Famous Matted Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Cloud in Trousers

...r besides, 
apparently ¨C ¡°borsch.¡± 

Poets, 
soaked in plaints and sobs, 
break from the street, rumpling their matted hair 
over: ¡°How with two such words celebrate 
a young lady 
and love 
and a floweret under the dew?¡± 

In the poets¡¯ wake 
thousands of street folk: 
students, 
prostitutes, 
salesmen. 

Gentlemen! 
Stop! 

thousands of street folk: 
students, 
prostitutes, 
salesmen. 

Gentlemen! 
Stop! 
You are no beggars; 
how dare you b...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir


Back Home

...francs
 she’d be brought to your room.
The sum’s not large - 
 just live for show - 
No,
 you highbrow,
 ruffling your matted hair,
you would thrust upon her
 a sewing machine,
in stitches
 scribbling 
 the silk of verse.
Proletarians
 arrive at communism
 from below - 
by the low way of mines,
 sickles,
 and pitchforks - 
But I,
 from poetry’s skies,
 plunge into communism,
because
 without it
 I feel no love.
Whether
 I’m self-exiled
 or sent to mamma - 
the steel of words...Read more of this...
by Mayakovsky, Vladimir

Cape Breton

...bulldozers, 
but without their drivers, because today is Sunday. 
The little white churches have been dropped into the matted hills 
like lost quartz arrowheads. 
The road appears to have been abandoned. 
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned, 
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior, 
where we cannot see, 
where deep lakes are reputed to be, 
and disused trails and mountains of rock 
and miles of burnt forests, standing in gray scr...Read more of this...
by Bishop, Elizabeth

Corn

...oaks that inward lean
To join their radiant amplitudes of green
I slowly move, with ranging looks that pass
Up from the matted miracles of grass
Into yon veined complex of space
Where sky and leafage interlace
So close, the heaven of blue is seen
Inwoven with a heaven of green.

I wander to the zigzag-cornered fence
Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense,
Contests with stolid vehemence
The march of culture, setting limb and thorn
As pikes against the army of the corn.
...Read more of this...
by Lanier, Sidney

Endymion: Book I

...eneath the forest trees,
A venerable priest full soberly,
Begirt with ministring looks: alway his eye
Stedfast upon the matted turf he kept,
And after him his sacred vestments swept.
From his right hand there swung a vase, milk-white,
Of mingled wine, out-sparkling generous light;
And in his left he held a basket full
Of all sweet herbs that searching eye could cull:
Wild thyme, and valley-lilies whiter still
Than Leda's love, and cresses from the rill.
His aged head, crowned...Read more of this...
by Keats, John


From Loves First Fever To Her Plague

...ked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word's warmt...Read more of this...
by Thomas, Dylan

Gregory Corso

...ts carcass elements
 Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
 over its long long dead Nor
 From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
 exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
 From thy appellational womb
 spew birth-gusts of of great worms
 Rip open your belly Bomb
 from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
 Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
 along the brink of Paradise
 O Bomb O final Pied Piper
 both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
 God abandoned m...Read more of this...
by Corso, Gregory

Julian and Maddalo (excerpt)

...bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heap'd from ever-shifting sand,
Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,
Such as from earth's embrace the salt ooze breeds,
Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepair'd, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon,
Where 'twas our w...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Shattered Head

...brane, cranial fluid) 

Shattered head on the breast
of a wooded hill
Laid down there endlessly so
tendrils soaked into matted compose
became a root
torqued over the faint springhead
groin whence illegible
matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt
volumes of sporic changes
hair long blown into far follicles
blasted into a chosen place 

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)
revenge on the mouth
packed with its inarticulate confessions
revenge on the eyes
green-...Read more of this...
by Rich, Adrienne

Sohrab and Rustum

...ams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles--
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer--till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea....Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew

Strayed Reveller The

...snuffing
The mountain wind.
They see the Indian
Drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moor'd to
A floating isle thick-matted
With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps, and stows them,
Drifting--drifting;--round him,
Round his green harvest-plot,
Flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them.
They see the Scythian
On the wide stepp, unharnessing
His wheel'd house at noon.
He tethers his beast down, and makes his meal--
Mares' milk, and ...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew

The Deserted Village

...ious terrors of that horrid shore;
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray
And fiercely shed intolerable day;
Those matted woods where birds forget to sing,
But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling;
Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned,
Where the dark scorpion gathers death around;
Where at each step the stranger fears to wake
The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake;
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey,
And savage men more murderous still than...Read more of this...
by Goldsmith, Oliver

The Emigrants: Book I

...st give
To Heaven for souls entrusted to his care.--
Where the cliff, hollow'd by the wintry storm,
Affords a seat with matted sea-weed strewn,
A softer form reclines; around her run,
On the rough shingles, or the chalky bourn,
Her gay unconscious children, soon amus'd;
Who pick the fretted stone, or glossy shell,
Or crimson plant marine: or they contrive
The fairy vessel, with its ribband sail
And gilded paper pennant: in the pool,
Left by the salt wave on the yielding sands...Read more of this...
by Turner Smith, Charlotte

The Lady of the Lake

...ecent stroke.
     Brian the Hermit by it stood,
     Barefooted, in his frock and hood.
     His grizzled beard and matted hair
     Obscured a visage of despair;
     His naked arms and legs, seamed o'er,
     The scars of frantic penance bore.
     That monk, of savage form and face
     The impending danger of his race
     Had drawn from deepest solitude
     Far in Benharrow's bosom rude.
     Not his the mien of Christian priest,
     But Druid's, from the ...Read more of this...
by Scott, Sir Walter

The Nightingales Nest

...Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails—
There have I hunted like a very boy,
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorn
To find her nest, and see her feed her young.
And vainly did I many hours employ :
All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn.
And where those crimping fern-leaves ramp among
The hazel's under boughs, I've nestled down,
And watched her while she sung ; and her renown
Hath made me marvel that so famed a bird
Should have no better dress than russet ...Read more of this...
by Clare, John

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

...night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came,
Where the heel-headed dogfish...Read more of this...
by Lowell, Robert

The Road To Haworth Moor

...of,

A couple of feet at the front with a broken wall

And the back bare and hard from children’s play,

The privet was matted with shards of glass, worn tennis balls and broken toys,

So tattered I cut it back to the wall, I sat on the top step and read,

Watching the children play in the sand I’d trundled in barrow loads

From the builder’s yard, a make-do sandpit which drew the whole street,

West Indian, English and Asian built temples together. Our sandalled

Bearded nei...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

The Strayed Reveller

...ain wind. 

151 They see the Indian
152 Drifting, knife in hand,
153 His frail boat moor'd to
154 A floating isle thick-matted
155 With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants 
156 And the dark cucumber. 

157 He reaps, and stows them,
158 Drifting--drifting;--round him,
159 Round his green harvest-plot,
160 Flow the cool lake-waves,
161 The mountains ring them. 

162 They see the Scythian
163 On the wide stepp, unharnessing
164 His wheel'd house at noon.
165 He tethers his b...Read more of this...
by Arnold, Matthew

The Three Voices

...epths of leafy trees -
Left him by no means at his ease. 

Once more he weltered in despair,
With hands, through denser-matted hair,
More tightly clenched than then they were. 

When, bathed in Dawn of living red,
Majestic frowned the mountain head,
"Tell me my fault," was all he said. 

When, at high Noon, the blazing sky
Scorched in his head each haggard eye,
Then keenest rose his weary cry. 

And when at Eve the unpitying sun
Smiled grimly on the solemn fun,
"Alack," he si...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis

The Witch Of Atlas

...weedy locks,
Offered to do her bidding through the seas,
Under the earth, and in the hollow rocks,
And far beneath the matted roots of trees,
And in the gnarled heart of stubborn oaks;
So they might live for ever in the light
Of her sweet presence--each a satellite.

"This may not be," the Wizard Maid replied.
"The fountains where the Naiades bedew
Their shining hair at length are drained and dried;
The solid oaks forget their strength, and strew
Their latest leaf upon the m...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

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