Famous Mottled Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Mottled poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous mottled poems. These examples illustrate what a famous mottled poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Holmes, Oliver Wendell
...long the land has kept ill
By Grant and Sherman throttled,
And by Father Abraham bottled,
(All specked and streaked and mottled
With the scars of murderous battles,
Where he clashed the iron rattles
That gods and men he shook at,)
For all the world to look at!
God bless the great Professor!
And Madam, too, God bless her!
Bless him and all his band,
On the sea and on the land,
Bless them head and heart and hand,
Till their glorious raid is o'er,
And they touch our ransomed sho...Read more of this...
by
Smart, Christopher
...N 'mongst the leaves
The gale his peace reports.
LVII
Increasing days their reign exalt,
Nor in the pink and mottled vault
The opposing spirits tilt;
And, by the coasting reader spi'd,
The silverlings and crusions glide
For ADORATION gilt.
LVIII
For ADORATION rip'ning canes
And cocoa's purest milk detains
The western pilgrim's staff;
Where rain in clasping boughs enclos'd,
And vines with oranges dispos'd,
Embow'r the social laugh.
LIX
No...Read more of this...
by
Cisneros, Sandra
...You were the rain rolling off the
waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock of straw-colored hair
wedged between the mottled pages of a Victor Hugo novel. A
crescent of soap. A spider the color of a fingernail. The black nets
beneath the sea of olive trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer
wrapped in newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueber-
ries in heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.
And when you opene...Read more of this...
by
Keats, John
...dur'd
Would seem a feather to the mighty prize.
So, with unusual gladness, on he hies
Through caves, and palaces of mottled ore,
Gold dome, and crystal wall, and turquois floor,
Black polish'd porticos of awful shade,
And, at the last, a diamond balustrade,
Leading afar past wild magnificence,
Spiral through ruggedest loopholes, and thence
Stretching across a void, then guiding o'er
Enormous chasms, where, all foam and roar,
Streams subterranean tease their granite beds;
...Read more of this...
by
Hacker, Marilyn
...rses grazed on a roof across the street.
You didn't believe me until you turned around.
They were both old, one mottled gray, one white.
Past the kitchen's russet dark, we found
bookshelves on both sides of the fireplace:
Verlaine, L'Étranger, Notes from the Underground.
Through an archway, a fresh-plastered staircase
led steeply upward. In a white room stood
a white-clad brass bed. Sunlight in your face
came from the tree-filled window. "You di...Read more of this...
by
Bishop, Elizabeth
...n from the corners of
my downturned mouth, run down my sides and drip beneath
my belly. Perhaps the droplets on my mottled hide are pretty,
like dewdrops, silver on a moldering leaf? They chill me
through and through. I feel my colors changing now, my pig-
ments gradually shudder and shift over.
Now I shall get beneath that overhanging ledge. Slowly. Hop.
Two or three times more, silently. That was too far. I'm
standing up. The lichen...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...iss --
Would not my lonesome heart still sigh for thee
What time the drear kiss-intervals must be?
II.
So do the mottled formulas of Sense
Glide snakewise through our dreams of Aftertime;
So errors breed in reeds and grasses dense
That bank our singing rivulets of rhyme.
By Sense rule Space and Time; but in God's Land
Their intervals are not, save such as lie
Betwixt successive tones in concords bland
Whose loving distance makes the harmony.
Ah, there shall nev...Read more of this...
by
Rich, Adrienne
...e has taken me this far
as if I had to bring to shore
a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor
old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books
tossed in the prow
some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.
Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.
Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain
in a sun blotted like unspoken anger
behind a casual mist.
The length of daylight
this far north, in this
forty-ninth year of my life
is critical.
The light is critical: ...Read more of this...
by
Seeger, Alan
...s,
When from the blue horizon to the shore,
Casting faint silver pathways like the moon's
Across the Ocean's glassy, mottled floor,
Far clouds uprear their gleaming battlements
Drawn to the crest of some bleak eminence,
When autumn twilight fades on the sere hill
And autumn winds are still;
To watch the East for some emerging sign,
Wintry Capella or the Pleiades
Or that great huntsman with the golden gear;
Ravished in hours like these
Before thy universal shrine
...Read more of this...
by
Clare, John
...o soon
will call them 'John go bed at noon
And fumitory too a name
That superstition holds to fame
Whose red and purple mottled flowers
Are cropt by maids in weeding hours
To boil in water milk and way1
For washes on an holiday
To make their beauty fair and sleak
And scour the tan from summers cheek
And simple small forget me not
Eyd wi a pinshead yellow spot
I'th'2 middle of its tender blue
That gains from poets notice due
These flowers the toil by crowds destroys
And robs t...Read more of this...
by
Neruda, Pablo
...coast,
was born the chowder,
thick and succulent,
a boon to man.
You bring the conger, skinned,
to the kitchen
(its mottled skin slips off
like a glove,
leaving the
grape of the sea
exposed to the world),
naked,
the tender eel
glistens,
prepared
to serve our appetites.
Now
you take
garlic,
first, caress
that precious
ivory,
smell
its irate fragrance,
then
blend the minced garlic
with onion
and tomato
until the onion
is the color of gold.
Meanwhile steam
our regal
...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...him—all are affectionate to him;
See you! some are such beautiful animals—so lofty looking!
Some are buff color’d—some mottled—one has a white line running along his
back—some are brindled,
Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)—See you! the bright hides;
See, the two with stars on their foreheads—See, the round bodies and broad backs;
See, how straight and square they stand on their legs—See, what fine, sagacious eyes;
See, how they watch their Tamer—they wish him ...Read more of this...
by
Hacker, Marilyn
...winds in a single strand.
She could find the world's words in a singing wind.
She could lend a weird will to a mottled hand.
She could wind a willed word from a muddled mind.
She could wend the wild woods on a saddled hind.
She could sound a wellspring with a rowan wand.
She could bind the wolf's wounds in a swaddling band.
She could bind a banned book in a silken skin.
She could spend a world war on invaded land.
She could pound the dry...Read more of this...
by
Lanier, Sidney
...lower greeds --
-- Fond sighs for old things, shouts for new, -- did reign
Below that stream of golden fire that broke,
Mottled with red, above the seas of smoke.
"Hark! Gay fanfares from halls of old Romance
Strike through the clouds of clamor: who be these
That, paired in rich processional, advance
From darkness o'er the murk mad factories
Into yon flaming road, and sink, strange Ministrants!
Sheer down to earth, with many minstrelsies
And motions fine, and mix about t...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...on were shining in a row.
And in the starry depths of each, artistically piled,
A fat and juicy ice-worm raised its mottled mug and smiled.
Then closer pressed the peering crown, suspended was the fun,
As Skipper Grey in courteous way said: "Stranger, please take one."
But with a gesture of disgust the Major shook his head.
"You can't bluff me. You'll never drink that gastly thing," he said.
"You'll see all right," said Deacon White, and held his cockt...Read more of this...
by
Lowell, Amy
...lets sunk to blacks, and reds in orange crushed.
32
Of every pattern and in every shade.
Nacreous, iridescent, mottled, checked.
Some purest sulphur-yellow, others made
An ivory-white with disks of copper flecked.
Sprinkled and striped, tasselled, or keenest edged.
Striated, powdered, freckled, long or short.
They bloomed, and seemed strange wonder-moths new-fledged,
Born of the spectrum wedded to a flame.
The shade within the arbour made a port
T...Read more of this...
by
Aiken, Conrad
...h me
By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . .
Look how the long volutes of foam unfold
To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . .
Take my hand,
Do not remember how these depths are cold,
Nor how, when you are dead,
Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head.
You lean your face upon your hands and cry,
The blown sand whispers about your feet,
Terrible seems it now to die,—
Terrible now, with life so incomplete,
To turn away fr...Read more of this...
by
Carroll, Lewis
...ar as day to me!'
He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,
'Extinguishes all hope!'...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...retches the caravan.
From far the eyes, its trail
Along the burning shale
Bending its wavering tail,
Like a mottled serpent scan.
These deserts are of God!
His are the bounds alone,
Here, where no feet have trod,
To Him its centre known!
And from this smoking sea
Veiled in obscurity,
The foam one seems to see
In fiery ashes thrown.
"Shall desert change to lake?" cried out the cloud.
"Still further!" from heaven's depths sounded tha...Read more of this...
by
Doty, Mark
...--you with your white and muscular wings
that rise and ripple beneath or above me,
your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors
of polished tortoise-- I do not want you ever to die....Read more of this...
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