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Thread: Favorite poem?

  1. #1
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    Favorite poem?

    I saw the massive list of favorite poets and I couldn't choose one, so I went for poems that stuck out in my mind. In no particular order:

    -"Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth. "These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to a blind man's eye" Whew.

    -"Old Movies" by August Kleinzahler. Live from the Hong Kong Nile club might be one of my favorite books of poems of all time.

    -"The Waste Land" by Eliot. Can't get much more canonical, but there's a reason everyone talks about it so much.

    -"Odi et amo" by Catullus. Yeah I know, its in Latin, but I just finished a course on him and found him to be as modern as some 20th century poets at times. The translated version is "I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you might ask. / I do not know, but I feel it happen, and I am tortured." Its a lot sharper in Latin, so I'll put that in here too:

    Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
    Nescio, sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.

    -Ok, enough of that Latin stuff. Another two-liner I like is "In the Station of a Metro" by Ezra Pound. The Imagists were kinda gimmicky, but they had the right idea.

    I think I'll stop myself now and give someone else a chance.

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  2. #2
    U2aholic
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    I love poems by Poe, but there's also one by Lermontov I really find amusing
    "Gratitude"
    For all, for all! I thank you, o my dear:
    For passions' deeply hidden pledge,
    For poison of a kiss, and stinging of a tear,
    Abuse by friends, and enemies' revenge;
    For soul's light, extinguished in a prison,
    For things by which I was deceived before.
    But do not give me any real reason
    To give you thanks from now any more.
    In dreams begin responsibilities.

  3. #3
    fated loafer
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    I like poems by Shel Silverstein and Mason Williams for example the one of the silly "Them" poems:

    Them Lunch Toters

    How about Them Lunch Toters,
    Ain't they a bunch?
    Goin' off to work,
    A-totin' they lunch.

    Totin' them vittles,
    Totin' that chow,
    Eatin' it later,
    But a-totin' it now.

    Look at Them Lunch Toters,
    Ain't they funny?
    Some use a paper sack,
    Some use a gunny.

    Them food-frugal Lunch Toters,
    Ain't they wise?
    Totin' they lunch,
    Made by they wives.

    How to be a Lunch Toter?
    Iffa may emote it,
    Gitchy wife to fix it,
    Go to work and tote it!

  4. #4
    fated loafer
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    Quote Originally Posted by mike401
    -"Odi et amo" by Catullus. Yeah I know, its in Latin, but I just finished a course on him and found him to be as modern as some 20th century poets at times. The translated version is "I hate and I love. Why do I do this, you might ask. / I do not know, but I feel it happen, and I am tortured.".
    I liked Catullus also Mike, but I read some of his works translated into english, I am planning on taking ancient greek and latin though so I can persue reading classics in thier origional languages.

  5. #5
    Donnes "Death be not proud"

    William Carlos Williams "The red wheelbarrow"

    So much depends
    on a red wheelbarrow
    glazed with rain
    beside the white chickens.
    "Man was made for joy and woe;
    And when this we rightly know
    Through the world we safely go" Blake

  6. #6
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    I like Tintern Abbey too:
    'And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,
    whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky,
    And in the mind of man;A motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought,
    And rolls through all things.'

    I think it's great how Wordsworth here describes the almost indescribable feeling that the place invokes and the spiritual experience it brings to him.

    There are loads of poems that I love and it's hard to choose a favourite, one that is above all others. At different times, different moods affect us all and I think our choice of a favourite is probably dominated by how we feel at the time of choosing. But for no reason at all, I chose this today:

    A Song of Honour - Ralph Hodgson

    I climbed a hill as light fell short,
    And rooks came home in scramble sort,
    And filled the trees and flapped and fought
    And sang themselves to sleep.
    An owl from nowhere with no sound
    Swung by and soon was nowhere found,
    I heard him calling halfway round,
    Hallo-ing loud and deep.
    A pair of stars, faint pins of light,
    Then many a star sailed into sight,
    And all the stars, the flowers of night,
    Were round me at a leap
    To tell how still the valleys lay.
    I heard a watch dog miles away,
    And bells of distant sheep.

    I heard no more of bird or bell,
    The mastiff in a slumber fell,
    I stared into the sky
    As wondering men have always done
    Since beauty and the stars were one,
    Though none so hard as I.

    It seemed, so still the valleys were,
    As if the whole world knelt at prayer,,
    Save me and me alone;
    So pure and wide that silence was
    I feared to bend a blade of grass,
    And there I stood, like a stone.

    I know lots of people don't like rhyme, but here it is so natural as if it the sentences were just born that way - none of them forced to match another - except maybe in the last verse..with alone and stone. I like the part where it seems to him the stars are talking and telling him how still the valleys are and how he describes them as 'flowers of the night'. Somehow when you read the poem, he takes you to that hill and the silence and experience the stillness as he did..even sitting in front of a computer. This is the wonder of books and words isn't it..how they can transport you to other places, times and experiences some of which you have never experienced and maybe will never have yourself, but which you can through the writer's art.

  7. #7
    mmmm... nerds 5Parker's Avatar
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    mmmm...

    I'm a big Donne fan... Valediction: Forbidding Mourning being my favorite. It's a little hard to grasp at first, but the more you read it the more awesome it becomes. But the best part is the story behind it. It goes that Donne had to leave his very pregnant wife behind when he left for France, so he wrote her this poem. When the time came for her to have the baby, he told his traveling companion that he had had a vision of his wife carrying a dead baby, and soo after he got a message proving his vision true. Believe it if you wish, but either way it shows just how attached these two were.

    AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
    And whisper to their souls to go,
    Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
    "Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

    So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
    No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
    'Twere profanation of our joys
    To tell the laity our love.

    Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
    Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
    But trepidation of the spheres,
    Though greater far, is innocent.

    Dull sublunary lovers' love
    —Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
    Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
    The thing which elemented it.

    But we by a love so much refined,
    That ourselves know not what it is,
    Inter-assurèd of the mind,
    Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

    Our two souls therefore, which are one,
    Though I must go, endure not yet
    A breach, but an expansion,
    Like gold to aery thinness beat.

    If they be two, they are two so 25
    As stiff twin compasses are two ;
    Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
    To move, but doth, if th' other do.

    And though it in the centre sit,
    Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
    It leans, and hearkens after it,
    And grows erect, as that comes home.

    Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
    Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
    And makes me end where I begun.
    Not all who wander are lost.....

  8. #8
    mmmm... nerds 5Parker's Avatar
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    and...

    Okay, so I lied. e e cumming's Since Feeling is First is my fav poem. I'll share:

    since feeling is first
    who pays any attention
    to the syntax of things
    will never wholly kiss you;

    wholly to be a fool
    while Spring is in the world

    my blood approves,
    and kisses are a far better fate
    than wisdom
    lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
    --the best gesture of my brain is less than
    your eyelids' flutter which says

    we are for eachother: then
    laugh, leaning back in my arms
    for life's not a paragraph

    And death i think is no parenthesis
    Not all who wander are lost.....

  9. #9
    an innate contradiction verybaddmom's Avatar
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    oooh parker, Donne is my FAVE poet of all time. i love the above mentioned one (i wrote quite a spectacular paper on it, if i do say so myself!), but i think my favorite of his would have to be "sonne rising":


    BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
    Why dost thou thus,
    Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
    Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
    Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
    Late school-boys and sour prentices,
    Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
    Call country ants to harvest offices ;
    Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
    Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

    Thy beams so reverend, and strong
    Why shouldst thou think ?
    I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
    But that I would not lose her sight so long.
    If her eyes have not blinded thine,
    Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
    Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
    Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
    Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
    And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

    She's all states, and all princes I ;
    Nothing else is ;
    Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
    All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
    Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
    In that the world's contracted thus ;
    Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
    To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
    Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
    This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
    Then we sat on the edge of the earth, with our feet dangling over the side, and marvelled that we had found each other.

  10. #10
    dancing before the storms baddad's Avatar
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    My favorite poem, and a direction championed by myself and many...

    TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A YELLOW WOOD,
    AND SORRY I COULD NOT TRAVEL BOTH
    AND BE ONE TRAVELER, LONG I STOOD
    AND LOOKED DOWN ONE AS FAR AS I COULD
    TO WHERE IT BENT IN THE UNDERGROWTH;

    THEN TOOK THE OTHER, AS JUST AS FAIR,
    AND HAVING PERHAPS THE BETTER CLAIM,
    BECAUSE IT WAS GRASSY AND WANTED WEAR;
    THOUGH AS FOR THAT THE PASSING THERE
    HAD WORN THEM REALLY ABOUT THE SAME,

    AND BOTH THAT MORNING EQUALLY LAY
    IN LEAVES NO STEP HAD TRODDEN BLACK.
    OH, I KEPT THE FIRST FOR ANOTHER!
    YET KNOWING HOW WAY LEADS ON TO WAY,
    I DOUBTED IF I SHOULD EVER COME BACK.

    I SHALL BE TELLING THIS WITH A SIGH
    SOMEWHERE AGES AND AGES HENCE;
    TWO ROADS DIVERGED IN A WOOD,AND I--
    I TOOK THE ONE LESS TRAVELED BY,
    AND THAT HAS MADE ALL THE DIFFERENCE.

    "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.

  11. #11
    an innate contradiction verybaddmom's Avatar
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    geez, mikey, you dont have to yell....')
    Then we sat on the edge of the earth, with our feet dangling over the side, and marvelled that we had found each other.

  12. #12
    Crazy Freak
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    This is one of my favorites:

    The lion banner sways and falls
    In the horror-haunted gloom
    A scarlet dragon rustles by
    Borne on winds of doom
    In heaps the shining horesemen lie
    Where the thrusting lances break
    And deep in the haunted mountains
    The lost black gods awake
    Dead hands grope in the shadows
    The stars turn pale with fright
    For this is the Dragon's Hour
    The triumph of Fear and Night

    "The Hour of the Dragon" by Robert E. Howard

  13. #13
    Registered User Diceman's Avatar
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    The End Of The Weekend by Anthony Hecht:
    http://plagiarist.com/poetry/2410/
    "A good night's sleep is no substitute for caffeine."

  14. #14
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    I turned to speak to God
    About the world's despair:
    But to make matters worse
    I found He wasn't there.

    God turned to speak to me
    (don't anybody laugh)
    God found I wasn't there _
    At least not over half.

    Robert Frost

  15. #15
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    Love and Friendship

    Love is like a wild rose briar
    Friendship like the holly tree -
    The holly is dark when the rose briar blooms
    But which will bloom more constantly?

    The wild rose briar is sweet in spring,
    It's summer blossoms scent the air,
    Yet wait till winter come again
    And who will call the briar fair?

    Then scorn the silly rose wreath now
    And deck thee with the holly's sheen
    And when December blights thy brow
    He still may leave thy garland green.

    Emily Bronte

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