Flying Crooked

Robert Graves 1895 (Wimbledon) – 1985 (Deià)



The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 26, 2023

19 sec read
258

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABBCCDEFF
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 328
Words 65
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 10

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves was an English poet, scholar/translator/writer of antiquity specializing in Classical Greece and Rome, novelist and soldier in World War One. more…

All Robert Graves poems | Robert Graves Books

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