and cleft
The seas apart.Below, above, to left,
To right, I saw what no man saw before:
Earth, hel...Read more of this...
by
Cullen, Countee
...in the oak -
but cannot see poor
whippoorwill
under the hill
in deadbrush nest,
who's awake, too -
with stricken eye
flayed by the moon
her brindled breast
repeats, repeats, repeats its plea
for cruelty....Read more of this...
by
Swenson, May
...whispers: 'How's this, how's this?'
In the bowl the hare is aborted,
Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice,
Flayed of fur and humanity.
Let us eat it like Plato's afterbirth,
Let us eat it like Christ.
These are the people that were important ----
Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces
On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.
Shall the hood of the cobra appall me ----
The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains
Through which the ...Read more of this...
by
Plath, Sylvia
...
IV
Nay robin red-breast, tha nedna
Sit noddin' thy head at me;
My breast's as red as thine, I reckon,
Flayed red, if tha could but see.
Nay, you blessed pee-whips,
You nedna screet at me!
I'm screetin' my-sen, but are-na goin'
To let iv'rybody see.
Tha _art_ smock-ravelled, bunny,
Larropin' neck an' crop
I' th' snow: but I's warrant thee, bunny,
_I'm_ further ower th' top.
V
Now sithee theer at th' railroad crossin'
Warmi...Read more of this...
by
Lawrence, D. H.
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