Favorite poem?

[ennison]

And just to show you that I like short amusing poetry too.


The Diatonic Dittymunch

The Diatonic Dittymunch plucked music from the air,
He swallowed scores of symphonies and still had space to spare.
Sonatas and cantatas slithered sweetly down his throat;
He made ballads into salads and consumed them note by note.

He ate marches and mazurkas; he ate rhapsodies and reels,
Minuets and tarantellas were the staples of his meals.
But the Diatonic Dittymunch outdid himself one day:
He ate a three-act opera --
And LOUDLY passed away.

Jack Prelutsky

[mvr_moorthy]

I like the following poem by Theodore Rothke.

I remember the neck curls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her;
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spring shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over the damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

[musewind]

who knew poems in China
I AM A STUDENT IN CHINA MY ENGLISH IN NOT VERY WELL
[email protected]

[musewind]

Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Quietly I wave good-bye
To the rosy clouds in the western sky.



The golden willows by the riverside
Are young brides in the setting sun;
Their reflections on the shimmering waves
Always linger in the depth of my heart.



The floatingheart growing in the sludge
Sways leisurely under the water;
In the gentle waves of Cambridge
I would be a water plant!



That pool under the shade of elm trees
Holds not water but the rainbow from the sky;
Shattered to pieces among the duckweeds
Is the sediment of a rainbow-like dream?



To seek a dream? Just to pole a boat upstream
To where the green grass is more verdant;
Or to have the boat fully loaded with starlight
And sing aloud in the splendour of starlight.



But I cannot sing aloud
Quietness is my farewell music;
Even summer insects heep silence for me
Silent is Cambridge tonight!



Very quietly I take my leave
As quietly as I came here;
Gently I flick my sleeves
Not even a wisp of cloud will I bring away

[Aurora Ariel]

This has to equally be one of my favourite shorter poems that I can still recite by heart.

I Am in Need of Music by Elizabeth Bishop

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

[ElizabethBennet]

I generally love all poems that talk about nature and the great outdoors. Here are a couple of my favourites that keep coming to my mind. The former, in particular, takes me away to a fairyland of distant dreams. (I usually judge poems by how emotionally drawn I feel to them)
1.Ode to a Nightingale

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth.
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: -do I wake or sleep?

John Keats

[ElizabethBennet]

And here's the second one:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Search on this Page:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils,
Beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: -
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -and gazed -but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.

William Wordsworth

[Arania]

To Riesa:

I love Sylvia Plath. Have you read "Two Lovers and A Beachcomber by the Real Sea?"

My favorite poem is T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men." I apologize if someone already posted it.

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[dramasnot6]

Im so glad you like that poem too Arania! It is one of my favorites, definetly in my top 3 poems.
My favorite part is:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Absolutely brilliant

[Yelena]

Here's my favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:
Again—his voice is at the door—
I feel the old Degree—
I hear him ask the servant
For such an one—as me—

I take a flower—as I go—
My face to justify—
He never saw me—in this life—
I might surprise his eye!

I cross the Hall with mingled steps—
I—silent—pass the door—
I look on all this world contains—
Just his face—nothing more!

We talk in careless—and it toss—
A kind of plummet strain—
Each—sounding—shyly—
Just—how—deep—
The other’s one—had been—

We walk—I leave my Dog—at home—
A tender—thoughtful Moon—
Goes with us—just a little way—
And—then—we are alone—

Alone—if Angels are “alone”—
First time they try the sky!
Alone—if those “veiled faces”—be—
We cannot count—on High!

I’d give—to live that hour—again—
The purple—in my Vein—
But He must count the drops—himself—
My price for every stain!

[ktd222]

Here's my favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:
Again—his voice is at the door—
I feel the old Degree—
I hear him ask the servant
For such an one—as me—

I take a flower—as I go—
My face to justify—
He never saw me—in this life—
I might surprise his eye!

I cross the Hall with mingled steps—
I—silent—pass the door—
I look on all this world contains—
Just his face—nothing more!

We talk in careless—and it toss—
A kind of plummet strain—
Each—sounding—shyly—
Just—how—deep—
The other’s one—had been—

We walk—I leave my Dog—at home—
A tender—thoughtful Moon—
Goes with us—just a little way—
And—then—we are alone—

Alone—if Angels are “alone”—
First time they try the sky!
Alone—if those “veiled faces”—be—
We cannot count—on High!

I’d give—to live that hour—again—
The purple—in my Vein—
But He must count the drops—himself—
My price for every stain!

That's a nice choice, Yelena. Though, I, myself consider hundreds of her poems among my favorites. She makes me so sad when she speaks of instances so amplified in importance to her, but of little meaning to the other in her poem.

[Poetess]

I don`t have a particular one, if it`s right to say "paticular ones".
I love all of Poe`s and Emily Dickinson`s.
First of all, I was growing very fond of William Blake and William Wordsworth.
I like the figurative language and scenes of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth;
I don`t have enough of reading "The World Is Too Much with Us" by Wordsworth, too, which shows how and what`s wrong with out modern world.
"In the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us" the poet contrasts Nature with the world of materialism and "making it." Because we are insensitive to the richness of Nature, we may be forfeiting our souls. To us there is nothing wonderful or mysterious about the natural world, but ancients who were pagans created a colorful mythology out of their awe of Nature."

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; (1)
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, (2)
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus (3) rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton (4) blow his wreathed horn.




Apart from that:


Acquainted with the Night


I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost

.............................................



"I Am Not Yours"


I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Sarah Teasdale

[Arania]

What about Poe´s For Annie? It was my first ¨favorite poem.¨ I love the meter. It is beautiful. I´m going to post it. I promise it´s worth the read.

THANK Heaven! the crisis—
The danger is past,
And the lingering illness
Is over at last—
And the fever called 'Living' 5
Is conquer'd at last.

Sadly, I know
I am shorn of my strength,
And no muscle I move
As I lie at full length: 10
But no matter—I feel
I am better at length.

And I rest so composedly
Now, in my bed,
That any beholder 15
Might fancy me dead—
Might start at beholding me,
Thinking me dead.

The moaning and groaning,
The sighing and sobbing, 20
Are quieted now,
With that horrible throbbing
At heart—ah, that horrible,
Horrible throbbing!

The sickness—the nausea— 25
The pitiless pain—
Have ceased, with the fever
That madden'd my brain—
With the fever called 'Living'
That burn'd in my brain. 30

And O! of all tortures
That torture the worst
Has abated—the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the naphthaline river 35
Of Passion accurst—
I have drunk of a water
That quenches all thirst.

—Of a water that flows,
With a lullaby sound, 40
From a spring but a very few
Feet under ground—
From a cavern not very far
Down under ground.

And ah! let it never 45
Be foolishly said
That my room it is gloomy,
And narrow my bed;
For man never slept
In a different bed— 50
And, to sleep, you must slumber
In just such a bed.

My tantalized spirit
Here blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never 55
Regretting its roses—
Its old agitations
Of myrtles and roses:

For now, while so quietly
Lying, it fancies 60
A holier odour
About it, of pansies—
A rosemary odour,
Commingled with pansies—
With rue and the beautiful 65
Puritan pansies.

And so it lies happily,
Bathing in many
A dream of the truth
And the beauty of Annie— 70
Drown'd in a bath
Of the tresses of Annie.

She tenderly kiss'd me,
She fondly caress'd,
And then I fell gently 75
To sleep on her breast—
Deeply to sleep
From the heaven of her breast.

When the light was extinguish'd,
She cover'd me warm, 80
And she pray'd to the angels
To keep me from harm—
To the queen of the angels
To shield me from harm.

And I lie so composedly, 85
Now, in my bed
(Knowing her love),
That you fancy me dead—
And I rest so contentedly,
Now, in my bed 90
(With her love at my breast),
That you fancy me dead—
That you shudder to look at me,
Thinking me dead.

But my heart it is brighter 95
Than all of the many
Stars in the sky,
For it sparkles with Annie—
It glows with the light
Of the love of my Annie— 100
With the thought of the light
Of the eyes of my Annie.

[Janine]

Just saw this poem on Poets' Corner and thought it was appropriate to the site:

Fragment

What is poetry? Is it a mosaic
Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought
Into a pattern? Rather glass that's taught
By patient labor any hue to take
And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make
Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught,
Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught
With storied meaning for religion's sake.

Amy Lowell

[Janine]

"I Am Not Yours"


I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

Sarah Teasdale

Poetess, I love this poem by Sarah Teasdale, have for many years now. I love her poetry so much; I have a book of her collection, but cannot presently find it...hidden somewhere in the deepest recesses of my bookshelves. :(
I enjoyed the other poems you posted very much. Loved the Frost poem about night...never heard it before. Janine

[ALI ASGHAR JOYO]

Whether hot or cold march on,
There is no time to rest
Lest you fail to find your beloved`s track


O sleeper awake arise sleep no so,
Royal affection can not be achieved by sleeping more.

[Ruede]

T. S. Eliot's Prufrock;

Robert Frost's Fire and Ice;

Alexander Pope's stuff, including Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot;

Robert Browning's My Last Duchess;

John Donne's The Tripple Fool;

...so many... so many! :/

[julien]

In Tagalong
Isangmahol means one love
One word
To express one thing
Where the English language
Imposes separation.

How could one not mean love?
And how could love not mean one?

I know I'm being simple
But I don't have time
For complicated line breaks
Or confusing word structures.
Basically,
I don't have time for bull****.

Love may leave me soon.
So I must embrace it
While I've got it.
And you've got to flaunt what you've got
'cuz
if there's one thing I've learned
from the immigrant experience
it's that a silenced heart
is one that never loves.

The quiet of a hardship never shared
In songs or hugs
Is death.

And the sins of the father unresolved
Fall onto the sun.
And so I yell from stage to stage
On page
And in person.
"I love you."
And mean it.
And back it up.

And have two fists and two fast ****ing kung-fu kicking legs to take down
Anyone
Who says otherwise of me.
'cuz I will not doubt love
in a rough skinned world
of helpless angles clipped
because they feel isolated.

Beautiful creatures broken by
Systems and cultures and wars
Who leave homelands searching
Instead of reaching out for home in others
Through shared experience.

You'll be amazed at what a common childhood will do
For two who have always felt alone.
And what holding that person will be like
For the rest of your life on.

I must live love always.

I don't write these words
To make it easy.

I write them to remind myself
How much work I have left,
How many layers I must melt,
How many more people
I have to quit excluding.

I'm not noble.
My anger and hate occupy spaces
Only love should.
But I'd rather acknowledge something
That I can work on
Than deny something
That will later consume me.

That's right.
I'm talking about you.
I'm calling you out.
All uncomfortable people
At this point are marked.

Be warned.
Shape up.
Or else you'll be loved
When you least expect it.
You want to be loved, now don't you?

But don't think love it just
A hug and a smile,
A good **** and duty,
A phase and a poem.
Love
is none of these things solely
but all of these things plus.

Plus I got your back when tears exhaust.
Plus I got your back when they come for us.
Plus
I got you
So I'll check ego
In return for us.

This is a call to arms.
A first step in a revolution long overdue.

This is a war, people.

Do you want to die with regret?
Do you want to die holding back?
Do you want to die alone?

Live love always
And I will love you
As long as I live.

Isangmahol.
Isangmahol.
Isangmahol.


Isangmahol by Beau Sia.
--------------------------------------

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Spring and Fall, to a Young Child by Gerard Manley Hopkins

[Elyx]

when i was a boy, some 15 years ago, i had watched a film about WW2 pilots....Memphis Belle, if i'm not mistaken. somewhere in the film....a line caught my attention and had since lodged in my mind.

Those that i fight i do not hate,
those that i guard i do not love . . .

it created some sort of lofty sensation my young heart never knew....even now, with 15 years in between me and the boy i was, the feeling never really left my mind -- a feeling of solitude amidst a world of strife and disillusioment, mutability and....me. from then on, whenever i HAD to choose a poem i love most, it would be --

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death

I know that i shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that i fight i do not hate,
Those that i guard i do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

[Janine]

when i was a boy, some 15 years ago, i had watched a film about WW2 pilots....Memphis Belle, if i'm not mistaken. somewhere in the film....a line caught my attention and had since lodged in my mind.

Those that i fight i do not hate,
those that i guard i do not love . . .

it created some sort of lofty sensation my young heart never knew....even now, with 15 years in between me and the boy i was, the feeling never really left my mind -- a feeling of solitude amidst a world of strife and disillusioment, mutability and....me. from then on, whenever i HAD to choose a poem i love most, it would be --

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death

I know that i shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that i fight i do not hate,
Those that i guard i do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Elyx, interesting and sad poem. I also saw "Memphis Bell" years ago and have been wanting to see the film again. I remember it was really good. Some of the actors in it were quite young then and went on to be big stars.
Do you know who wrote the poem you posted and how did you locate it?
I wondered if a true airman wrote it and would like to know more of the history of the poem, for instance if he really met his death...if so how sad. I understand there was a real plane "Memphis Bell". I just saw a documentary on a film dircector, William Wyer and he joined up during WWII and he flew in the plane to take documentary films. He also manned the guns and became partially deaf because of the intense sound; then he was discharged from the service. He directed such great films as "Ben Hur" and "Best Years of Our Lives". You may know all this but thought it would be of interest to you and others.

[Elyx]

An Irish Airman Forsees His Death was written by the Irish William Butler Yeats ( 1865 - 1939 ), a Nobel poet, freedom fighter, and in my opinion, the last romanticist to have braced the modern world. this is of course purely subjective, as many view him as the paragon of modernistic disillusionment.

Yeats never fought in arms....his is a war within, a constant dilemma between spiritual sublimity and the earthly struggle of his people. His peotry hence becomes a medium through which he attempts to conciliate these contending passions. it is for this reason his poems emanate a sense of philosophical fatigue that in turn reflects the modern world more accurately than his contemporaries have.

alot more could be said of Yeats; and even what little i have stated, others would disagree. but one thing is certain: W.B.Yeats is among the best of poets in the western world.

[dumwitliteratur]

I have many favorites but if I had to post on it would be "The Glove And The Lions" by James Leigh Hunt

King Francis was a hearty king, and loved a royal sport,
And one day as his lions fought, sat looking on the court;
The nobles filled the benches, and the ladies in their pride,
And 'mongst them sat the Count de Lorge, with one for whom he sighed:
And truly 'twas a gallant thing to see that crowning show,
Valour and love, and a king above, and the royal beasts below.

Ramped and roared the lions, with horrid laughing jaws;
They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams, a wind went with their paws;
With wallowing might and stifled roar they rolled on one another;
Till all the pit with sand and mane was in a thunderous smother;
The bloody foam above the bars came whisking through the air;
Said Francis then, "Faith, gentlemen, we're better here than there."

De Lorge's love o'erheard the King, a beauteous lively dame
With smiling lips and sharp bright eyes, which always seemed the same;
She thought, the Count my lover is brave as brave can be;
He surely would do wondrous things to show his love of me;
King, ladies, lovers, all look on; the occasion is divine;
I'll drop my glove, to prove his love; great glory will be mine.

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady's face.
"By God!" said Francis, "rightly done!" and he rose from where he sat:
"No love," quoth he, "but vanity, sets love a task like that."

[omegaxx]

Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is my all-time favourite. I took on literature in college because of that single poem. Some lines are embarassing to read aloud; so what? The poem still transports me far and wide and leaves me enraptured in the clouds. "Mount Blanc" is another poem I heart. Yes I heart Shelley.


Ode to the West Wind


I


O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!


II


Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!


III


Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!


IV


If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.


V


Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

[omegaxx]

Here's my favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:
Again—his voice is at the door—
I feel the old Degree—
I hear him ask the servant
For such an one—as me—

I take a flower—as I go—
My face to justify—
He never saw me—in this life—
I might surprise his eye!

I cross the Hall with mingled steps—
I—silent—pass the door—
I look on all this world contains—
Just his face—nothing more!

We talk in careless—and it toss—
A kind of plummet strain—
Each—sounding—shyly—
Just—how—deep—
The other’s one—had been—

We walk—I leave my Dog—at home—
A tender—thoughtful Moon—
Goes with us—just a little way—
And—then—we are alone—

Alone—if Angels are “alone”—
First time they try the sky!
Alone—if those “veiled faces”—be—
We cannot count—on High!

I’d give—to live that hour—again—
The purple—in my Vein—
But He must count the drops—himself—
My price for every stain!

OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG
This just got me sobbing and sniffling away here:bawling: :bawling: :bawling:

[brokenheartpoet]

The Raven by Edgar allen poe

[Logos]

"Last Words To A Dumb Friend"

Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall -
Foot suspended in its fall -
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should--by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance -
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man's will,
Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

Thomas Hardy, October 2, 1904.

[Janine]

"Last Words To A Dumb Friend"

Pet was never mourned as you,
Purrer of the spotless hue,
Plumy tail, and wistful gaze
While you humoured our queer ways,
Or outshrilled your morning call
Up the stairs and through the hall -
Foot suspended in its fall -
While, expectant, you would stand
Arched, to meet the stroking hand;
Till your way you chose to wend
Yonder, to your tragic end.

Never another pet for me!
Let your place all vacant be;
Better blankness day by day
Than companion torn away.
Better bid his memory fade,
Better blot each mark he made,
Selfishly escape distress
By contrived forgetfulness,
Than preserve his prints to make
Every morn and eve an ache.

From the chair whereon he sat
Sweep his fur, nor wince thereat;
Rake his little pathways out
Mid the bushes roundabout;
Smooth away his talons' mark
From the claw-worn pine-tree bark,
Where he climbed as dusk embrowned,
Waiting us who loitered round.

Strange it is this speechless thing,
Subject to our mastering,
Subject for his life and food
To our gift, and time, and mood;
Timid pensioner of us Powers,
His existence ruled by ours,
Should--by crossing at a breath
Into safe and shielded death,
By the merely taking hence
Of his insignificance -
Loom as largened to the sense,
Shape as part, above man's will,
Of the Imperturbable.

As a prisoner, flight debarred,
Exercising in a yard,
Still retain I, troubled, shaken,
Mean estate, by him forsaken;
And this home, which scarcely took
Impress from his little look,
By his faring to the Dim
Grows all eloquent of him.

Housemate, I can think you still
Bounding to the window-sill,
Over which I vaguely see
Your small mound beneath the tree,
Showing in the autumn shade
That you moulder where you played.

Thomas Hardy, October 2, 1904.

Logos, this poem is so sweet. I love Hardy but never read this one before. I have many departed animal friends - cats, a rabbit and a goose, and this really hit me right (painfully) in the heart like an arrow. Thanks for posting such a great poem.

[Logos]

Yeah, I thought it was a gem, had to post it. I had no idea Thomas Hardy wrote so much poetry, I'm adding *dozens* of his poems now, should be on the site in a few days :)

[Janine]

Yeah, I thought it was a gem, had to post it. I had no idea Thomas Hardy wrote so much poetry, I'm adding *dozens* of his poems now, should be on the site in a few days :)

Logos, Those additions would be so nice. Hardy wrote tons of poetry. In fact, I found this out, since I used to belong to a Hardy group; he gave up writing novels after "Jude the Obscure" and wrote poetry exclusively. He thought himself more a poet than a novelist. A friend of mine knows so much about Hardy and visited England just to see Hardy country...he loved it. He is totally obsessed with Hardy and he is now pursuing the full volume of his poetry, but being native born Japanese, it is quite difficult for him. I have one book of his poems, but I don't think I noticed this one. I will have to check and see if it is in my book. I will definitely copy your post of the poem to keep in a file on my hard-drive. Thanks again for posting it.
I haven't seen you around lately so it is nice to see you tonight ~ Janine

[raspberry_jelly]

DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime .-
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

By Wilfred Owen


SONNET 116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

By W.Shakespeare

[Drummerzzz]

I read this poem after randomly surfing the web and I've been reading it over and over.

itzamatch.com/smorgazboard_imprezzionz_stirrings.jsp

stirrings. stirrings.

Drip from my body like water
Cleanse me away as you slide off
And onto the ground
Slithering away into the sewers

Are you not entertained as I
By the night's lusty proceedings
Kept, stoked, to juicy consistency
Till oozing in abundance
We could no longer hold it back.

I feel toxic, yet however clean I now feel
I have seen you in the darkness
Bent to bite your neck and taste your saltiness
Bitten into your flesh and savored your pink meat
I savored your moans before biting into you
Lower. Deeper. The hotness of your body
Oil glistening on my skin.

cold ashes.

Mingled about
The tears of passion and desire
I've claimed rapture
Only to fall back spent within
Like so many empty vessels of wine and beer
More, I crave
Till I've killed the woman in you.
The beast
I've raised
I've killed with the weapons
My fathers' loins gave me.

So take me, oh, to your gentling dreams
For I cannot thrash in delight
At such wanton,
To see her mouth full of myself
To see her eyes slaked of its hunger
To fill her depths of thirst
Now abated, now spent

Perhaps when I was younger
The passing into immortality
Would not have been as painful
As it is,

As it is.

[fallingup]

ee cummings.. i haven't read this whole thread so it may have already been posted, as it is one of his most famous -

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

[mjc]

Hi, first time on. Has Keats' Ode to a Nightengale been said a lot? or his La belle dame sans merci. But I also like Pound and The Wasteland...

[Cheese King]

Wow, long thread! My favorites are The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson:

http://www.bartleby.com/236/239.html

And "Recuerdo" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

WE were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

[dorindapaige]

The Lady of Shallot - Tennyson
Ozymandias - Shelley
My Last Duchess - Browning
Death, Be Not Proud - Donne
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Thomas
A Poison Tree - Blake
Nothing Gold Can Stay - Frost
Richard Cory - EA Robinson
O Captain! My Captain! - Whitman
Sonnet 121 - Shakespeare

[Lyn]

I met ayont the cairney
a lass wi tousie hair
Singin till a bairnie
That wis nae langer there

Wunds wi warlds tae swing
Widne sing sae sweet
The licht than bends owre aa thing
Is less taen up wi it.

Hugh MacDiarmid.

and Sonnet 116. Did it at school, loved it ever since. And the Wasteland. And of course, Paradise Lost. And anything by Norman MacCaig. He is, indeed, a God of poetry.

[kilted exile]

And anything by Norman MacCaig.

On the topic of MacCaig, my favourite of his was always:

Assisi

The dwarf with his hands on backwards
Sat, slumped like a half filled sack
On tiny twisted legs from which
Sawdust might run,
Outside the three tiers of churches built
In honour of St Francis, brother
Of the poor, talker with birds, Over whom
He had the advantage
Of not being dead yet

A priest explained
How clever it was of Giotto
To make his frescoes tell stories
That would reveal to the illiterate the goodness
Of God and the suffering
Of His Son. I understood
The explanation and
The cleverness.

A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
Fluttered around him as he scattered
The grain of the word. It was they who had passed
The ruined temple outside, whose eyes
Wept pus, whose back was higher
Than his head, whose lopsided mouth
Said, Grazie in a voice as sweet
As a child's when she speaks to her mother
Or a bird's, when it spoke
To St Francis

Another couple of my favourite poems by 20th Century Scots are:

One Cigarette (Edwin Morgan)

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed in on my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled in wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

&

For the unknown seamen of the 1939 - 1945 war (Iain Crichton Smith)

One would like to be able to write something for them
not for the sake of writing but because
a man should be named in dying as well as living,
in drowning as well as on death-bed, and because
the brain being brain must try to establish laws.

Yet these events are not amenable
to any discipline that we can impose
and are not in the end even imaginable.
What happened was simply this, bad luck for those
who have lain here twelve years in a changing pose

These things happen and there's no explaining,
and to call them "chosen" might abuse a word.
It is better also not to assume a mourning,
moaning stance. These may well have concurred
in whatever struck them through the absurd

or maybe meaningful. One simply doesn't
know enough, or understand what came
out of the altering weather in a fashioned
descriptive phrase that was common to each name
or may have surrounded each like a dear frame.

Best not to make much of it and leave these seamen
in the equally altering acre they now have
inherited from strangers though yet human.
They fell from sea to earth, from grave to grave,
and, griefless now, taught others how to grieve.

[ennison]

It's long but one I like. Not my favourite because I cannot make a choice like that. This is Francis Thompson's 'The Hound of Heaven.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat -- and a voice beat
More instant than the Feet --
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
I pleaded, outlaw-wise,
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities;
(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
Yet was I sore adread
Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside.)
But, if one little casement parted wide,
The gust of his approach would clash it to :
Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars ;
Fretted to dulcet jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
I said to Dawn : Be sudden -- to Eve : Be soon ;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover--
Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see !
I tempted all His servitors, but to find
My own betrayal in their constancy,
In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
To all swift things for swiftness did I sue ;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue ;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged his chariot 'thwart a heaven,
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet :--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
Still with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
Came on the following Feet,
And a Voice above their beat--
"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
I sought no more that after which I strayed,
In face of man or maid ;
But still within the little children's eyes
Seems something, something that replies,
They at least are for me, surely for me !
I turned me to them very wistfully ;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
"Come then, ye other children, Nature's -- share
With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship ;
Let me greet you lip to lip,
Let me twine with you caresses,
Wantoning
With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
Banqueting
With her in her wind-walled palace,
Underneath her azured daïs,
Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
From a chalice
Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
So it was done :
I in their delicate fellowship was one --
Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
I knew all the swift importings
On the wilful face of skies ;
I knew how the clouds arise
Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings ;
All that's born or dies
Rose and drooped with ; made them shapers
Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine ;
With them joyed and was bereaven.
I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities.
I laughed in the morning's eyes.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine ;
Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat,
And share commingling heat ;
But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
For ah ! we know not what each other says,
These things and I ; in sound I speak--
Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth ;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o' her tenderness ;
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.
Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
With unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy ;
And past those noisèd Feet
A Voice comes yet more fleet --
"Lo ! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."
Naked I wait thy Love's uplifted stroke !
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee ;
I am defenceless utterly.
I slept, methinks, and woke,
And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
I shook the pillaring hours
And pulled my life upon me ; grimed with smears,
I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years --
My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist ;
Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding ; cords of all too weak account
For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.
Ah ! is Thy love indeed
A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
Suffering no flowers except its own to mount ?
Ah ! must --
Designer infinite !--
Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it ?
My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust ;
And now my heart is as a broken fount,
Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
From the dank thoughts that shiver
Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
Such is ; what is to be ?
The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind ?
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity ;
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned ;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death ?
Now of that long pursuit
Comes on at hand the bruit ;
That Voice is round me like a bursting sea :
"And is thy earth so marred,
Shattered in shard on shard ?
Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest me !
"Strange, piteous, futile thing !
Wherefore should any set thee love apart ?
Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),
"And human love needs human meriting :
How hast thou merited --
Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot ?
Alack, thou knowest not
How little worthy of any love thou art !
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
Save Me, save only Me ?
All which I took from thee I did but take,
Not for thy harms,
But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child's mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home :
Rise, clasp My hand, and come !"
Halts by me that footfall :
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly ?
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He Whom thou seekest !
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me."

[Sarasvati]

Matthew Arnold:

Requiscat

Strew on her roses, roses,
And never a spray of yew.
In quiet she reposes;
Ah, would that I did too!

Her mirth the world required;
She bathed it in smiles of glee.
But her heart was tired, tired,
And now they let her be.

Her life was turning, turning,
In mazes of heat and sound.
But for peace her soul was yearning,
And now peace laps her round.

Her cabin'd ample spirit,
It fultter'd and fail'd for breath.
Tonight it doth inherit
The vasty hall of death.

[Mrs. Dalloway]

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B.Yeats

and also

The Stolen Child

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

W.B.Yeats

[hockeychick8792]

This has to be one of my favorites. It is short sweet and romantic
I wrote your name in the sky,
but the wind blew it away.
I wrote your name in the sand,
but the waves washed it away.
I wrote your name in my heart,
and forever it will stay.

Here is another that I adore
I Asked God
- John Raine -
I asked God for a flower, he gave me a bouquet
I asked God for a minute, he gave me a day
I asked God for true love, he gave me that too
I asked for an angel and he gave me you.

[Sarasvati]

I feel I should be more specific. "Requiscat" is beautiful, but definitely won't be my favorite poem for long.

I enjoy e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Stephen Crane, Carl Sandburg, and Dorothy Parker.

I loved Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
And T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

And, Mrs. Dalloway? I like that Yeats poem too. :)

[Mrs. Dalloway]

Which one? :D The Stolen Child or the other? They're great!
I also like the Ancient Mariner!!:p It's the only poem I like from Coleridge.

[dboodoofortune]

Conrad Aiken's 'Window', and TS Eliot's 'Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock'... both definitely come to mind when I think of my favourites! Other favourite poets of mine are Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda

[Niamh]

W.B.Yeats

The Stolen Child

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scare could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

W.B.Yeats

Good choice!;)

[AChristieFan]

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, whom is my favorite Poet.:) :) :) :) :)

[ejarg7]

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, whom is my favorite Poet.:) :) :) :) :)

Hey, that's my favorite too! I also like The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. :)

[lumos]

"You ask me 'why I like him.'
Nay
I cannot; nay I would not, say.
I think it vile to pidgeonhole
The pros and cons of a kindred soul.

You 'wonder he should be my friend.'
But then why should you comprehend
Thank God for this--a new--surprise:
My eyes, remember, are not your eyes.

Cherish this one small mystery
And marvel not that love can be
"In spite of all his many flaws.'
In spite? Supposing I said
'Because.'

A truce, a truce to questioning:
'We two are friends' tells everything.
Yet if you must know, this is why:
Because he is he, and I am I.

Friends, by Edward Verrall Lucas.

[Lily Adams]

I always thought this one was really cute:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you a nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us-don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

-Emliy Dickinson

[autumn rose]

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

I love that poem!

[Janine]

I love these poems!
I love Lily Adam's entry. I read that poem many times before - it is so simple and so great!
I love Lumos' entry - I have never heard that poem before, but I have heard a poem that is much like it in theme. I must try to recall who wrote it and post it soon.
The poem that Niamh quoted that Mrs. Dalloway posted originally - the Yeats poem - "The Stolen Child" - Loreena Mckennitt records a version of that poem that I just adore. It is so soulful.
Mrs. Dalloway - the first poem is beautiful, too - who wrote it?
Hockychick - that is a sweet little poem.
Sarsavati - I love e.e.cummings and I adore "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I also love "The Road Not Taken" by Frost.

There are too many wonderful poems to choose a best one or favorite. Soon, when I have more time I will post some of mine. I have many, many favorites.:)

[Lily Adams]

Oh yes, isn't it?

"How dreary to be public..." :nod:

[Mrs. Dalloway]

I love these poems!
I love Lily Adam's entry. I read that poem many times before - it is so simple and so great!
I love Lumos' entry - I have never heard that poem before, but I have heard a poem that is much like it in theme. I must try to recall who wrote it and post it soon.
The poem that Niamh quoted that Mrs. Dalloway posted originally - the Yeats poem - "The Stolen Child" - Loreena Mckennitt records a version of that poem that I just adore. It is so soulful.
Mrs. Dalloway - the first poem is beautiful, too - who wrote it?
Hockychick - that is a sweet little poem.
Sarsavati - I love e.e.cummings and I adore "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". I also love "The Road Not Taken" by Frost.

There are too many wonderful poems to choose a best one or favorite. Soon, when I have more time I will post some of mine. I have many, many favorites.:)

Both were written by William Butler Yeats! :D

[aabbcc]

It is hard for me to speak of "favourite" poem(s) as I adore so many of them, but if I had to make some selection, these would probably be in it:

V.Petković Dis - "Možda spava" ["Perhaps she is sleeping"], "Nirvana", "Utopljene duše" ["Drowned Souls"], in fact, I could probably claim most of the poems from his opus to be my favourites. I do not know if Dis has ever been translated into English, but his poems are of indescribable beauty;
K.H.Mácha - "Máj";
A.G.Matoš - "Utjeha kose" ["The Consolation of the Hair"], "Jesenje veče" ["An autumn evening"];
C.Pavese - "Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi" ["The Death shall come and it shall have your eyes"];
innumerable of the poems written by A.Šantić and F.Tjutchev;
Sappho's "Φαίνεται μοι κήνος ίσος θέοισιν", and its Latin translation "Ille mi par esse deo videtur".

[Omniglot]

When I have Fears that I may cease to be

WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

Keats

[symphony]

may be this is way too common, but i just cant help thinking of Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind' and 'To a Skylark' when someone asks me about favourite poem hehe.

Cant resist falling in love(over and over again) with particularly this part--

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

And, in "to a Skylark"---

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see,
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:
....
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know;
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Plus I'm also in love with the 1st stanza of "Lines to an Indian Air", in fact i even dared translate the 1st stanza once in bengali :blush: !

Oh and i'm total nuts about "Triumph of Death", "Dirge of Love", "To me Fair Friend, u never can be old...." and etc by Shakespeare. But its just normal to be nuts about Shakespeare i guess! :D

Oh and did i mention Rubaiyat-e-Omar Khayyam?! AND a 100 other odes by Rabindranath Tagore?! :p

Argh this can go on forever! :sick:

[Aiculík]

Although I love many poets and poems, my all-time favourite is Jacques Prévert's Barbara. Fallen in love with it on the first read. :)

[Uncle Lar]

Hello! My favorite Poem is,

The Song of Wandering Aengus
by William Butler Yeats

"I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

"When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

"Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun."

Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Uncle Lar

[DeathAngel]

a lot of people i no say they hate poetry "it's too confusing, why don't they just get to the freakin point, if you love her take her, quite tryna show off",
lol, in a way, i must agree

but there's no harm in writing art, is there?

i have too many favorite poets, but i value Poe's the most...he still remains a mystery to this day.....ooooooo

"The Raven"

and if not him than shakespeare, who takes forever to get to his thesis, haha...

[mercy_mankind]

hi,,
this is very good topic
thanks so much

[Riesa]

found this the other day and just had to share: tempted to add it to my sig.

Wild to sit on a haypile,
Writing Haikus,
Drinkin wine

Jack Kerouac

[Virgil]

found this the other day and just had to share: tempted to add it to my sig.

Wild to sit on a haypile,
Writing Haikus,
Drinkin wine

Jack Kerouac

:lol: Maybe I'll add it to my signature. Great find, Reisa. :thumbs_up

[chasestalling]

I value little those much vaunted rights
that have for some the lure of dizzy heights.
I do not fret because the gods refuse
to let me wrangle over revenues
or thwart the wars of kings. 'Tis to me
of no concern whether the press be free
to dupe poor oafs or if censors cramp
the current fancies of some scrbbling scamp.
These things are words, words, words. My spirit fights
for deeper liberties, for better rights.
Whom shall we serve -- the people or the state?
The poet does not care. So let them wait.
To give account to none, to be one's own
vassal and lord, to please oneself alone,
to bend neither one's neck nor inner schemes
nor conscience to obtain some thing that seems
power but is a flunky's coat; to stroll
in one's own wake, admiring the divine
beauties of nature, and to feel one's soul
melt in the glow of man's inspired design
-- that is the blessing, those are the rights!

[sumalan monica]

Favouite poem is one who is close to your heart and represents your beliefs in everything you do.I mean something like a motto;
Favourite poem is written in order to be read and interpreted,in order to maintain your inner harmony.

[tinustijger]

Hey, in Holland there's a saying 'gedeelde smart is halve smart' which means something like: shared pain is half the pain. This Dutch poet opposes this saying in the following poem, it's my favourite Dutch poem.

Verborgen smart is halve smart

Ik zal niet droevig klagen,
Dat niemand mij troost in mijn leed;
Juist daarom kan ik het dragen,
Omdat geen mensch het weet.

Geen troost, geen mededoogen,
Maakt ooit dit hart gezond,
Want zagen nieuwsgierige oogen
De groote, open wond,

En peilden nieuwsgierige handen
Hoe diep die wonden zijn,
Hoe smartelijk zouden ze branden
Met haast onduldbare pijn!

Want iedere blik zou schrijnen,
Wat toch reeds zo moeilijk geneest.
Alleen door rustig te schijnen
Ben ik ook rustig geweest.

Jacqueline E. van der Waals

I tried to translate it, but ofcourse I can convey nothing of the beauty of this poem.. Now it's just words, in Dutch it's much more!
Well anyway:

I won’t sadly complain
That no-one comforts me in my suffering
That’s how I can endure it
Because no-one knows

No consolation, no compassion
Will ever cure this heart
When curious eyes would see
These big open wounds

And curious hands would measure
How deep these wounds are
How heartbreaking they’d burn
With almost insufferable pain!

Because every look would burn
That which is already hard to cure
Only by calmly pretending
I too have been calm.

[Sylph]

there's a long list of my fav poems, now a days, these 2 r my most fav


A Ballade of Suicide

The gallows in my garden, people say,


Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way

As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"

The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay--


My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--

Perhaps the rector's mother will not call-- I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--

I never read the works of Juvenal--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing-day;


The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,

And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray

So secret that the very sky seems small--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;

Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

- G.K. Chesterton


Death & Dying


Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.


Sylvia Plath

[HappyReader]

There's two little poems that come to mind which I really enjoy.
1. The one l llama he's a priest.
The two l llama he's a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isn't any three l llama.


2. Willie with a thirst for gore
Nailed his sister to the door.
Mother said with humor quaint
Now, Willie dear, don't scratch the paint.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the authors right now; but if anyone else knows who they are feel free to tell us.

"If your tired of problems, your tired of life." H. A. Ted Bailey(or my grandfather.)

[MariahElizabeth]

Part One I The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,The road was a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple moor,And the highwayman came riding- Riding-riding-The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door. IIHe'd a French cocked-hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin,A coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of brown doe-skin;They fitted with never a wrinkle: his boots were up to the thigh!And he rode with a jewelled twinkle, His pistol butts a-twinkle,His rapier hilt a-twinkle, under the jewelled sky. IIIOver the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,And he tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred;He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting thereBut the landlord's black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord's daughter,Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair. IVAnd dark in the old inn-yard a stable-wicket creakedWhere Tim the ostler listened; his face was white and peaked;His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,But he loved the landlord's daughter, The landlord's red-lipped daughter,Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say- V"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart, I'm after a prize to-night,But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light;Yet, if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,Then look for me by moonlight, Watch for me by moonlight,I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way." VIHe rose upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,But she loosened her hair i' the casement! His face burnt like a brandAs the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;And he kissed its waves in the moonlight, (Oh, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the West.Part Two IHe did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon;And out o' the tawny sunset, before the rise o' the moon,When the road was a gipsy's ribbon, looping the purple moor,A red-coat troop came marching- Marching-marching-King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door. IIThey said no word to the landlord, they drank his ale instead,But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed;Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets at their side!There was death at every window; And hell at one dark window;For Bess could see, through the casement, the road that <EM>he</EM> would ride. IIIThey had tied her up to attention, with many a sniggering jest;They bound a musket beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her. She heard the dead man say-<EM>Look for me by moonlight; Watch for me by moonlight;I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way!</EM> IVShe twisted her hands behind her; but all the knots held good!She writhed her hands till here fingers were wet with sweat or blood!They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by likeyears,Till, now, on the stroke of midnight, Cold, on the stroke of midnight,The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers! VThe tip of one finger touched it; she strove no more for the rest!Up, she stood up to attention, with the barrel beneath her breast,She would not risk their hearing; she would not strive again;For the road lay bare in the moonlight; Blank and bare in the moonlight;And the blood of her veins in the moonlight throbbed to her love's refrain. VI<EM> Tlot-tlot; tlot-tlot!</EM> Had they heard it? The horse-hoofsringing clear;<EM>Tlot-tlot, tlot-tlot</EM>, in the distance? Were they deaf that they didnot hear?Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,The highwayman came riding, Riding, riding!The red-coats looked to their priming! She stood up strait and still! VII<EM>Tlot-tlot</EM>, in the frosty silence! <EM>Tlot-tlot</EM>, in the echoing night!Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,Then her finger moved in the moonlight, Her musket shattered the moonlight,Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him-with her death. VIIIHe turned; he spurred to the West; he did not know who stoodBowed, with her head o'er the musket, drenched with her own red blood!Not till the dawn he heard it, his face grew grey to hearHow Bess, the landlord's daughter, The landlord's black-eyed daughter,Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there. IXBack, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!Blood-red were his spurs i' the golden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat,When they shot him down on the highway, Down like a dog on the highway,And he lay in his blood on the highway, with a bunch of lace at his throat. * * * * * * X<EM>And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,A highwayman comes riding- Riding-riding-A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.</EM> XI<EM>Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting thereBut the landlord's black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord's daughter,Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

[aemy]

There's two little poems that come to mind which I really enjoy.
1. The one l llama he's a priest.
The two l llama he's a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isn't any three l llama.

*** HappyReader. # 1 is Ogden Nash; wouldn't be surprised if #2 is also - just type the first line into your search engine (Google?) and the author will pop up.

2. Willie with a thirst for gore
Nailed his sister to the door.
Mother said with humor quaint
Now, Willie dear, don't scratch the paint.

Unfortunately I cannot remember the authors right now; but if anyone else knows who they are feel free to tell us.

"If your tired of problems, your tired of life." H. A. Ted Bailey(or my grandfather.)[/QUOTE]

[Aunty-lion]

e.e. cummings - anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

It's in my signature. I cry every time I read it :bawling:

I love heaps of poems though, I don't know if I have a definite favorite.

Oh, also:


One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.



Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.



Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.



I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn't hard to master.



I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.



--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident

the art of losing's not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[NotWoodhouse]

As you can probably tell by my signature my favorite poem is Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott".

[Aunty-lion]

On either side the river lie....

Yep, I luuuurrrvvvee that one too.

[Franki Griffith]

I would have to say that my favoite poem is The Raven by EAP. I tend to favor writters and authors that have a dark side... the kind that you have to think outside of the box so to speak

[insomnia lodge]

Prufrock!

[pamroder1]

So many poems but the one that speaks to me most personally is "Birches" by Robert Frost. Too long to quote here.
I won't comment-the poem speaks for itself.

[kenikki]

sorry for length but i wanted to share my favourite poems with everyone. Cut is my all time favourite.


Cut

What a thrill -
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they one?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

Sylvia Plath


'Resume'

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker


Twice Shy

Her scarf a la Bardot,
In suede flats for the walk,
She came with me one evening
For air and friendly talk.
We crossed the quiet river,
Took the embankment walk.

Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm:
Dusk hung like a backcloth
That shook where a swan swam,
Tremulous as a hawk
Hanging deadly, calm.

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

Our Juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait,
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late -
Mushroom loves already
Had puffed and burst in hate.

So, chary and excited,
As a thrush linked on a hawk,
We thrilled to the March twilight
With nervous childish talk:
Still waters running deep
Along the embankment walk.

Seamus Heaney

[rsorad3]

OMG!!!!!!!


Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).

14. Hurrahing in Harvest


SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, 5
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!— 10
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

[lewis allan]

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 better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

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

and death i think is no parenthesis


*wipes tears from cheeks* that one gets me every time.

[Danzamx]

I'm going have to say The Raven by Poe

[continuum]

One of my all-time favorites is "Summer Farm" by Norman MacCaig.

http://i17.tinypic.com/6gei101.jpg

[Bii]

There are so many poems I love that it's hard to pick a favourite, but at the moment I'm loving 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W B Yeats which goes:

Had I the heavens embroidered cloths
enwrought with golden and silver light
the blue and the dim and the dark cloths
of night and light and the half-light
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
but I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

[tinustijger]

This is my favourite,, it's just so touching,.


Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

– W.H. Auden

[quasimodo1]

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Life and Works of Cioran

www.Cioran.eu

Cioran, the most important Euro philosopher, spiritualitist and psychologist of the last century.

Related, influences:
Artaud, Baudelaire, Beckett, Bergson, Burke, Camus, Cau, Céline, Codreanu, Dickinson, Diogenes, Drieu La Rochelle, Le Bon, Eliade, Evola, Dostoevsky, Eckhart, Ortega y Gasset, Guénon, Hamsun, Hegel, Heidegger, Hesse, Huxley, Ionescu, Jung, Jünger, Klages, Lenz, London, Lorenz, Mabire, de Maistre, Mann, Maschke, Matzneff, Michaux, Michels, Mishima, Mohler, Montherlant, Mutti, Nagarjuna, Nietzsche, Orwell, Pareto, Pound, Pascal, Poulet, Raspail, de Saint-Exupéry, Sade, Saint-Loup, Saint-Simon, von Salomon, Schopenhauer, Socrates, Schmitt, Savater, Shockley, Spengler, van den Bruck, de Tocqueville, Tolkien

Key words:
Spirituality, Spiritualitist, Philosophy, Philosophers, Psychology, Mysticism, Religion, Traditionalism, Nihilism, Writers, Existentialism, Emile Cioran, Emil Cioran, E.M. Cioran, EM Cioran, Emil Mihai Cioran, Emile M. Cioran

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[quasimodo1]

The beauty of flames lies in their strange play, beyond all proportion and harmony. Their diaphanous flare symbolizes at once grace and tragedy, innocence and despair, sadness and voluptuousness. The burning transcendence has something of the lightness of great purifications. I wish the fiery transcendence would carry me up and throw me into a sea of flames, where, consumed by their delicate and insidious tongues, I would die an ecstatic death. The beauty of flames creates the illusion of a pure, sublime death similar to the light of dawn. Immaterial, death in flames is like a burning of light, graceful wings. Do only butterflies die in flames? What about those devoured by the flames within them?”
sixsixsick Emile M. Cioran quote

[ELizabeth McC]

Alan Ginsberg's Aunt Rose is one of my favourite poems. I was lucky enough to see and hear him preform this. I find it very moving and even more so since my mother's death. I hope it's not a problem to quote it here in its entirety:

TO AUNT ROSE

Aunt Rose—now—might I see you
with your thin face and buck tooth smile and pain
of rheumatism—and a long black heavy shoe
for your bony left leg
limping down the long hall in Newark on the running carpet
past the black grand piano
in the day room
where the parties were
and I sang Spanish loyalist songs
in a high squeaky voice
(hysterical) the committee listening
while you limped around the room
collected the money—
Aunt Honey, Uncle Sam, a stranger with a cloth arm
in his pocket
and huge young bald head
of Abraham Lincoln Brigade

—your long sad face
your tears of sexual frustration
(what smothered sobs and bony hips
under the pillows of Osborne Terrace)
—the time I stood on the toilet sear naked
and you powered my thighs with calamine
against the poison ivy—my tender
and shamed first black curled hairs
what were you thinking in secret heart then
knowing me a man already—
and I an ignorant girl of family silence on the thin pedestal
of my legs in the bathroom—Museum of Newark.

Aunt Rose
Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with
Tamburlane and Emily Brontë

Though I see you walking still, a ghost on Osborne Terrace
down the long dark hall to the front door
limping a little with a pinched smile
in what must have been a silken
flower dress
welcoming my father, the Poet, on his visit to Newark
—see you arriving in the living room
dancing on your crippled leg
and clapping hands his book
had been accepted by Liveright

Hitler is dead and Liveright’s gone out of business
The Attic of the Past and Everlasting Minute are out of print
Uncle Harry sold his last silk stocking
Claire quite interpretive dancing school
Buba sits a wrinkled monument in Old
Ladies Home blinking at new babies

last time I saw you was the hospital
pale skull protruding under ashen skin
blue veined unconscious girl
in an oxygen tent
the war in Spain has ended long ago
Aunt Rose

Paris, June 1958

[anochapr]

I look across the distant sky, staring with curiosity
wondering about who was it that led you to me
There are millions of people, it doesn't make any sense that we met
From a person that believes in nothing, I finally question myself
So, is it really destiny that let us be?
So, we are destined for each other, then could I ask for something?
Please don't ever let us part, let us love one another till death do us part
Can I ask for this?
Back then, I thought my breath was for myself
But when I met you, I just realized that my breath is for you
There are millions of people, it doesn't make any sense that we met
From a person that believes in nothing, finally I have to question myself again
There are still millions of people, there's no reason that I'm the one
From a person that believes in nothing, finally I have to question myself again

please visit my blog about poem
http://poeminlove.blogspot.com

[tulysg1982]

i love keats, Shelley, Eliot , Shakespeare's sonnet and lots more

[annabellee]

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Search on this Page:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[fleurus]

yay Kenniki, you have great taste! As do all of the other posters. "Cut" used to be my favorite poem, I'm curious why it's yours. I'm also a huge fan of Auden, Yeats, and Cummings. Great picks!

My favorite of late is "The Journey of the Magi," by Eliot. Incredible.

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

[annabellee]

[Text: Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee" (A), "Griswold" manuscript, about May of 1849.]
Annabel Lee.
By Edgar A. Poe.

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee; —
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee —
With a love that the wing&#233;d seraphs in Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her high-born kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre,
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me —
Yes! — that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
And neither the angels in Heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: —

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee: —
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea —
In her tomb by the sounding sea.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[This is probably the last poem Poe wrote. In 1850, Frances S. Osgood identified Poe's wife, Virginia, as the real Annabel Lee, an attribution that has meet with much agreement. In contrast, T. O. Mabbott and other scholars have pointed out that although perhaps inspired, in part, by Virginia, Annabel Lee is a fictional character and need not truly represent any real person. Elmira Shelton, Poe's childhood sweetheart, considered herself as Annabel Lee, even though she outlived the author by many years.]

[BlueSkyGB]

Thanks for that one by Poe...
which brings to mind, one of my favs...by Poe also
The Bells...

..."To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells."

[Ineverland]

I could never choose just one so here is my list.

Tulips, Daddy, Insomniac by Sylvia Plath
Night Mail, Funeral Blues by WH Auden
Composed upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth
Howl, Kaddish, A Supermarket in California, America by Allen Ginsberg
Dawn by Federico Garcia Lorca
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
In my craft or art (I think that is the right title) Dylan Thomas
Crow by Ted Hughes

[_JadeRain_]

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)
and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

ee cummings

[Monica]

This poem was in the film "21 Grams".

The Earth Turned to Bring Us Closer

by Eugenio Montejo
translated by Peter Boyle

The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.
Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.
A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;
it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.

[quasimodo1]

Eugenio Montejo is a new name for me. This poem is great; what language (Spanish, Portuguese) does he write in? Also have no idea about the movie. How about a clue? quasimodo1

[Endymion]

I'm pretty sure the original was written in Spanish.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315733/

[quasimodo1]

To Endymion: definitely latin, translates roughly ...why does man exist if only to error, no error has any right to exist ...could be off on that quasi

[Behemoth]

My favourite of the moment has to be Donne's "Witchcraft by a Picture":

I fix mine eye on thine, and there
Pity the picture burning in thine eye;
My picture drowned in a transparent tear
When I look lower I espy;
Hadst thou the wicked skill
By pictures made and marred, to kill,
How many ways mightst thou perform thy will?

But now I have drunk thy sweet salt tears,
And though thou pour more i'll depart;
My picture vanished, vanish fears,
That I can be endamaged by that art;
Though thou retain of me
One picture more, yet that will be,
Being in thine own heart, from all malice free.

[GrayFoxDown]

My favorite poem was,is and will always be Keats' ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. It's concluding lines "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" is the essence of much of what I believe in...regardless of life's complexities and intellectual contentions.

[Monica]

Eugenio Montejo is a new name for me. This poem is great; what language (Spanish, Portuguese) does he write in? Also have no idea about the movie. How about a clue? quasimodo1



Endymion is right, Montejo writes in Spanish. He's from Venezuela, I believe. I got to know about him from the film. In "21 Grams" the main protagonist, played by Sean Penn, quotes the poem. The film is pretty good, I really enjoyed it. Although maybe the plot is a bit complicated, because not chronological.

[Haven]

My favourite from childhood, and if I am not mistaken, my first encounter with poetry.


Rebecca
Hilaire Belloc
Who Slammed Doors For Fun And Perished Miserably

A trick that everyone abhors
In little girls is slamming doors.
A wealthy banker’s little daughter
Who lived in Palace Green, Bayswater
(By name Rebecca Offendort),
Was given to this furious sport.

She would deliberately go
And slam the door like billy-o!
To make her uncle Jacob start.
She was not really bad at heart,
But only rather rude and wild;
She was an aggravating child…

It happened that a marble bust
Of Abraham was standing just
Above the door this little lamb
Had carefully prepared to slam,
And down it came! It knocked her flat!
It laid her out! She looked like that.

Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too,
And showed the deadful end of one
Who goes and slams the door for fun.

The children who were brought to hear
The awful tale from far and near
Were much impressed, and inly swore
They never more would slam the door,
— As often they had done before.
Online text © 1998-2007 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Cautionary Tales for Children | 1920

[Harahara8]

I, too, love Tintern Abbey. Whenever I read the poem aloud, I am amazed at its musicality--I particularly love the line "the sounding cataract haunted me like a passion." I'm less fond of "Immortality Ode," though it rhymes...

Another poem whose musicality haunts me is Mark Strand's The Disquieting Muses, which starts with "Boredom sets in first, and then despair/ One tries to brush it off. It only grows." It's a villanelle, and the recurrence of certain phrases in the poem catches quite well what Wallace Stevens calls "the malady of the quotidian."

Lastly, I'm in love with Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole": the opening lines are "The trees are in their autumn beauty,/ and the woodland paths are dry./ Under the October twilight, the water/ Mirrors the still sky." I can't understand why he could write such a beautiful poem which exploits the slow movement of long vowels in order to create a feeling of nostalgia.

[PrinceMyshkin]

Maybe this has been posted already. I haven't read through all the pages, but am awed by the wonderful choices others have made:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


W. B. Yeats

[IrishBlues]

I Sit and Look Out by: Walt Whitman

I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

[quasimodo1]

To IrishBlues: There was my day, moving along just fine, and here comes THIS post of an amazing poem by Whitman and everything changes. I forgot how great he is, although he did live in Camden, ...thank you IB for a great posting. quasimodo1

[Ludmila607]

Two fauvorites for my.
One by Emily Dickinson ¨I Hide Myself Withing my flower¨¨for its melancholic sweetness.
One, prose poem by the great Charles Baudelaire ¨The eyes of the poor¨...an ode to missunderstanding and the dessillussion of loving someone who dont share the same values of life.

[IrishBlues]

Anytime quasimodo1. :)

[annabellee]

TEARS,IDLE TEARS
Tears,idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

[PrinceMyshkin]

All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions.

Robert Hass, excerpt from "Privilege of Being," from Human Wishes

[tinustijger]

Death, be not proud

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.

By John Donne

The last two lines are the best in my opinion :)

[quasimodo1]

FIRST WEEKS by contemporary poet...Sharon Olds

Those first weeks, I don’t know if I knew
how to love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry-and not even
despair, but just depression, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened-she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood,
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early;
sleepy, the breast so engorged it stood out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
In two days we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.

[ganesa]

it is worse than dream

the light randy slut can’t be easy

this clonic earth

all these phantoms shuddering out of focus

it is useless to close the eyes

"Samuel Becket"

[_JadeRain_]

Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought--
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

[tinustijger]

I just read this in the paper yesterday, soo cool!

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

By Mark Strand

[firefangled]

tinustijger, Mark Strand does write very cool poetry. You would like "Reasons for Moving"

I'll see if I can find it and post it.

[firefangled]

The book by Mark Strand is collection of three books, one of which is Reasons for Moving the poem I remembered is Keeping Things Whole


In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

[tinustijger]

Wow! That's a very cool poem too! Thank you so much firefangled!

[Lyn]

I'm impressed, im off to buy some on amazon. thanks for posting those poems.

[ampoule]

And I thank you too! I will be off to the bookstore a little later to stand in the corner and fondle his books.

[dramasnot6]

My current favorite...so amazing.
"Since Feeling is First"- e.e. cummings

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 better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

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

and death i think is no parenthesis

[MaryLupin]

My favourite is by Nazim Hikmet.

ON LIVING

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.


III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say ``I lived'' ...


Nazim Hikmet
February, 1948
Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk - 1993

[ampoule]

There is much to read here so I am not sure if anyone has posted anything by Billy Collins but oh, how I like him.

Taking off Emily Dickinson's Clothes

First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.

And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.

Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.

You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything-
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.

What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.

So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset

and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.

[quasimodo1]

Autumn day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

[Adolescent09]

OMG. You people have posted the most beautiful works of poetry I have ever seen!!! Thank you so much!!! I don't even have to buy a poetry book! I got all the greatest works right here!! LOL. Keep it up people.

[dibyendra]

This thread has so much poems to read. Thank you all. I'm very interested in poetry and literature. I wish to post my poems in this thread too.

[ampoule]

I think this is truly my favorite.

The Vinegar Man

THE crazy old Vinegar Man is dead! He never had missed a day before!
Somebody went to his tumble-down shed by the Haunted House and forced the door.
There in the litter of his pungent pans, the murky mess of his mixing place —
Deep, sticky spiders and empty cans — with the same old frown on his sour old face.
"Vinegar - Vinegar - Vinegar Man!
Face - us - and - chase - us - and - catch - if -you - can!
Pepper for a tongue! Pickle for a nose!
Stick a pin in him and vinegar flows!
Glare -at-us- swear -at-us- catch - if - you-can!
Ketchup - and - chow - chow - and -Vinegar -Man!"

Nothing but recipes and worthless junk; greasy old records of paid and due ;
But down in the depths of a battered trunk, a queer, quaint valentine torn in two —
Red hearts and arrows and silver lace, and a prim, dim, ladylike script that said —
(Oh, Vinegar Man, with the sour old face!) —
"With dearest love, from Ellen to Ned!"

"Steel - us - and - peel - us - and - drown - us -in - brine!
He pickles his heart in" — a valentine! '
' Vinegar for blood! Pepper for his tongue!
Stick a pin in him and —" once he was young! "
Glare -at-us- swear -at-us- catch - if - you - can! " -
"With dearest love" — to the Vinegar Man!

Dingy little books of profit and loss
(died about Saturday, so they say),
And a queer, quaint valentine torn across . . .
torn, but it never was thrown away!
"With dearest love from Ellen to Ned" —
"Old Pepper Tongue! Pickles his heart in brine!"
The Vinegar Man is a long time dead:
he died when he tore his valentine.

Ruth Comfort Mitchell

[Riesa]

that is great. :)

[dumwitliteratur]

I'm a huge Edgar Allan Poe fan so I'd have to say that my favorite poem is "The Raven"

http://www.heise.de/ix/raven/Literature/Lore/TheRaven.html

[firefangled]

Someday I suppose I will have to write
a great poem about Billy Collins,

because he has written so many
about me and everyone I know,

and as if he thought that wasn't enough,
there are those descriptions of delicious meals -

osso buco, portabellos, salmon,
so real on the page, their aroma rising

in a fine ink vapor as the vowels
and consonants begin to simmer.

In the poem I write about Billy Collins
you will learn how he helped me quit smoking,

how I learned to watch, while driving at night,
for the eyes of poems on the roadside,

waiting for me to pass before crossing
and following the tail lights to my home.

I think how good my poem to him will be,
when suddenly he's there, on the jacket flap,

arms folded, and he stares at me all the way
from Lehman College, by the classroom door,

as if he is analyzing my poem,
filling its pages with circles and lines,

comments in red pencil, like a strange map
illuminated with angels, butterflies and fifth tones.

*****
This is just to introduce one of my favorites by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses:



Surprise

This —
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less —
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today,
quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely, he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.


-Billy Collins, Copyright 2002

[quasimodo1]

Still havn't found a better poem to call favorite...Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

1. The Road Not Taken


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; 5

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, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

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. 20

[ampoule]

Someday I suppose I will have to write
a great poem about Billy Collins,

because he has written so many
about me and everyone I know,

and as if he thought that wasn't enough,
there are those descriptions of delicious meals -

osso buco, portabellos, salmon,
so real on the page, their aroma rising

in a fine ink vapor as the vowels
and consonants begin to simmer.

In the poem I write about Billy Collins
you will learn how he helped me quit smoking,

how I learned to watch, while driving at night,
for the eyes of poems on the roadside,

waiting for me to pass before crossing
and following the tail lights to my home.

I think how good my poem to him will be,
when suddenly he's there, on the jacket flap,

arms folded, and he stares at me all the way
from Lehman College, by the classroom door,

as if he is analyzing my poem,
filling its pages with circles and lines,

comments in red pencil, like a strange map
illuminated with angels, butterflies and fifth tones.

*****
This is just to introduce one of my favorites by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses:



Surprise

This —
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less —
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today,
quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely, he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.


-Billy Collins, Copyright 2002

And would not the biggest surprise be that you, firefangled, have written this introduction yourself? In the style of favored poet? Absolutely marvelous!
Thank you for sharing Surprise. I could laugh but I could cry over it, that poem.

Could it be possible that you love this one also?

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking,
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbor's dog will not stop barking,
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins, copyright 2001

I was hostess a few months ago for book club, Prose and Cons, and I chose Sailing Alone Around the Room to be read. They were to choose several of their favorites and I believe everyone had liked the one about the dog barking in the orchestra.

[firefangled]

And would not the biggest surprise be that you, firefangled, have written this introduction yourself? In the style of favored poet? Absolutely marvelous!
Thank you for sharing Surprise. I could laugh but I could cry over it, that poem.

Could it be possible that you love this one also?

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking,
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbor's dog will not stop barking,
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Billy Collins, copyright 2001

I was hostess a few months ago for book club, Prose and Cons, and I chose Sailing Alone Around the Room to be read. They were to choose several of their favorites and I believe everyone had liked the one about the dog barking in the orchestra.

One of my very favorites, along with most of the other ones. I started to laugh as soon as I saw the title, it jumped right into my cerbral cortex (if that is where barking dogs jump) as if I had read it yesterday. I love it that the title doesn't give anything away and when you finish reading it, you realize there is no more perfect title. Thanks!!

[quasimodo1]

The Cremation of Sam Mcgee
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell".

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows -- O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May".
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here", said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared -- such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked";. . . then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[quasimodo1]

The Day of Wrath / Dies Ir&#230;
by Ambrose Bierce


Day of Satan's painful duty!
Earth shall vanish, hot and sooty;
So says Virtue, so says Beauty.


Ah! what terror shall be shaping
When the Judge the truth's undraping—
Cats from every bag escaping!


Now the trumpet's invocation
Calls the dead to condemnation;
All receive an invitation.


Death and Nature now are quaking,
And the late lamented, waking,
In their breezy shrouds are shaking.


Lo! the Ledger's leaves are stirring,
And the Clerk, to them referring,
Makes it awkward for the erring.


When the Judge appears in session,
We shall all attend confession,
Loudly preaching non-suppression.


How shall I then make romances
Mitigating circumstances?
Even the just must take their chances.


King whose majesty amazes,
Save thou him who sings thy praises;
Fountain, quench my private blazes.


Pray remember, sacred Saviour,
Mine the playful hand that gave your
Death-blow. Pardon such behavior.


Seeking me, fatigue assailed thee,
Calvary's outlook naught availed thee;
Now 'twere cruel if I failed thee.


Righteous judge and learn&#232;d brother,
Pray thy prejudices smother
Ere we meet to try each other.


Sighs of guilt my conscience gushes,
And my face vermilion flushes;
Spare me for my pretty blushes.


Thief and harlot, when repenting,
Thou forgavest—complimenting
Me with sign of like relenting.


If too bold is my petition
I'll receive with due submission
My dismissal—from perdition.


When thy sheep thou hast selected
From the goats, may I, respected,
Stand amongst them undetected.


When offenders are indited,
And with trial-flames ignited,
Elsewhere I'll attend if cited.


Ashen-hearted, prone and prayerful,
When of death I see the air full,
Lest I perish too be careful.


On that day of lamentation,
When, to enjoy the conflagration,
Men come forth, O be not cruel:
Spare me, Lord—make them thy fuel.









Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) was a journalist, short story writer, poet, and satirist who wrote about the culture around him.

addendum/quasimodo1....Ambrose Bierce spent much of his journalistic life working for Randolph Hearst and occaisonally would quit writing for him out of disgust with the sensensationalism of this type of newspaper or just because his interest drew him elsewhere. R. Hearst however would never stop sending Ambrose his checks no matter how long he stayed away. Always (probably because of this) he returned and resumed writing for the paper.

[tinustijger]

Still havn't found a better poem to call favorite...Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

1. The Road Not Taken


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; 5

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, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

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. 20

That's my favourite Robert Frost poem! Last lines are really cool!

[Annabel Lee]

Love, by William Wordsworth


All Thoughts, all Passions, all Delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal Frame,
All are but Ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

Oft in my waking dreams do I
Live o'er again that happy hour,
When midway on the Mount I lay
Beside the Ruin'd Tower.

The Moonshine stealing o'er the scene
Had blended with the Lights of Eve;
And she was there, my Hope, my Joy,
My own dear Genevieve!

She lean'd against the Armed Man,
The Statue of the Armed Knight:
She stood and listen'd to my Harp
Amid the ling'ring Light.

Few Sorrows hath she of her own,
My Hope, my Joy, my Genevieve!
She loves me best, whene'er I sing
The Songs, that make her grieve.

I play'd a soft and doleful Air,
I sang an old and moving Story--
An old rude Song that fitted well
The Ruin wild and hoary.

She listen'd with a flitting Blush,
With downcast Eyes and modest Grace;
For well she knew, I could not choose
But gaze upon her Face.

I told her of the Knight, that wore
Upon his Shield a burning Brand;
And that for ten long Years he woo'd
_The Lady of the Land_.

I told her, how he pin'd: and, ah!
The low, the deep, the pleading tone,
With which I sang another's Love,
Interpreted my own.

She listen'd with a flitting Blush,
With downcast Eyes and modest Grace;
And she forgave me, that I gaz'd
Too fondly on her Face!

But when I told the cruel scorn
Which craz'd this bold and lovely Knight,
And that be cross'd the mountain woods
Nor rested day nor night;

That sometimes from the savage Den,
And sometimes from the darksome Shade,
And sometimes starting up at once
In green and sunny Glade,

There came, and look'd him in the face,
An Angel beautiful and bright;
And that he knew, it was a Fiend,
This miserable Knight!

And that, unknowing what he did,
He leapt amid a murd'rous Band,
And sav'd from Outrage worse than Death
The Lady of the Land;

And how she wept and clasp'd his knees
And how she tended him in vain--
And ever strove to expiate
The Scorn, that craz'd his Brain

And that she nurs'd him in a Cave;
And how his Madness went away
When on the yellow forest leaves
A dying Man he lay;

His dying words--but when I reach'd
That tenderest strain of all the Ditty,
My falt'ring Voice and pausing Harp
Disturb'd her Soul with Pity!

All Impulses of Soul and Sense
Had thrill'd my guileless Genevieve,
The Music, and the doleful Tale,
The rich and balmy Eve;

And Hopes, and Fears that kindle Hope,
An undistinguishable Throng!
And gentle Wishes long subdued,
Subdued and cherish'd long!

She wept with pity and delight,
She blush'd with love and maiden shame;
And, like the murmur of a dream,
I heard her breathe my name.

Her Bosom heav'd--she stepp'd aside;
As conscious of my Look, she stepp'd--
Then suddenly with timorous eye
She fled to me and wept.

She half inclosed me with her arms,
She press'd me with a meek embrace;
And bending back her head look'd up,
And gaz'd upon my face.

'Twas partly Love, and partly Fear,
And partly 'twas a bashful Art
That I might rather feel than see
The Swelling of her Heart.

I calm'd her Tears; and she was calm,
And told her love with virgin Pride.
And so I won my Genevieve,
My bright and beauteous Bride!

[quasimodo1]

For whom the bell tolls a poem
(No man is an island) by John Donne










No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

These famous words by John Donne were not originally written as a poem - the passage is taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and is prose. The words of the original passage are as follows:

John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."


footnote: obviously, Ernest Hemingway did not write the famous line here quasimodo1

[Lily Adams]

Tim Burton's Vincent is my favorite poem. It's on my bedroom door.

Vincent

Vincent Malloy is seven years old,
He’s always polite and does what he’s told.
For a boy his age he’s considerate and nice,
But he wants to be just like Vincent Price.

He doesn’t mind living with his sister, dog and cat,
Though he’d rather share a home with spiders and bats.
There he could reflect on the horrors he’s invented,
And wander dark hallways alone and tormented.

Vincent is nice when his aunt comes to see him,
But imagines dipping her in wax for his wax museum.

He likes to experiment on his dog Abercrombie,
In the hopes of creating a horrible zombie.
So he and his horrible zombie dog,
Could go searching for victims in the London fog.

His thoughts aren’t only of ghoulish crime,
He likes to paint and read to pass the time.
While other kids read books like Go Jane Go,
Vincent’s favorite author is Edgar Allen Poe.

One night while reading a gruesome tale,
He read a passage that made him turn pale.

Such horrible news he could not survive,
For his beautiful wife had been buried alive.
He dug out her grave to make sure she was dead,
Unaware that her grave was his mother’s flower bed.

His mother sent Vincent off to his room,
He knew he’d been banished to the tower of doom.
Where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life,
Alone with a portrait of his beautiful wife.

While alone and insane, encased in his tomb,
Vincent’s mother suddenly burst into the room.
“If you want to you can go outside and play.
It’s sunny outside and a beautiful day.”

Vincent tried to talk, but he just couldn’t speak,
The years of isolation had made him quite weak.
So he took out some paper, and scrawled with a pen,
“I am possessed by this house, and can never leave it again.”
His mother said, “You’re not possessed, and you’re not almost dead.
These games that you play are all in your head.
You’re not Vincent Price, you’re Vincent Malloy.
You’re not tormented, you’re just a young boy.”
“You’re seven years old, and you’re my son,
I want you to get outside and have some real fun.”

Her anger now spent, she walked out through the hall,
While Vincent backed slowly against the wall.
The room started to sway, to shiver and creak.
His horrid insanity had reached its peak.

He saw Abercrombie his zombie slave,
And heard his wife call from beyond the grave.
She spoke from her coffin, and made ghoulish demands.
While through cracking walls reached skeleton hands.

Every horror in his life that had crept through his dreams,
Swept his mad laugh to terrified screams.
To escape the madness, he reached for the door,
But fell limp and lifeless down on the floor.

His voice was soft and very slow,
As he quoted The Raven from Edgar Allen Poe:

“And my soul from out that shadow floating on the floor, shall be lifted –Nevermore!”





One of the best parts about this poem? There's a SHORT to go with it. Watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCuiEr9rUDg

[quasimodo1]

In Youth I have Known One by Edgar Allan Poe
How often we forget all time, when lone
Admiring Nature's universal throne;
Her woods - her winds - her mountains - the intense
Reply of Hers to Our intelligence!

I.

In youth I have known one with whom the Earth
In secret communing held - as he with it,
In daylight, and in beauty, from his birth:
Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit
From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth
A passionate light - such for his spirit was fit -
And yet that spirit knew - not in the hour
Of its own fervour - what had o'er it power.

II.

Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought
To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,
But I will half believe that wild light fraught
With more of sovereignty than ancient lore
Hath ever told - or is it of a thought
The unembodied essence, and no more
That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass
As dew of the night time, o'er the summer grass?

III.

Doth o'er us pass, when as th' expanding eye
To the loved object - so the tear to the lid
Will start, which lately slept in apathy?
And yet it need not be - (that object) hid
From us in life - but common - which doth lie
Each hour before us - but then only bid
With a strange sound, as of a harpstring broken
T' awake us - 'Tis a symbol and a token -

IV.

Of what in other worlds shall be - and given
In beauty by our God, to those alone
Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven
Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,
That high tone of the spirit which hath striven
Though not with Faith - with godliness - whose throne
With desperate energy 't hath beaten down;
Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.

[tinustijger]

Succes is counted sweetest

Succes is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear,
The distant strains of triumph
Break agonized and clear.

By Emily Dickinson

[mattieog]

may i feel said he by ee cummings

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she


(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she


(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
....

Love in the Guise of Frindship
by Robert Burns

Talk not of love, it gives me pain,
For love has been my foe;
He bound me in an iron chain,
And plung&#180;d me deep in woe.

But friendship&#180;s pure and lasting joys,
My heart was form&#180;d to prove;
There, welcome win and wear the prize,
But never talk of love.

Your friendship much can make me blest,
O why that bliss destroy?
Why urge the only, one request
You know I will deny?

Your thought, if Love must harbour there,
Conceal it in that thought;
Nor cause it in that thought;
Nor cause me from my bosom tear
The very friend I sought

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER By DYLAN tHOMAS

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
....

[tinustijger]

THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER is beautiful.

[Alex Sheremet]

what I consider the greatest poem of all time ?

I always get chills when I read it. sadly, it's also one of the most neglected poems, by
one of the world's most neglected writers. If I were to choose a poet whose consistency
I admire most, it would be Countee Cullen. With other poets, I like perhaps 20-40 of their
poems. With Cullen, almost everything he touched turned gold.



Heritage

by Countee Cullen


What is Africa to me:
Copper sun or scarlet sea,
Jungle star or jungle track,
Strong bronzed men, or regal black
Women from whose loins I sprang
When the birds of Eden sang?
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who all day long
Want no sound except the song
Sung by wild barbaric birds
Goading massive jungle herds,
Juggernauts of flesh that pass
Trampling tall defiant grass
Where young forest lovers lie,
Plighting troth beneath the sky.
So I lie, who always hear,
Though I cram against my ear
Both my thumbs, and keep them there,
Great drums throbbing through the air.
So I lie, whose fount of pride,
Dear distress, and joy allied,
Is my somber flesh and skin,
With the dark blood dammed within
Like great pulsing tides of wine
That, I fear, must burst the fine
Channels of the chafing net
Where they surge and foam and fret.

....

[/I]

[detritus]

Undoubtedly one of my favorites, from Goethe, no less:

"Sound, sweet song."

Sound, sweet song, from some far land,
Sighing softly close at hand,

Now of joy, and now of woe!

Stars are wont to glimmer so.

Sooner thus will good unfold;
Children young and children old
Gladly hear thy numbers flow.

[mattieog]

The Angel that presided o'er my birth


The Angel that presided o'er my birth
Said, "Little creature, form'd of Joy and Mirth,
"Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth."

William Blake

[ellen c]

I must confess that I never heard of Robert Service before this week - Aug 15th 2007

The Book Borrower

I am a mild man, you"ll agree
But red my rage is
When folks who borrow books from me
Turn down their pages

Or when a chap a book I lend
And find he"s loaned it
Without permission to a friend-
As if he owned it

But worst of all I hate those crooks
(May hell-fires burn them)
Who beg the loan of cherished books
And don"t return them

My books are tendrils of myself
No shears can sever
May he who rapes one from its shelf
Be damned forever

[ampoule]

I can't say that this is my FAVORITE poem but I certainly like it a lot. If you are a poet you might like it too.

The Trouble with Poetry by Billy Collins from the book of the same name.

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night-
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky-

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world.

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti-
to be perfectly honest for a moment-

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

[ellen c]

Why do you never print my posts?

[pellegrino]

You guys are awesome! Having the poems at the ready isn't possible but there are so many! Robert Hayden's Those Winter Sundays, Leopardi's l'Infinito, Eliot's Waste Land, Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality, Dickinson (usually) and the greatest sustained poem, Dante's Commedia. Milton's Lycidas, Keats' Ode to a Nightingale, Larkin's An Arundel Tomb oh so so many. Any one think Whitman is overrated and the Beats just God awful? Hate to be a sour puss, but I am mystified by Ginsbergites and the like.

[Kiba]

my first post and i dedicate it to my favorite writer Rudyard Kipling and to his poem "IF"

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

[tome_keeper]

too many to choose, but some include...

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe
Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats
To L.L., Oscar Wilde
Ode, Arthur O'Shaughnessy

[quasimodo1]

ULALUME.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere —
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir: —
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul —
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
There were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll —
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek,
In the ultimate climes of the Pole —
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the Boreal Pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere —
Our memories were treacherous and sere;
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year —
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)
We noted not the dim lake of Auber,
(Though once we had journeyed down here)
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. [page 21:]

And now, as the night was senescent,
And star-dials pointed to morn —
As the star-dials hinted of morn —
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn —
Astarte's bediamonded crescent,
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said — "She is warmer than Dian:
She rolls through an ether of sighs —
She revels in a region of sighs.
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion,
To point us the path to the skies —
To the Lethean peace of the skies —
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes —
Come up, through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said — "Sadly this star I mistrust —
Her pallor I strangely mistrust —
Ah, hasten! — ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! — let us fly! — for we must."
In terror she spoke; letting sink her
Wings till they trailed in the dust —
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust —
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied — "This is nothing but dreaming.
Let us on, by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light! [page 22:]
Its Sybillic splendor is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty to-night —
See! — it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright —
We safely may trust to a gleaming
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom —
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista —
But were stopped by the door of a tomb —
By the door of a legended tomb: —
And I said — "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied — "Ulalume — Ulalume —
'T is the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere —
As the leaves that were withering and sere —
And I cried — "It was surely October
On this very night of last year,
That I journeyed — I journeyed down here! —
That I brought a dread burden down here —
On this night, of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon has tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber —
This misty mid region of Weir: —
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber —
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No poem haunts like this one; one of love and loss, Edgar Allen Poe's best in my opinion. quasimodo1

[Lyn]

I learned words, I learned words: but half of them
died for lack of exercise. And the ones I use
often look at me
with a look that whispers, Liar.

from Ineducable Me, Norman MacCaig

[Pensive]

I learned words, I learned words: but half of them
died for lack of exercise. And the ones I use
often look at me
with a look that whispers, Liar.

from Ineducable Me, Norman MacCaig

It's great but is making me feel a bit guilty. Thanks for posting this poem, Lyn...

[tinustijger]

Very 'cool' poem, I think!

[Lyn]

Glad you like it. MacCaig's my favourite poet of the moment, although I think a lot of people ignore/underrate his work. Here's another extract, from his poem 'Summer Farm'

"I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me - as
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me."

[ivette]

I like novels more than poems but I still have a few favourite poems:

E.A.Poe - The Raven, Alone
Sylvia Plath - Lady Lazarus, Never try to trick me with a kiss, Last words

[quoththeraven98]

'The Raven', by Edgar Allen Poe, is my favorite poem, though that may be obvious considering my name.

[higley]

Not much for poetry on the whole (though I ought to pay more attention to it), but I do like Robert Frost. My favorite is Fragmentary Blue:

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

[theP3ach]

The Hollow Men by T.S Elliot

[Bakiryu]

Anything by Plath. I love her :blush:

[Pensive]

Anything by Plath. I love her :blush:

I like Daddy.

[Anza]

Edgar Allan Poe: The Conquerer Worm (Memorized), and The Raven.
I've completely memorized The Raven. The last few stanzas are a little shaky, but otherwise it's good.
I also like The Lady of Shallot, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. I memorized that one, too.

[Anza]

I started memorizing the Raven three days ago, and I've been reciting it every waking moment. It's been driving my Mom insane.

[tinustijger]

Haha! I have that sort of phases too :) Just when you can't get enough from one poem!
I even had the idea to tattoo Death be not proud's last line: "Death thou shalt die" ~ John Donne, on my spine! I'm still toying with the idea but my love for this poem has diminished a tiny bit now!

[Lyn]

What is it about the raven that everyone loves so much? I like it too, was just interested to hear why so many people seem to like that one particular poem.

[Pensive]

What is it about the raven that everyone loves so much? I like it too, was just interested to hear why so many people seem to like that one particular poem.

The rhythm, the rhyme. And the idea is most sublime. :)

[cloudcuckooland]

Hello!

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

I.

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

III.

I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

IV.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

V.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look’d at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

VI.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

VII.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
“I love thee true.”

VIII.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

IX.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.

X.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

XI.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

XII.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

John Keats.

I don't like it, to be quite honest, I'm obsessed with it! :)

[Beverly S]

I like this simple poem by Carl Sandburg entitled: Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then, moves on.

[bookworm712]

Anything by Plath. I love her :blush:

I love her too- she was the subject of many many papers in college.

I enjoy Walt Whitman- my parents were hippies....

[Bardd]

Leap Before You Look

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it may look from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-fairs,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weap;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

- W. H. Auden

[tinustijger]

Wow! I love it!!!

[quasimodo1]

Mother of this unfathomable world!
Favor my solemn song, for I have loved
Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched 20
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,
When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness, 30
Like an inspired and desperate alchemist
Staking his very life on some dark hope,
Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks
With my most innocent love, until strange tears,
Uniting with those breathless kisses, made
Such magic as compels the charmèd night
To render up thy charge; and, though ne'er yet
Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,
Enough from incommunicable dream,
And twilight phantasms, and deep noonday thought, 40
Has shone within me, that serenely now
And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre
Suspended in the solitary dome
Of some mysterious and deserted fane,
I wait thy breath, Great Parent, that my strain
May modulate with murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings, and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.
{from "Alastor: Or, The Spirit of Solitude"}

[sreeja]

I am also a fan of these lines by Robert Frost.

[Awod]

Fire And Ice


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-Robert Frost

Honestly haven't read many poems but I remember this one from High School and liked it quite a bit.

[Virgil]

Not exactly my favorite poem, but a good one:


Snake
by D.H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

[packersfan]

We are dreaming of tomorrow and tomorrow isn't coming,
We are dreaming of a glory that we don't really want.
We are dreaming of a new day when the new day's here already.
We are running from the battle when it's one that must be fought.

And still we sleep.

We are listening for the calling but never really heeding,
Hoping for the future when the future's only plans.
Dreaming of the wisdom that we are dodging daily,
Praying for a savior when salvation's in our hands.

And still we sleep.

And still we dream.
And still we pray.
And still we fear.

And still we sleep.

- Todd Anderson of Dead Poets' Society

[Janine]

Fire And Ice


Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

-Robert Frost

Honestly haven't read many poems but I remember this one from High School and liked it quite a bit.

And, Awod, that is a great choice. I really love that poem. I heard it once before and I recall it truly stuck in my mind; who can go wrong with Robert Frost? To me that is a perfect poem.

If you can think of any others do post them.


Virgil, I see you posted the "Snake" poem, that I posted on the D.H.L. short story thread. Good choice and it is downright 'highway robbery'! ;) :lol:

[Pensive]

And, Awod, that is a great choice. I really love that poem. I heard it once before and I recall it truly stuck in my mind; who can go wrong with Robert Frost? To me that is a perfect poem.

I like this poem a lot too. Though Frost wrote many other good poems too, but I believe none of them can compete this one!

[Virgil]

You know it's annoying when people post their school problems in threads dedicated to other things. :flare:

[Logos]

They've been dealt with Virgil :p

[Janine]

They've been dealt with Virgil :p

Good, Logos, Thank you. I also, get rather frustrated and annoyed when people ask me or us to do their school assignments. Afterall, we are all here to be just 'students' and learn more; we are not here to be 'teachers'. I don't mind helping those with their English or directing them to resources, but to do whole assignments is uncalled for.

[Logos]

I know, I agree Janine. Don't go into the O (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166)rwell forums right now :lol:

[Janine]

Logos,:lol: don't you know if you tell someone not to do something, they are going to want to go and do that very thing - 'curiosity did kill the cat!'

Why can't I go there? Also, why does just the O in Orwell appear in brown highlight - oh, you underlined it, I see - am I missing the joke here? :lol:

revised post after above:

Logos, Ok, oK, I confess, I confess....quilty......I snuck a tiny peak....what is that over there....'Political Science' 101?......:lol:

Just don't tell, Virgil.....:lol:

[IrishMark]

the raven by edgar allen poe- the tightness of the rhythm is beyond perfection-anybody disagree? am in the mood for a debate...

[Etienne]

Soir d'hiver
Emile Nelligan

Ah! comme la neige a neig&#233;!
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre.
Ah! comme la neige a neig&#233;!
Qu'est-ce que le spasme de vivre
&#212; la douleur que j'ai, que j'ai!

Tous les &#233;tangs gisent gel&#233;s,
Mon &#226;me est noire: O&#249; vis-je? o&#249; vais-je?
Tous ses espoirs gisent gel&#233;s:
Je suis la nouvelle Norv&#232;ge
D'o&#249; les blonds ciels s'en sont all&#233;s.

Pleurez, oiseaux de f&#233;vrier,
Au sinistre frisson des choses,
Pleurez, oiseaux de f&#233;vrier,
Pleurez mes pleurs, pleurez mes roses,
Aux branches du gen&#233;vrier.

Ah! comme la neige a neig&#233;!
Ma vitre est un jardin de givre.
Ah! comme la neige a neig&#233;!
Qu'est-ce que le spasme de vivre
A tout l'ennui que j'ai, que j'ai!...

There is some Emile Nelligan's translations in english, but they're bad. So whoever can read french enjoy this masterpiece, and for those who can't read french, you have no idea what you're missing!

"the raven by edgar allen poe- the tightness of the rhythm is beyond perfection-anybody disagree? am in the mood for a debate..."

Sorry to disappoint you, but there's no debate to be had there :p

[Beverly S]

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls:
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1851)

[V.Jayalakshmi]

My favorite poem is "Gitanjali" by Rabindranath Tagore.Especially the stanza Mind Without Fear
............................

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up

into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason

has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
"METHOUGHT I SAW THE FOOTSTEPS OF A THRONE"
I

METHOUGHT I saw the footsteps of a throne
Which mists and vapours from mine eyes did shroud--
Nor view of who might sit thereon allowed;
But all the steps and ground about were strown
With sights the ruefullest that flesh and bone
Ever put on; a miserable crowd,
Sick, hale, old, young, who cried before that cloud,
"Thou art our king, O Death! to thee we groan."
Those steps I clomb; the mists before me gave
Smooth way; and I beheld the face of one 10
Sleeping alone within a mossy cave,
With her face up to heaven; that seemed to have
Pleasing remembrance of a thought foregone;
A lovely Beauty in a summer grave

The above by Wordsworth too touches me very much.

V.Jayalakshmi.

[Mattch1331]

The Song of Wandering Aengus - W.B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.


Poetry - Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesmal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

[white camellia]

Hynd Etin

May Margaret sits in her bower door
Sewing her silken seam;
She heard a note in Elmond’s wood,
And wish’d she there had been.

She loot the seam fa’ frae her side,
The needle to her tae,
And she is on to Elmond’s wood
As fast as she could gae.

She hadna pu’d a nut, a nut,
Nor broken a branch but ane,
Till by there came the Hynd Etin,
Says, ‘Lady, lat alane.

‘O why pu’ ye the nut, the nut,
Or why break ye the tree?
For I am forester o’ this wood:
Ye should spier leave at me.’—

I’ll ask leave at nae living man,
Nor yet will I at thee;
My father is king o’er a’ this realm,
This wood belongs to me.’

The highest tree in Elmond’s wood,
He’s pu’d it by the reet,
And he has built for her a bower
Near by a hallow seat.

He’s kept her there in Elmond’s wood
For six lang years and ane,
Till six pretty sons to him she bare,
And the seventh she’s brought hame.

It fell out ance upon a day
He’s to the hunting gane,
And a’ to carry his game for him
He’s tane his eldest son.

‘A question I will ask, father,
Gin ye wadna angry be.’—
‘Say on, say on, my bonny boy,
Ye’se nae be quarrell’d by me.’

‘I see my mither’s cheeks aye weet,
I never can see them dry;
And I wonder what aileth my mither
To mourn [sae constantly].’—

‘Your mither was a king’s daughtèr,
Sprung frae a high degree;
She might hae wed some worthy prince
Had she na been stown by me.

‘Your mither was a king’s daughtèr
Of noble birth and fame,
But now she’s wife o’ Hynd Etin,
Wha ne’er gat christendame.

‘But we’ll shoot the buntin’ o’ the bush,
The linnet o’ the tree,
And ye’se tak’ them hame to your dear mither,
See if she’ll merrier be.’

It fell upon anither day,
He’s to the hunting gane
And left his seven [young] children
To stay wi’ their mither at hame.

‘O I will tell to you, mither,
Gin ye wadna angry be.’—
‘Speak on, speak on, my little wee boy,
Ye’se nae be quarrell’d by me.’—

‘As we came frae the hind-hunting,
We heard fine music ring.’—
‘My blessings on you, my bonny boy,
I wish I’d been there my lane.’

They wistna weel where they were gaen,
Wi’ the stratlins o’ their feet;
They wistna weel where they were gaen,
Till at her father’s yate.

‘I hae nae money in my pocket,
But royal rings hae three;
I’ll gie them you, my little young son,
And ye’ll walk there for me.

‘Ye’ll gi’e the first to the proud portèr
And he will let you in;
Ye’ll gi’e the next to the butler-boy
And he will show you ben;

‘Ye’ll gi’e the third to the minstrel
That plays before the King;
He’ll play success to the bonny boy
Came thro’ the wood him lane.’

He ga’e the first to the proud portèr
And he open’d and let him in;
He ga’e the next to the butler-boy,
And he has shown him ben.

He ga’e the third to the minstrel
That play’d before the King,
And he play’d success to the bonny boy
Came thro’ the wood him lane.

Now when he came before the King,
Fell low upon his knee;
The King he turn’d him round about,
And the saut tear blint his e’e.

‘Win up, win up, my bonny boy,
Gang frae my companie;
Ye look sae like my dear daughtèr,
My heart will burst in three.’—

‘If I look like your dear daughtèr,
A wonder it is none;
If I look like your dear daughtèr,
I am her eldest son.’—

‘Will ye tell me, ye little wee boy,
Where may my Margaret be?’—
‘She’s just now standing at your yates,
And my six brithers her wi’.’—

‘O where are a’ my porter-boys
That I pay meat and fee,
To open my yates baith wide and braid,
Let her come in to me?’

When she cam’ in before the King,
Fell low down on her knee:
‘Win up, win up, my daughter dear,
This day ye’se dine wi’ me.’—

‘Ae bit I canna eat, father,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Until I see my mither dear,
For lang for her I think.’

When she cam’ in before the queen,
Fell low down on her knee;
‘Win up, win up, my daughter dear,
This day ye’se dine wi’ me.’—

‘Ae bit I canna eat, mither,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Until I see my sister dear,
For lang for her I think.’

When that these twa sisters met,
She hail’d her courteouslie;
‘Come ben, come ben, my sister dear,
This day ye’se dine wi’ me.’—

‘Ae bit I canna eat, sister,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Until I see my dear husband,
So lang for him I think.’—

‘O where are a’ my rangers bold
That I pay meat and fee,
To search the forest far an’ wide,
And bring Etin back to me?’

Out it speaks the little wee boy:
‘Na, na, this mauna be;
Without ye grant a free pardon,
I hope ye’ll nae him see.’—

‘O here I grant a free pardon,
Well seal’d by my own han’;
Ye may mak’ search for Young Etin
As soon as ever ye can.’

They search’d the country wide and braid,
The forests far and near,
And they found him into Elmond’s wood,
Tearing his yellow hair.

‘Win up, win up now, Hynd Etin,
Win up an’ boun wi’ me;
We’re messengers come frae the court;
The King wants you to see.’—

‘O lat them tak’ frae me my head,
Or hang me on a tree;
For since I’ve lost my dear lady,
Life’s no pleasure to me.’—

‘Your head will na be touch’d, Etin,
Nor you hang’d on a tree;
Your lady’s in her father’s court
And a’ he wants is thee.’

When he cam’ in before the King,
Fell low down on his knee;
‘Win up, win up now, Young Etin,
This day ye’se dine wi’ me.’

But as they were at dinner set
The wee boy ask’d a boon:
‘I wish we were in a good kirk
For to get christendoun.

‘For we hae lived in gude green wood
This seven years and ane;
But a’ this time since e’er I mind
Was never a kirk within.’—

‘Your asking ’s na sae great, my boy,
But granted it sall be;
This day to gude kirk ye sall gang
And your mither sall gang you wi’.’

When unto the gude kirk she came,
She at the door did stan’;
She was sae sair sunk down wi’ shame,
She couldna come farther ben.

Then out and spak’ the parish priest,
And a sweet smile ga’e he:
‘Come ben, come ben, my lily-flower,
Present your babes to me.’

Charles, Vincent, Sam and Dick,
And likewise John and James;
They call’d the eldest Young Etin,
Which was his father’s name.


Edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch in The Oxford Book of Ballads

[Sylph]

A Sign-Seeker
Thomas Hardy


I MARK the months in liveries dank and dry,
The day-tides many-shaped and hued;
I see the nightfall shades subtrude,
And hear the monotonous hours clang negligently by.

I view the evening bonfires of the sun
On hills where morning rains have hissed;
The eyeless countenance of the mist
Pallidly rising when the summer droughts are done.

I have seen the lightning-blade, the leaping star,
The caldrons of the sea in storm,
Have felt the earthquake's lifting arm,
And trodden where abysmal fires and snowcones are.

I learn to prophesy the hid eclipse,
The coming of eccentric orbs;
To mete the dust the sky absorbs,
To weigh the sun, and fix the hour each planet dips.

I witness fellow earth-men surge and strive;
Assemblies meet, and throb, and part;
Death's soothing finger, sorrow's smart;
--All the vast various moils that mean a world alive.

But that I fain would wot of shuns my sense--
Those sights of which old prophets tell,
Those signs the general word so well,
Vouchsafed to their unheed, denied my watchings tense.

In graveyard green, behind his monument
To glimpse a phantom parent, friend,
Wearing his smile, and "Not the end!"
Outbreathing softly: that were blest enlightenment;

Or, if a dead Love's lips, whom dreams reveal
When midnight imps of King Decay
Delve sly to solve me back to clay,
Should leave some print to prove her spirit-kisses real;

Or, when Earth's Frail lie bleeding of her Strong,
If some Recorder, as in Writ,
Near to the weary scene should flit
And drop one plume as pledge that Heaven inscrolls the wrong.

--There are who, rapt to heights of trancéd trust,
These tokens claim to feel and see,
Read radiant hints of times to be--
Of heart to heart returning after dust to dust.

Such scope is granted not my powers indign...
I have lain in dead men's beds, have walked
The tombs of those with whom I'd talked,
Called many a gone and goodly one to shape a sign,

And panted for response. But none replies;
No warnings loom, nor whisperings
To open out my limitings,
And Nescience mutely muses: When a man falls he lies.

[quasimodo1]

Dies Irae

ON that great, that awful day,
This vain world shall pass away.
Thus the sibyl sang of old,
Thus hath holy David told.
There shall be a deadly fear
When the Avenger shall appear,
And unveiled before his eye
All the works of man shall lie.
Hark! to the great trumpet's tones
Pealing o'er the place of bones:
Hark! it waketh from their bed
All the nations of the dead,--
In a countless throng to meet,
At the eternal judgment seat.
Nature sickens with dismay,
Death may not retain its prey;
And before the Maker stand
All the creatures of his hand.
The great book shall be unfurled,
Whereby God shall judge the world;
What was distant shall be near,
What was hidden shall be clear.
To what shelter shall I fly?
To what guardian shall I cry?
Oh, in that destroying hour,
Source of goodness, Source of power,
Show thou, of thine own free grace,
Help unto a helpless race.
Though I plead not at thy throne
Aught that I for thee have done,
Do not thou unmindful be,
Of what thou hast borne for me:
Of the wandering, of the scorn,
Of the scourge, and of the thorn.
Jesus, hast thou borne the pain,
And hath all been borne in vain?
Shall thy vengeance smite the head
For whose ransom thou hast bled?
Thou, whose dying blessing gave
Glory to a guilty slave:
Thou, who from the crew unclean
Didst release the Magdalene:
Shall not mercy vast and free,
Evermore be found in thee?
Father, turn on me thine eyes,
See my blushes, hear my cries;
Faint though be the cries I make,
Save me for thy mercy's sake,
From the worm, and from the fire,
From the torments of thine ire.
Fold me with the sheep that stand
Pure and safe at thy right hand.
Hear thy guilty child implore thee,
Rolling in the dust before thee.
Oh the horrors of that day!
When this frame of sinful clay,
Starting from its burial place,
Must behold thee face to face.
Hear and pity, hear and aid,
Spare the creatures thou hast made.
Mercy, mercy, save, forgive,
Oh, who shall look on thee and live?

Thomas Babbington Macaulay {Dies Irae, Dies Illa. from the Gregorian chant translated means "Day of wrath, Day of Mourning" which is sung in the Mass for the Dead...Roman Catholic High Mass}

[quasimodo1]

I will come to you in the day time.
I will raise you from your sleep.
I will kiss you in four places,
as I go running down your street.
And I will squeeze the life right out of you.
I will make you laugh and make you cry.
And we may never forget it
'cuz we had the time of our life.
And now all the good times are through.
And I will always love you.
So shed your tears, let's get it over.
I will come to you in at night time.
I will put you to bed.
I will say I love you.
And I won't be happy even when you're dreaming,
because I know I will bleeding
when I tell you, darlin', I'm leaving.
But let's put that aside and have some fun.
We'll never forget it even when we're done.
Because we had the time of our life,
and now that is through.
Please baby, don't cry when I say I love you.
Because now it's time to leave
and we may never forget it.
So baby please say good bye.
Don't shed a tear, no please don't cry.
Together we are, but now miles apart.
The inches between seem like light years.
Emptyness runs down my face in the form of tears.
-- Submitted by Jeff Fair from Centereach
e-mail: [email protected]
{To Logos: This posting is a test as I found alot of poetry advertised as poetry from all over the world, adjusted by subject matter...cr issues are unclear}

[hellsapoppin]

To me, no poem can ever be the equal of,



THANATOPSIS

by: William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

O him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;--
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around--
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--
Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, pour'd round all,
Old Ocean's grey and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound
Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest: and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

[*_Annabel Lee_*]

La Beaut&#233;

Je suis belle, &#244; mortels ! comme un r&#234;ve de pierre,
Et mon sein, o&#249; chacun s’est meurtri tour &#224; tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au po&#232;te un amour
&#201;ternel et muet ainsi que la mati&#232;re.

Je tr&#244;ne dans l’azur comme un sphinx incompris ;
J’unis un cœur de neige &#224; la blancheur des cygnes ;
Je hais le mouvement qui d&#233;place les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

Les po&#232;tes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Que j’ai l’air d’emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,
Consumeront leurs jours en d’aust&#232;res &#233;tudes ;

Car j’ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles :
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clart&#233;s &#233;ternelles !


Charles Baudelaire

[Etienne]

Cors de chasse

Notre histoire est noble et tragique
Comme le masque d'un tyran
Nul drame hasardeux ou magique
Aucun d&#233;tail indiff&#233;rent
Ne rend notre amour path&#233;tique

Et Thomas de Quincey buvant
L'opium poison doux et chaste
A sa pauvre Anna allait r&#234;vant
Passons passons puisque tout passe
Je me retournerai souvent
[The two last lines are some of my favorite... incredible]

Les souvenirs sont cors de chasse
Dont meurt le bruit parmi le vent

-Apollinaire

Hercule et Omphalle

Le cul
D'Ophalle
Vaincu
S'affale.

- "Sens-tu
Mon phalle
Aigu
- "Quel m&#226;le!...

Le chien
Me cr&#232;ve!...
Quel r&#234;ve?...

- ...Tiens bien?"
Hercule
L'encule.

-Apollinaire

More grotesque but very funny especially in their context, they are from Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais. The young Gargantua is reciting them (I do not like the english translations of them):

Chiard,
Foirard,
P&#233;tard,
Brenous,
Ton lard,
Chappard,
S'&#233;part,
Sur nous,
Ordous,
Merdous,
Egous,
Le feu de saint Antoine t'ard,
Si tous
Te trous
Eclous
Ne torches avant ton d&#233;part.

Rondeau

En chiant, l'autre hier, senti
La gabelle qu'&#224; mon cul dois;
L'odeur fut autre que cuidois;
J'en fus du tout empuanti.
Oh! si quelqu'un eut consenti
M'amener une qu'attendais
En chiant!

Car je lui eusse acimenti
Son trou d'urine &#224; mon lourdois;
Cependant e&#251;t avec ses doigts
Mon trou de merde garanti
En chiant!

-Young Gargantua to his father Grandgousier

[quasimodo1]

To *_Annabel Lee_* & Etienne: Could I request a translation from you French speaking poetry lovers? Your own would be fine. quasimodo1

[HunterBrown1968]

"Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame"

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, muderous bloody, full of blame,
Savage, exstreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight:
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having,and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof; and proved a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream,
All this the world knows well; yet none knows well,
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
~William Shakespeare

[Etienne]

To *_Annabel Lee_* & Etienne: Could I request a translation from you French speaking poetry lovers? Your own would be fine. quasimodo1

Hunting horns

Our story’s noble as its tragic
like the grimace of a tyrant
no drama’s chance or magic
no detail that’s indifferent
makes our great love pathetic

And Thomas de Quincey drinking
Opiate poison sweet and chaste
Of his poor Anne went dreaming
We pass we pass since all must pass
Often I’ll be returning

Memories are hunting horns alas
whose note along the wind is dying

-Apollinaire

[patrycja]

My favourite poem is an excerpt from 'Tamburlaine the Great' Part I. The text is as follows:

"Nature, that fram'd us of our four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown."

When it comes to "poem as a poem"... H. G. Hopkins' "The Windhover".

"The Windhover"

To Christ our Lord


I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

[white camellia]

For lo! thy law is passed
That this my love should manifestly be
To serve and honor thee;
And so I do; and my delight is full,
Accepted for the servant of thy rule.

“Without almost, I am all rapturous,
Since thus my will was set
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence;
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse
A pain or regret,
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense;
Considering that from thee all virtues spread
As from a fountain head,—
That in thy gift is wisdom’s best avail,
And honor without fail;
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate,
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state.

“Lady, since I conceived
That pleasurable aspect in my heart,
My life has been apart
In shining brightness and the place of truth;
Which till that time, good sooth,
Groped among shadows in a darken’d place,
Where many hours and days
It hardly ever had remember’d good.
But now my servitude
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest.
A man from a wild beast
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived.

[quasimodo1]

To White camellia: OK, who is the author?

[sherlock]

i like the raven

[Fawkes]

Hi, I'm new here! Thought I share one of my favorites poems:

"Hope' is the thing with feathers"

"Hope" is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

And sweetest in the Gale is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never in Extremity,
It asked a crumb of Me

Emily Dickinson

[quasimodo1]

Welcome to the litnet Fawkes. quasimodo1

[mukta581]

How Do We Mend A Broken Heart

How do we mend our broken hearts,
When our loved one has been untrue,
Surrounded with lies and deception,
After hearing the words I love only you.

Self esteem is now at an all time low,
Confidence has taken wings and flew,
Your trust in love has been shattered,
Now alone in a world with just you.

Falling tears that you cried leave you empty,
Your faith once so strong is now weak,
The love that you fought and sacrificed for,
Leaves you devastated and unable to speak.

The words keep haunting you day after day,
All the stories you once thought were true,
Asking yourself the same question once more,
Now what on earth shall I do.

Cracks and holes have pierced through your heart,
From someone who had claimed to love you,
Seem so slow in becoming whole once again,
But heal faster from what you can do!

Do not sit alone contemplating your past,
Self pity has hooks made of steel,
Hold your head way up high when your walking,
Be thankful no more hurt will you feel.

And please do not ever give up on love,
Take the lessons you've learned and be wise,
Make certain when someone says they love you,
It will not bring about your demise!

There are men and women who are genuine and true,
Who've been victims of lies and deceit,
So never give up on your dreams for happiness,
A true love is waiting just for you to meet!

[mukta581]

If It’s Okay With You

You are the love of a lifetime
I’ve always wanted as mine.”
You are everything I’ve ever wanted
and so much more than that,
and my heart tells me every second
of every minute
of every hour
of every day
that “you are the special soul mate
I always hoped I’d find.
You are the one perfect person in my life,
everything I always hoped for… my secret
dream that swept me off my feet and really
did come true.
You have the warmth of the morning sun in
your spirit, and you have a gentle soul that
I always want to be close to. I deeply, dearly,
and happily love you,” and I will until the end of time.
“And there will never be a day when I will
take even one moment of that joy and that
sweetness for granted.” You make a certain sense
of tranquility embed itself in my mind, and you
make me feel like a better person. I will never ask
for anything more from you, because you are the best
how you are, right here, right now. “I know what a
gift you are… and I want you to know it, too.
You have an amazing way of touching
my heart, and you have a way of turning
every day into a time and a place where
the nicest feelings and the deepest gratitude
all come together. I have such an immense
amount of thanks and appreciation for all this.”
You are truly the best thing that has ever
happened to me, and I could never ask for
anything else, because there is nothing in the
entire world that could make me happier
than you do when I’m around you.
You are the only one for me,
“and if it’s okay with you,
I’d love to go on loving you
forever.”

[quasimodo1]

HYMN TO APOLLO
God of the golden bow,
And of the golden lyre,
And of the golden hair,
And of the golden fire,
Charioteer
Of the patient year,
Where---where slept thine ire,
When like a blank idiot I put on thy wreath,
Thy laurel, thy glory,
The light of thy story,
Or was I a worm---too low crawling for death?
O Delphic Apollo!

The Thunderer grasp'd and grasp'd,
The Thunderer frown'd and frown'd;
The eagle's feathery mane
For wrath became stiffen'd---the sound
Of breeding thunder
Went drowsily under,
Muttering to be unbound.
O why didst thou pity, and beg for a worm?
Why touch thy soft lute
Till the thunder was mute,
Why was I not crush'd---such a pitiful germ?
O Delphic Apollo!

The Pleiades were up,
Watching the silent air;
The seeds and roots in Earth
Were swelling for summer fare;
The Ocean, its neighbour,
Was at his old labour,
When, who---who did dare
To tie for a moment, thy plant round his brow,
And grin and look proudly,
And blaspheme so loudly,
And live for that honour, to stoop to thee now?
O Delphic Apollo!

[protagonist]

my favourite poem is below and my favourite poet is Emily Dickenson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

[Pensive]

my favourite poem is below and my favourite poet is Emily Dickenson

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

I like this one. :)

[mukta581]

My haert is broken!!!!

My heart is broken
and i am torn
between my life
between my all

my heart is broken
my life is gone
all my dreams
everything crushed

my heart is broken
in a million places
living alone
a lonely life

my heart is broken
without you here
my heart is broken
like never before

[1n50mn14]

Fred Cogswell- The Butterfly

[Dori]

A pretty boy --- with an auctioneer.
Bargaining there, I fancy.


:lol: Written by the Roman poet Catullus.

[Igetanotion]

Hi everyone, I'm new here! (I've been visiting the site for quite some time, but I've just now joined the forums)
This is my favorite
it is by Yousef Komunyakaa

"We Never Know"

He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbed photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

and also this one by Thomas Lux
"Refrigerator 1957"
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

[mukta581]

Grace Of God!!!!!

Surround me Gods.
Gods are worshipped by me.
As I sit in a room.
Looking am at all the posters.
Posters of gods and goddesses.
Colourful being the posters.
As colourful is the colour of worshipping.
Different being the ways of worshipping.
Goal being the same.
Which is to impress through impressions created by us in the eyes of god.
Look us for ways to impress the almighty.
Use us prayers to pray.
So we can reach the gods.
Gods who are listeners of our needs.
Needs which need fulfillment.
As he is all we got.
Got as he is our guide.
Guide for our guidance.
Guidance required to help us.
Help us through rocky patches.
Patches patch as it is life.
Life being a blessing.
Of one who blessed us.
To live and survive.
As we are needed to learn from life.
Which is a blessing.
Given to us by the one known as creator.
Creator of creations.
Which surround me.

[PaisteN'Pearl]

Books and Thoughts - By Aldous Huxley

Old ghosts that death forgot to ferry
Across the Lethe of the years-
These are my friends, and at their tears
I weep and with their mirth am merry.
On a high tower, whose mattlements
Give me all heaven at a glance,
I lie long summer nights in trance,
Drowsed by the murmurs and the scents
That rise from the earth, while the sky above me
Merges its peace with my soul's peace,
Deep meeting deep. No stir can move me,
Nought break the quiet of my release:

In vain the windy sunlight raves
At the hush and gloom of polar caves.

[PaisteN'Pearl]

*battlements*....... my bad :)

[Domer121]

"There be none of Beauty's daughters
with a Magic like thee.
And like Music on the water
is thy sweet voice to me."
Lord Byron

[mukta581]

Love

Love is like a lump of gold,
Hard to get, and hard to hold.
Of all the girls I've ever met,
You're the one I can't forget.
I do believe that God above,
Created you for me to love.
He chose you from all the rest,
Because he knew I would love you best.

[mukta581]

Have You?
Have You ever loved someone
But knew they didn't care?
Have You ever felt like crying
But Knew you'd get no where?

Have you ever looked into their eyes
And said a little prayer?
Have you ever looked into their hearts
And wished that you were there?

Have you ever felt their heartbeat,
When the lights were turned down low?
Have you ever whispered "God, I love You"
But you'll never let me show?

Love is grand, yet it hurts so much.
The price you pay is high.
If I could choose between Love and Death,
I'd rather choose to die.

So do not fall in love, my friend,
It doesn't pay a dime.
It only causes broken hearts,
Yet it happens all the time.

So do not fall in love, my friend,
You'll hurt before it's through.
I ought to know, my friend -
I fell in love with you.

[islandclimber]

Pablo Neruda... "Ode With a Lament"

[mukta581]

If.. you ever need me...
If ever you need me,
I'll be right here,
To chase away the sadness,
And wipe away a tear.

If ever you need me,
I'll be two steps behind,
To follow in your footsteps,
And hear what's on your mind.

If ever you need me,
You'll never have to fear,
That your presence isn't important,
And your love isn't dear.

If ever you need me,
I'll always be around,
To bring back the laughter,
Where deep in your heart it's found.

You'll never have to worry,
For I'll always be here,
To chase away the sadness,
And wipe away a tear

[musicman0000]

longfellows "the tide rises the tide falls"
thats why im an english
he painted a picture in words as music can paint pictures

[quasimodo1]

Zone
by Guillaume Apollinaire
Translated by Donald Revell


At last you're tired of this elderly world

Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

You're fed up living with antiquity

Even the automobiles are antiques
Religion alone remains entirely new religion
Remains as simple as an airport hangar

In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old
The most modem European Pope Pius X it's you
The windows watch and shame has sealed
The confessionals against you this morning
Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud
Here's poetry this morning and for prose you're reading the tabloids
Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
Biographies of great men a thousand various titles

I saw a pretty street this morning I forgot the name
New and cleanly it was the sun's clarion
Executives laborers exquisite stenographers
Criss-cross Monday through Saturday four times daily
Three times every morning sirens groan
At the lunch hour a rabid bell barks
The lettering on the walls and billboards
the doorplates and posters twitters parakeet-style
I love the swank of that street
Situated in Paris between the rue Aumont-Thieville and the avenue des Ternes

Here's the young street and you're still a baby
Dressed by your mother in blue and white only
You're very pious and with your oldest friend Rene Dalize
Nothing is more fun than Masses and Litanies


It's nine o'clock the gaslight is low you leave your bed
You pray all night in the school chapel
Meanwhile an eternal adorable amethyst depth
Christ's flamboyant halo spins forever
Behold the beautiful lily of worship
Behold the red-haired torch inextinguishable
Behold the pale son and scarlet of the dolorous Mother
Behold the tree forever tufted with prayer
Behold the double gallows honor and eternity
Behold the six-pointed star
Behold the God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday
Behold the Christ who flies higher than aviators
He holds the world's record for altitude

Christ pupil of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries knows its stuff
And bird-changed this century like Jesus climbs the sky
Devils in the abyss look up to watch
They say this century mimics Simon Magus in Judea
It takes a thief to catch a thief they cry
Angels flutter around the pretty trapeze act
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Hover as close to the airplane as they can
Sometimes they give way to other men hauling the Eucharist
Priests eternally climbing the elevating Host
The plane descends at last its wings unfolded
bursts into a million swallows
Full speed come the crows the owls and falcons
From Africa ibis storks flamingoes
The Roc-bird famous with writers and poets
Glides Adam's skull the original head in its talons
The horizon screams an eagle pouncing
And from America there comes a hummingbird
From China sinuous peehees
Who have only one wing and who fly in couples
And here's a dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by lyre-bird and shimmery peacock

Phoenix the pyre the self-resurrected
Obscures everything ardently briefly with ash
The sirens abandon their perilous channels
Each one singing more beautifully arrives
Everyone eagle Phoenix Chinese peehees
Eager to befriend a machine that flies

You are walking in Paris alone inside a crowd
Herds of buses bellow and come too close
Love-anguish clutches your throat
You must never again be loved
In the Dark Ages you would have entered a monastery
You are ashamed to overhear yourself praying
You laugh at yourself and the laughter crackles like hellfire
The sparks gild the ground and background of your life
Your life is a painting in a dark museum
And sometimes you examine it closely

You are walking in Paris the women are bloodsoaked
It was and I have no wish to remember it was the end of beauty

In Chartres from her entourage of flames Our Lady beamed at me
The blood of your Sacred Heart drenched me in Montmartre
I'm sick of hearing blissful promises
The love I feel is a venereal disease
And the image possessing you in your pain your insomnia
Vanishes and it is always near you

And now you are on the Riviera
Under lemon trees that never stop blooming
You are boating with friends
One is from Nice one is from Menton two from La Turbie
We are staring terrified at giant squid
At fish the symbols of Jesus swimming through seaweed

You are in the garden at an inn outside of Prague
You are completely happy a rose is on the table
And instead of getting on with your short-story
You watch the rosebug sleeping in the rose's heart

Appalled you see yourself reproduced in the agates of Saint Vitus
You were sad near to death to see yourself there
You looked as bewildered as Lazarus
In the Jewish ghetto the clock runs backwards
And you go backwards also through a slow life
Climbing the Hradchen listening at nightfall
To Bohemian songs in the singing taverns

You in Marseilles among the watermelons

Yu in Coblenz at the Hotel Gigantic

You in Rome beneath a Japanese tree

You in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly
She's engaged to marry a student from Leyden
Where you can rent rooms in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember spending three days there and three in Gouda

You are in Paris hauled before the magistrate
You are under arrest you are a criminal now

You went on sorrowful and giddy travels
Ignorant still of dishonesty and old age
Love afflicted you at twenty and again at thirty
I've lived like a fool and I've wasted my time
You dare not look at your hands I want to weep all the time
On you on the one I love on everything that frightened you

And now you are crying at the sight of refugees
Who believe in God who pray whose women nurse babies
The hall of the train station is filled with the refugee-smell
Like the Magi refugees believe in their star
They expect to find silver mines in the Argentine
And to return like kings to their abandoned countries
One family carries a red eiderdown you carry your heart
Eiderdown and dreams are equally fantastic

Some of the refugees stay on in Paris settling
Into slums on the rue des Rosiers or the rue des Ecouffes
I have seen them often at dusk they breathe at their doorways
They budge from home as reluctantly as chessmen
They are chiefly Jewish the women wear wigs
And haunt backrooms of little shops in little chairs

You're standing at the metal counter of some dive
Drinking wretched coffee where the wretched live

You are in a cavernous restaurant at night

These women are not evil they are used-up regretful
Each has tormented someone even the ugliest

She is the daughter of a police sergeant from Jersey

Her hands I'd never noticed are hard and cracked

My pity aches along the seams of her belly

I humble my mouth to her grotesque laughter

You're alone when morning comes
The milkmen jingle bottles in the street

Night beautiful courtesan the night withdraws
Fraudulent Ferdine or careful Leah

And you drink an alcohol as caustic as your life
Your life you drink as alcohol

You walk to Auteuil you want to go on foot to sleep
At home among your South Sea and Guinean fetishes
Christs of another shape another faith
Subordinate Christs of uncertain hopes

Goodbye Goodbye

Sun cut throated

[Xcape]

The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

[Trekker114]

If I had to pick one I would probably go with Keats' "To Autumn".

[bravenewlife]

Paradise Lost By John Milton :yawnb:

[quasimodo1]

Dedication to M.


Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what
invisible branch. Who, who gave you the push,
that you swung with me into the leaves?
How near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying
is the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only
toward the forever-too-high, all at once the possible
nearness. Vicinities, then
from an irresistibly swung-up-to place
-already, once again, lost-the new sight, the outlook.
And now: the commanded return
back and across and into equilbrium's arms.
Below, in between, hesitation, the pull of earth, the passage
through the turning-point of the heavy-, past it: and the
catapult stretches,
weighted with the heart's curiosity,
to the other side, opposite, upward.
Again how different, how new! How they envy each other
at the ends of the rope, these opposite halves of pleasure.


{first stanza}

[kelby_lake]

I like 'Neutral Tones' by Thomas Hardy
'On a Dead Child' by Richard Middleton
'The Tyger' by William Blake
'Sonnet' by Christina Rossetti
'Dulce et Decorem Est' by Wilfred Owen

Lots, I think

[lakeside_girl]

there are so many... and my taste changes depending on so many things...but coleridge "Duty surviving self love"
wordsworth "..tintern abbey"
tennyson "come to the garden, maude"
eliot "prufrock"
wally stevens..(my favorite poet) "13 ways of looking at a blackbird"
kipling for when i want to grin...but right now i'm "feverish" and so prone to being a bit romantic....*grin* when in england...
there a five million more...sorry!
thanks for letting me post here..it's great! ( sorry if this came up two times)

[djy78usa]

Brick by Ben Folds

Shes a Brick and I'm Drowning slowly

All about a guy that gets a girl pregnant, and then tries to talk her into an abortion... absolutley beautiful song!!!

[detays]

TS Eliot - The Wasteland

April is the cruellest month
Breeding lilacs out of the dead land
Mixing memory and desire
Stirring dull roots with spring rain

[quasimodo1]

Love For This Book
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Clark Zlotchew and Dennis Maloney


In these lonely regions I have been powerful
in the same way as a cheerful tool
or like untrammeled grass which lets loose its seed
or like a dog rolling around in the dew.
Matilde, time will pass wearing out and burning
another skin, other fingernails, other eyes, and then
the algae that lashed our wild rocks,
the waves that unceasingly construct their own whiteness,
all will be firm without us,
all will be ready for the new days,
which will not know our destiny.

What do we leave here but the lost cry
of the seabird, in the sand of winter, in the gusts of wind
that cut our faces and kept us
erect in the light of purity,
as in the heart of an illustrious star? {first half of this poem}

[pjjr]

Prufrock, TS Eliot
Stopping by Woods-Robert Frost
Be Still, My soul, be still-AE Houseman
On his Blindness-Milton
Dover Beach
My Heart leaps up with joy-Wordsworth
I like a lot of poems, but these I enjoy reading over and over and over.

[Mintyblue]

My favourites are-
Ode to Autumn, Keats
Written in early spring, Worsworth
In Memorium, Tennyson

[Roivas]

Definitely "Goblin Market" by Christina Rossetti.

I like "Leda and the Swan" by Yeats, as well.

[GunslingerSnake]

Gotta say 'Days' by Larkin is a favourite of mine:

''Days, what are days for?"

[Rakthor]

I must say the crunch, by Charles Bukowski.

people are not good to each other.
perhaps if they were
our deaths would not be so sad.

My favorite quote of all time.

[Vincent Black]

Prufrock by Eliot or The Raven by Poe

[jikan myshkin]

the raven

[rajeevacklamon]

one of my favourite poems is by Pablo Nerruda Tonight I can write the saddest lines..........

[LaPléiade]

One of my favourite poem is "Daffodils" by W.Wordsworth
I also like Shakespeare's sonnet "Dirge to Love"
"The Moon" by Shelley

Nevertheless as a French people , I do not know a lot about English litterature but I am eager to learn

[Statistic]

The Jabberwocky

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

[bej6s]

i like sylvia plath's "mirror" and also am a fan of Robert Frost.

[Negar]

Do we really need to read lines of words to get some feeling about something?! Just look at this :
old pond
a frog jumps
the sound of water
isn't haiku marvelous?

[Negar]

One of my favourite poem is "Daffodils" by W.Wordsworth
I also like Shakespeare's sonnet "Dirge to Love"
"The Moon" by Shelley

Nevertheless as a French people , I do not know a lot about English litterature but I am eager to learn

Dear LaPleiade,
I am interested in french and its literature.You can write poems in french here for us.( if u have the translation it'll be wonderful)

[quasimodo1]

In earlier days, and calmer hours,

When heart with heart delights to blend,

Where bloom my native valley's bowers,

I had --- Ah ! Have I now? --- a friend !

To him this pledge I charge thee send,

Memorial of a youthful vow;

I would remind him of my end:

Though souls absorb'd like mine allow

Brief thought to distant friendship's claim,

Yet dear to him my blighted name.

'Tis strange --- he prophesied my doom,

And I have smiled --- I then could smile ---

When Prudence would his voice assume,

And warn --- I reck'd not what --- the while:

But now remembrance whisper o'er

Those accents scarcely mark'd before.

Say --- that his bodings came to pass,

And he will start to hear their truth,

And wish his words had not been sooth:

Tell him, unheeding as I was,

Through many a busy bitter scene

Of all our golden youth had been,

In pain, my faltering tongue had tried

To bless his memory ere I died;

But Heaven in wrath would turn away

If Guilt should for the guiltless pray.

I do not ask him not to blame,

Too gentle he to wound my name;

And what have I to do with fame?

I do not ask him not to mourn,

Such cold request might sound like scorn;

And what than friendship's manly tear

May better grace a brother's bier?

But bear this ring, his own of old,

And tell him --- what thou dost behold !

The wither'd frame, the ruin'd mind,

The wrack by passion left behind,

A shrivell'd scroll, a scatter'd leaf,

Sear'd by the autumn blast of grief !


{excerpt from Lord Byron's long poem} -- THE GIAOUR
A FRAGMENT OF A TURKISH TALE

By
Lord Byron
1813

http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-Giaour.htm

[quasimodo1]

Invitation to the Voyage


My child, my sister,
Think of the rapture
Of living together there!
Of loving at will,
Of loving till death,
In the land that is like you!
The misty sunlight
Of those cloudy skies
Has for my spirit the charms,
So mysterious,
Of your treacherous eyes,
Shining brightly through their tears.


There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.


Gleaming furniture,
Polished by the years,
Will ornament our bedroom;
The rarest flowers
Mingling their fragrance
With the faint scent of amber,
The ornate ceilings,
The limpid mirrors,
The oriental splendor,
All would whisper there
Secretly to the soul
In its soft, native language.


There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.


See on the canals
Those vessels sleeping.
Their mood is adventurous;
It's to satisfy
Your slightest desire
That they come from the ends of the earth.
— The setting suns
Adorn the fields,
The canals, the whole city,
With hyacinth and gold;
The world falls asleep
In a warm glow of light.


There all is order and beauty,
Luxury, peace, and pleasure.


— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)


{I have no idea if this translation is the best, Antiquarian?}

[alakungfu]

Fern Hill



Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the **** on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.


By Dylan Thomas

[Xarlot]

Almost Miss Scotland by Liz Lochhead

A little extract:

I was six-fit-six, I was slinky
(Yet nae skinnymalinky) -
My waist was nipped in wi elastic,
My powder and panstick were three inches thick
Nails? Long, blood-red and plastic.
So my smile'd come across, I'd larded oan lipgloss
And my false eyelashes were mink
With a sky blue crescent that was pure iridescent
When I lowered my eyelids to blink.

Well, I wiggled on tapselteerie, my heels were that peerie
While a kinna Jimmy Shrandish band
Played 'Flower of Scotland'
But it aw got droont oot wi wolf whistles -
And that's no countin' "For These Are My Mountains'
- See I'd tits like nuclear missiles.

Funny if you hear it in a Scottish accent :p