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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Graves
Robert Graves
The author of numerous collections of poetry, novels, and translation, Robert Graves was viewed as an accomplished war poet and is the author of I, Claudius...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Sharks
Angel Shark
by Hailey Leithauser
Ants and Sharks
by Tomasz Rózycki
Ashore
by Ernest Hilbert
At Shark Reef Sanctuary
by Eva Alice Counsell
Beach Walk
by Henri Cole
Coffee and Oranges
by Joel Brouwer
Flying Fish: An Ode [excerpt]
by Charles Wharton Stork
Haunted Seas
by Cale Young Rice
In a Breath
by Carl Sandburg
Inheritance of Waterfalls and Sharks
by Martín Espada
Murray Dreaming
by Stephen Edgar
No Place Like Home
by Stephen Cushman
Ode on Dictionaries
by Barbara Hamby
Plague of Dead Sharks
by Alan Dugan
Rome
by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Seal Lullaby
by Rudyard Kipling
Sharks in the Rivers
by Ada Limón
Sharks' Teeth
by Kay Ryan
Shoal of Sharks
by Richard O'Connell
Song of the Paddlers [excerpt]
by Herman Melville
Submarine Mountains
by Cale Young Rice
Summer [excerpt]
by James Thomson
The Bluefish
by Isaac McLellan
The Maldive Shark
by Herman Melville
The Ripple Effect
by Jamey Dunham
The Sea is History
by Derek Walcott
The Shark
by Lord Alfred Douglas
The Shark
by Judith Beveridge
The Shark
by William Henry Venable
The Shark
by Isaac McLellan
The Shark's Parlor
by James Dickey
The Sharks
by Denise Levertov
The Sirens
by James Russell Lowell
The Steel Rippers
by Patricia Carlin
Tiger Shark
by Hailey Leithauser
Untitled [There, by the crescent moon, the shark]
by Shido
Upon Shark
by Robert Herrick
What To Do About Sharks
by Vivian Shipley
White Sales
by Allen Grossman
World Below the Brine
by Walt Whitman
Related Prose
Poems for Shark Week
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I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned?

 
by Robert Graves

Look at my knees,   
That island rising from the steamy seas!   
The candle's a tall lightship; my two hands   
Are boats and barges anchored to the sands,   
With mighty cliffs all round; 
They're full of wine and riches from far lands....   
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?
   
I can make caves,   
By lifting up the island and huge waves   
And storms, and then with head and ears well under
Blow bubbles with a monstrous roar like thunder,   
A bull-of-Bashan sound.   
The seas run high and the boats split asunder....   
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?  
   
The thin soap slips
And slithers like a shark under the ships.   
My toes are on the soap-dish—that's the effect   
Of my huge storms; an iron steamer's wrecked.   
The soap slides round and round;   
He's biting the old sailors, I expect....
I wonder what it feels like to be drowned?



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