Famous Lapsing Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Off to the Fishing Ground

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 There's a piping wind from a sunrise shore
Blowing over a silver sea,
There's a joyous voice in the lapsing tide
That calls enticingly;
The mist of dawn has taken flight
To the dim horizon's bound,
And with wide sails set and eager hearts 
We're off to the fishing ground. 

Ho, comrades mine, how that brave wind sings
Like a great sea-harp afar!
We whistle its wild...Read more of this...

Dreams Old

by D. H. Lawrence
 I have opened the window to warm my hands on the sill
Where the sunlight soaks in the stone: the afternoon 
Is full of dreams, my love, the boys are all still 
In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone. 

The clink of the shunting engines is sharp and fine,
Like savage music striking far off, and there 
On the great, uplifted...Read more of this...

Lorelei

by Sylvia Plath
 It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,

The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,

The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float

Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous

With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more...Read more of this...

The House Of Dust: Part 01: 06: Over the darkened city the city of towers

by Conrad Aiken
 Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
The city of a thousand gates,
Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.
On one side purples the lustrous dusk of the sea,
And dreams in white at the city's feet;
On one side sleep...Read more of this...

The Nile

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands, 
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream, 
And times and things, as in that vision, seem 
Keeping along it their eternal stands,-- 
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands 
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme 
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam, 
The laughing queen that caught...Read more of this...

The Wildy Ones

by Robert William Service
 The sheep are in the silver wood,
 The cows are in the broom;
The goats are in the wild mountain
 And won't be home by noon.

My mother sang that olden tune
 Most every night,
And to her newest she would croon
 By candle light;
While cuddling in the velvet gloom
 I'd dream of cows
That sought each dawn 'mid golden broom
 To gently...Read more of this...

Wind Song

by Carl Sandburg
 LONG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”
I slept with my head in...Read more of this...

Last Look

by Robert William Service
 What would I choose to see when I
To this bright earth shall bid good-bye?
When fades forever from my sight
The world I've loved with long delight?
What would I pray to look on last,
When Death shall draw the Curtain fast?

I've loved the farewell of the Sun,
Low-lapsing after work well done;
Or leaping from a sea forlorn,
Gold-glad to greet a day new born....Read more of this...

A Thought of the Nile

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands,--
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.

Then comes a mightier...Read more of this...

Proud Music of The Storm

by Walt Whitman
 1
PROUD music of the storm! 
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies! 
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains! 
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras! 
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature’s rhythmus, all the tongues of nations; 
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses! 
You formless, free, religious dances! you...Read more of this...

In Lovers Lane

by Lucy Maud Montgomery
 I know a place for loitering feet
Deep in the valley where the breeze
Makes melody in lichened boughs,
And murmurs low love-litanies. 

There slender harebells nod and dream,
And pale wild roses offer up
The fragrance of their golden hearts,
As from some incense-brimméd cup. 

It holds the sunshine sifted down
Softly through many a beechen screen,
Save where, by deeper woods embraced,
Cool shadows linger, dim...Read more of this...

In The Willow Shade

by Christina Rossetti
 I sat beneath a willow tree,
Where water falls and calls;
While fancies upon fancies solaced me,
Some true, and some were false.

Who set their heart upon a hope
That never comes to pass,
Droop in the end like fading heliotrope
The sun's wan looking-glass.

Who set their will upon a whim
Clung to through good and ill,
Are wrecked alike whether they sink or swim,
Or hit or...Read more of this...

Suppose?

by Robert William Service
 It's mighty nice at shut of day
With weariness to hit the hey,
To close your eyes, tired through and through,
And just forget that "you are you."

It's mighty sweet to wake again
When sunshine floods the window pain;
I love in cosy couch to lie,
And re-discover "I am I."

It would be grand could we conceive
A heaven in which to believe,
And in a better...Read more of this...

The Ship of Death

by D. H. Lawrence
 I 

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit 
and the long journey towards oblivion. 

The apples falling like great drops of dew 
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves. 

And it is time to go, to bid farewell 
to one's own self, and find an exit 
from the fallen self. 

II 

Have you built your ship of death,...Read more of this...

Invocation To The Muses

by Edna St. Vincent Millay
 Read by the poet at The Public Ceremonial of The Naional Institute 
of Arts and Letters at Carnegie Hall, New York, January 18th, 1941.

Great Muse, that from this hall absent for long
Hast never been, 
Great Muse of Song,
Colossal Muse of mighty Melody,
Vocal Calliope,
With thine august and contrapuntal brow
And thy vast throat builded for Harmony,
For the strict monumental pure design,
And...Read more of this...

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