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Famous Flukes Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...
And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said beh...Read more of this...
by Heaney, Seamus



...the Cross hangs upside-down in water. 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve 
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought 
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, 
Gone even from the meaning of a name; 
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips 
And hits and cries against the ports of space, 
Beating their sides to make its fury heard. 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face 
In agonies of speech on speechless panes? 
Cry louder, ...Read more of this...
by Slessor, Kenneth
...e needle drew their blood.
I see her standing in the hall, 
Where the mirror's lashed to blood and foam, 
And the black flukes of agony
Beat at the air till the light blows out....Read more of this...
by Nemerov, Howard
...That holds the hot sky tame,
And the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powdered floors
 Where the scared whale flukes in flame!
 Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
 And her ropes are taut with the dew,
 For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
 We're sagging south on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new.

Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
 And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp a...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard
...sk bulk that is the whale’s bulk, it seems mine; 
Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and sluggish, the tap of my flukes is death.

15
A show of the summer softness! a contact of something unseen! an amour of the light and
 air! 
I am jealous, and overwhelm’d with friendliness, 
And will go gallivant with the light and air myself, 
And have an unseen something to be in contact with them also. 

O love and summer! you are in the dreams, and in me!
Autumn and winter are i...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt



...That holds the hot sky tame,
And the steady fore-foot snores through the planet-powdered floors
 Where the scared whale flukes in flame!
 Her plates are flaked by the sun, dear lass
 And her ropes are taut with the dew,
 For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
 We're sagging south on the Long Trail -- the trail that is always new.

Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
 And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard
...fall and sink into the fat?
In the great ash-pit of Jehoshaphat
The bones cry for the blood of the white whale,
The fat flukes arch and whack about its ears,
The death-lance churns into the sanctuary, tears
The gun-blue swingle, heaving like a flail,
And hacks the coiling life out: it works and drags
And rips the sperm-whale's midriff into rags,
Gobbets of blubber spill to wind and weather,
Sailor, and gulls go round the stoven timbers
Where the morning stars sing out togethe...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert
...er sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen. 
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a d...Read more of this...
by Doty, Mark
...or slowly crawling close to the bottom, 
The sperm-whale at the surface, blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, 
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray; 
Passions there—wars, pursuits, tribes—sight in those ocean-depths—breathing
 that
 thick-breathing air, as so many do; 
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us, who
 walk
 this sphere;
The change onward from ours, t...Read more of this...
by Whitman, Walt

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry