Favorite poem? [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

Miranda

06-12-2004, 08:05 AM

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

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

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

A Song of Honour - Ralph Hodgson

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

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

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

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

5Parker

08-03-2004, 03:02 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

5Parker

08-03-2004, 03:09 PM

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

verybaddmom

08-03-2004, 07:29 PM

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

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

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

She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

baddad

08-03-2004, 11:48 PM

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

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

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

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

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost.

verybaddmom

08-03-2004, 11:51 PM

geez, mikey, you dont have to yell....')

Kahrey

08-29-2004, 11:30 PM

This is one of my favorites:

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

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

Diceman

08-30-2004, 02:46 AM

The End Of The Weekend by Anthony Hecht:
http://plagiarist.com/poetry/2410/

Miranda

09-08-2004, 06:00 PM

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

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

Robert Frost

Miranda

09-08-2004, 06:05 PM

Love and Friendship

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

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

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

Emily Bronte

Miranda

09-08-2004, 06:23 PM

The Heart Knoweth its Own Bitterness

When all the work of life
Is finished once, and fast asleep
We swerve no more against the knife
But taste silence cool and deep
Forgetful of the highways rough,
Forgetful of the thorny scurge.
Forgetful of the tossing surge,
Then shall we find it is enough?

How can we say 'enough' on earth -
'Enough with such a craving heart?
I have not found it since my birth.
But still have bartered part for part.
I have not held and hugged the whole,
But paid the old to gain the new;
Much have I paid, but much is due,
'till I am beggared sense and soul.

I used to labour, used to strive,
For pleasure with a restless will:
Now if I save my soul alive
All else, what matters, good or ill?
I used to dream alone, to plan
Unspoken hopes and days to come-
Of all this past, this is the sum-
I will not lean on child of man.

To give, to give ,not to recieve!
I long to pour myself, my soul
Not to keep back, or count or leave,
But king with king to give the whole.
I long for one to stir my deep -
I have had enough of help and gift -
I long for one to search and sift
Myself, to take myself and keep.

You scratch my surface with your pin,
You stroke me smooth with hushing breath -
Nay pierce, nay probe, nay dig within,
Probe my quick core and sound my depth.
You call me with your puny call,
You talk, you smile, you nothing do:
How should I spend my heart on you,
My heart that so outweights you all?

Your vessels are much too strait:
Were I to pour you could not hold:-
Bear with me; I must bear to wait
A fountain sealed through heat and cold.
Bear with me, day or months or years:
Deep must call unto deep until the end
When friend shall no more envy friend
Nor vex his friend unawares.

Not in this world of hope deferred,
This world of perishable stuff: -
Eye hath not seen, nor ear hath heard
Nor heart concieved that full 'enough' :
Here means a separating sea
Here harvests fail, here breaks the heart;
There God shall join and no more part
I full of Christ and Christ of me.

Christina Rossetti

kautilya

12-28-2004, 02:47 AM

hi
I am new to the forum and by your standards, almost uninitiated to poetry.
But looking at frost-lovers population, I could not resist joining in.
I think "After Apple-picking" is another beauty by Frost, can someone post it and reviews on it.
Prashanth

mono

12-28-2004, 02:08 PM

Good choice, kautilya! I think I have never read that particular poem, though I consider myself, too, a devoted fan of Frost. His use of imagery seems specifically distinguished in this poem, when, usually, he writes more sporadically with random descriptions. Thanks for the suggestion.

Jay

12-28-2004, 09:58 PM

I'm another Frost fan, and I like Fire And Ice a lot :)
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 know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost

nothingman87

12-29-2004, 01:29 AM

A few:

Eloisa and Abelard by Alexander Pope

Ozymandias by Shelley

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Wessex Heights by Thomas Hardy

Avalive

01-12-2005, 02:37 AM

Apologia

IS it thy will that I should wax and wane,
Barter my cloth of gold for hodden grey,
And at thy pleasure weave that web of pain
Whose brightest threads are each a wasted day?

Is it thy will That my Soul's House should be a tortured spot
Wherein, like evil paramours, must dwell
The quenchless flame, the worm that dieth not?

Nay, if it be thy will I shall endure,
And sell ambition at the common mart,
And let dull failure be my vestiture,
And sorrow dig its grave within my heart.

Perchance it may be better so I have not made my heart a heart of stone,
Nor starved my boyhood of its goodly feast,
Nor walked where Beauty is a thing unknown.

Many a man hath done so; sought to fence
In straitened bonds the soul that should be free,
Trodden the dusty road of common sense,
While all the forest sang of liberty,

Not marking how the spotted hawk in flight
Passed on wide pinion through the lofty air,
To where the steep untrodden mountain height
Caught the last tresses of the Sun God¹s hair.

Or how the little flower he trod upon,
The daisy, that white-feathered shield of gold,
Followed with wistful eyes the wandering sun
Content if once its leaves were aureoled.

But surely it is something to have been
The best belovèd for a little while,
To have walked hand in hand with Love, and seen
His purple wings flit once across thy smile.

Ay! though the gorgèd asp of passion feed
On my boy's heart, yet have I burst the bars,
Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!

Scheherazade

01-15-2005, 06:16 AM

This morning I woke up thinking of this poem... God knows why... but I just did and it put a smile on my face (or was it because I had a smile on my face I remembered it?? )

Get Drunk!

Always be drunk.
That's it!
The great imperative!
In order not to feel
Time's horrid fardel
bruise your shoulders,
grinding you into the earth,
Get drunk and stay that way.

On what?
On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
But get drunk.

And if you sometimes happen to wake up
on the porches of a palace,
in the green grass of a ditch,
in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
ask the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask everything that flees,
everything that groans
or rolls
or sings,
everything that speaks,
ask what time it is;
and the wind,
the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock
will answer you:

"Time to get drunk!
Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Charles Baudelaire

I know there many different translations of this poem out there and I really wish I could French to appreciate it fully but this is the next best thing I guess...

Helga

01-15-2005, 06:31 PM

This is a great poem Scheherazade, by Baudelaire right?

this is my favourite:

Love's Secret
Never seek to tell thy love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind doth move
Silently, invisibly.

I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears.
Ah! she did depart!

Soon after she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly:
He took her with a sigh.

By W.Blake

mono

01-15-2005, 06:36 PM

I just read the following poem for the first time, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and fell in love with it. Of course, I cannot narrow my favorite poem to one, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

The Haunted Oak

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak-tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

My leaves were green as the best, I trow,
And sap ran free in my veins,
But I saw in the moonlight dim and weird
A guiltless victim's pains.

I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan,
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.

They'd charged him with the old, old crime,
And set him fast in jail:
Oh, why does the dog howl all night long,
And why does the night wind wail?

He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath,
And he raised his hand to the sky;
But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear,
And the steady tread drew nigh.

Who is it rides by night, by night,
Over the moonlit road?
And what is the spur that keeps the pace,
What is the galling goad?

And now they beat at the prison door,
"Ho, keeper, do not stay!
We are friends of him whom you hold within,
And we fain would take him away

"From those who ride fast on our heels
With mind to do him wrong;
They have no care for his innocence,
And the rope they bear is long."

They have fooled the jailer with lying words,
They have fooled the man with lies;
The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn,
And the great door open flies.

Now they have taken him from the jail,
And hard and fast they ride,
And the leader laughs low down in his throat,
As they halt my trunk beside.

Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black,
And the doctor one of white,
And the minister, with his oldest son,
Was curiously bedight.

Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?
'Tis but a little space,
And the time will come when these shall dread
The mem'ry of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,
And the weight of him in my grain,
I feel in the throe of his final woe
The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth
On the bough that bears the ban;
I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,
From the curse of a guiltless man.

And ever the judge rides by, rides by,
And goes to hunt the deer,
And ever another rides his soul
In the guise of a mortal fear.

And ever the man he rides me hard,
And never a night stays he;
For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,
On the trunk of a haunted tree.

lukkiseven

03-19-2005, 08:54 PM

My favorite poet is Edgar Allen Poe. I love his work, but most of the poeple I know think his poems are depressing. Annabel Lee is my favorite poem, ever.

-------
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 winged seraphs of 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 one 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 the sepulchre there by the sea -
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Scheherazade

07-01-2005, 11:42 AM

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 wornout 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 breath 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!

Rudyard Kipling

Beaumains

07-03-2005, 01:19 PM

I have too many favorite poems (and poets) to name, so I'll just post this one, a poem of Tolkien's:

Gil-galad was an Elven-king.
Of him the harpers sadly sing:
the last whose realm was fair and free
between the Mountains and the Sea.

His sword was long, his lance was keen,
his shining helm afar was seen;
the countless stars of heaven's field
were mirrored in his silver shield.

But long ago he rode away,
and where he dwelleth none can say;
for into darkness fell his star
in Mordor where the shadows are.

Beaumains

07-03-2005, 01:25 PM

Tennyson needs some representation on here too, and though I would post The Lady of Shalott, it's rather lengthy for a message board, so I'll leave you with this one instead:

The Charge of the Light Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Some one had blundered:
Their's not to make reply,
Their's not to reason why,
Their's but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre-stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not,
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Sally Brown

07-05-2005, 01:57 PM

I love poems by Eugenio Montale, like that:

Maybe one morning walking in air
of dry glass, I'll turn and see the miracle occur -
nothingness at my shoulders, the void
behind me - with a drunkard's terror.
Then, as on a screen, the usual illusion:
hills houses trees will suddenly reassemble,
but too late, and I'll quietly go my way,
with my secret, among men who don't look back.

Bye,
Sally

Monica

07-06-2005, 05:38 AM

Of course, there are many poems that I love, but I think the most important ones for me are by Pablo Neruda. For example:

If You Forget Me - Pablo Neruda

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Sally Brown

07-07-2005, 03:13 AM

Another poem from my country - Italy - by Cesare Pavese.

DEATH WILL COME WITH YOUR EYES

Death will come with your eyes—
this death that accompanies us
from morning till night, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or a stupid vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a muted cry, a silence.
As you see them each morning
when alone you lean over
the mirror. O cherished hope,
that day we too shall know
that you are life and nothing.

For everyone death has a look.
Death will come with your eyes.
It will be like terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed lips.
We'll go down the abyss in silence.

Bye,
Sally

Scheherazade

07-08-2005, 05:08 AM

The World is Too Much With Us

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-gather'd 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,-
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

William Wordsworth

I love this poem... The first four lines haunt me... Really wish I knew what Wordsworth was thinking when he wrote them.

Bix12

07-10-2005, 08:26 PM

My favorite poem? Oh good grief...impossible request. Here's one of my favorites, one of a very, very many. O, btw, Scheherazade, you were wondering what Wordsworth was talking about? I'll venture a guess, and say that he is lamenting the onset of the industrial revolution, remember the age in which Wordsworth was alive. The lines carry a tone of grieving, of loss. He sees a change occurring, one he doesn't care for. He notes the ease in which his fellow man has so cold-heartedly exploited nature in the greedy pursuit of material wealth, and it's breaking his heart. Just an opinion....now, the poem:

SUDDEN LIGHT

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Scheherazade

07-11-2005, 05:18 AM

O, btw, Scheherazade, you were wondering what Wordsworth was talking about? I'll venture a guess, and say that he is lamenting the onset of the industrial revolution, remember the age in which Wordsworth was alive. The lines carry a tone of grieving, of loss. He sees a change occurring, one he doesn't care for. He notes the ease in which his fellow man has so cold-heartedly exploited nature in the greedy pursuit of material wealth, and it's breaking his heart. Just an opinion....now, the poem:
Hello, Bix12! I am familiar with the popular interpretation of Wordworth's poem; i.e., the burdens Industrial revolutions put on the shoulder of humanity. However, as I said, I love the opening lines of this poem and, I believe, when read seperately, they can be interpreted differently, without being as specific as Industrial Revolution... which is why I wonder what was going through Wordsworth's mind exactly. Was he only thinking about the industrialist world or were there other worries on his mind? Just a thought... Or maybe a wish that he did :)

Welcome to the Forum, by the way! :)

Bix12

07-11-2005, 09:04 PM

Thank you, Scheherazade! :wave: I really like it here...too bad it's not more lively, though...but not everyone has as much freetime as I do, either...anyway...I didn't mean to sound presumptuous in my comments regarding Mr. Wordsworth, it definitely wasn't my intent. :blush:

Here's another one of my favorites:

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow--
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand--
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep--while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

I've felt exactly like that before....<sigh>

Bix12

07-12-2005, 12:11 AM

Sarah Teasdale is another one of my favorites poets, and this is one of my favorite poems by her:

"Did You Never Know?"

Did you never know, long ago, how much you loved me --
That your love would never lessen and never go?
You were young then, proud and fresh-hearted,
You were too young to know.

Fate is a wind, and red leaves fly before it
Far apart, far away in the gusty time of year --
Seldom we meet now, but when I hear you speaking,
I know your secret, my dear, my dear.

Sarah Teasdale

Bix12

07-13-2005, 11:27 AM

Good day all! :wave:

Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song

Rainer Maria Rilke

mono

07-13-2005, 01:06 PM

Love Song
. . .
Rainer Maria Rilke
Oh, I love Rilke!
Two of my favorites:

Childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?

We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

(Translated by Edward Snow)

-----

Autumn

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

(Translated by Robert Bly)

Scheherazade

07-13-2005, 01:16 PM

Although only recently I discovered this poem, it is one of my favorites. I am almost jealous that Donne is the one who wrote it instead of me.

The Will

BEFORE I sigh my last gasp, let me breathe,
Great Love, some legacies ; I here bequeath
Mine eyes to Argus, if mine eyes can see ;
If they be blind, then, Love, I give them thee ;
My tongue to Fame ; to ambassadors mine ears ;
To women, or the sea, my tears ;
Thou, Love, hast taught me heretofore
By making me serve her who had twenty more,
That I should give to none, but such as had too much before.

My constancy I to the planets give ;
My truth to them who at the court do live ;
My ingenuity and openness,
To Jesuits ; to buffoons my pensiveness ;
My silence to any, who abroad hath been ;
My money to a Capuchin :
Thou, Love, taught'st me, by appointing me
To love there, where no love received can be,
Only to give to such as have an incapacity.

My faith I give to Roman Catholics ;
All my good works unto the Schismatics
Of Amsterdam ; my best civility
And courtship to an University ;
My modesty I give to soldiers bare ;
My patience let gamesters share :
Thou, Love, taught'st me, by making me
Love her that holds my love disparity,
Only to give to those that count my gifts indignity.

I give my reputation to those
Which were my friends ; mine industry to foes ;
To schoolmen I bequeath my doubtfulness ;
My sickness to physicians, or excess ;
To nature all that I in rhyme have writ ;
And to my company my wit :
Thou, Love, by making me adore
Her, who begot this love in me before,
Taught'st me to make, as though I gave, when I do but restore.

To him for whom the passing-bell next tolls,
I give my physic books ; my written rolls
Of moral counsels I to Bedlam give ;
My brazen medals unto them which live
In want of bread ; to them which pass among
All foreigners, mine English tongue :
Though, Love, by making me love one
Who thinks her friendship a fit portion
For younger lovers, dost my gifts thus disproportion.

Therefore I'll give no more, but I'll undo
The world by dying, because love dies too.
Then all your beauties will be no more worth
Than gold in mines, where none doth draw it forth ;
And all your graces no more use shall have,
Than a sun-dial in a grave :
Thou, Love, taught'st me by making me
Love her who doth neglect both me and thee,
To invent, and practise this one way, to annihilate all three.

John Donne

Bix12

07-15-2005, 09:09 AM

Ah yes, John Donne...not only was he a brilliant poet, but a fiery & spellbinding sermonizer. It could be argued that, in his day, he was more well known for his work from the pulpit, than any fame his poetry brought...of course, he's remember'd now almost exclusively for his wonderful poetry.

Here's a particular favorite of mine by Donne, and certainly one of his best known, if not one of his best, poems:

Aire And Angles

Twice or thrice had I lov'd thee,
Before I knew thy face or name;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be;
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing I did see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught;
Ev'ry thy hair for love to work upon
Is much too much, some fitter must be sought;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere;
Then, as an angel, face, and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure, doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

John Donne

Bix12

07-15-2005, 09:25 AM

Here's the poem I came here to post, before I was sidetrack'd by Donne, (pleasantly so). This poem, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is one of my all-time ever favourites...to me, this is the very definition of happiness. This poem illustrates the genius of Ferlinghetti through it's brevity, and clean, concise lines.To look at it, one would think that there isn't much there, but it conveys (to me, at least), a scene almost real enough to touch, and I feel as if I'm actually there.

http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/6932/paris47jj.jpg
Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/2999/paris50bn.jpg

mono

07-15-2005, 07:05 PM

[FONT=Comic Sans MS]Here's the poem I came here to post, before I was sidetrack'd by Donne, (pleasantly so). This poem, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, is one of my all-time ever favourites...to me, this is the very definition of happiness . . .
Very nice, Bix12. How pleasant to have another big poetry fan on the forum! :nod:
Unfortunately, I have not encountered a lot of Ferlinghetti's poetry until months ago, and, ever since, he has become one of my favorites. I posted a few of his poems that I thought especially high of here:
http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=4254

Bix12

07-16-2005, 09:34 PM

Not to brag, or anything...hee hee....but I happen to know Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I've been to his bookstore several times (City Lights, San Francisco), and I've also attended a few parties where he happened to be in attendance...he is a sweetheart of a man.

http://img320.imageshack.us/img320/4730/visit8sx.jpg
That's Lawrence on the left, in front of his book store...the other guy is a Cuban poet, whose name escapes me just now

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
at the turn of the century
my father ran into my mother
on a fun-ride at Coney Island
having spied each other eating
in a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
that she was right for him entirely
he followed her into
the playland of that evening
where the headlong meeting
of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
hurtled them forever together

And I now in the back seat
of their eternity
reaching out to embrace them

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

amuse

07-16-2005, 09:40 PM

i like his "Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace" poem. very crisp and strong. :)

come to think of it, he reminds me of Brautigan, without the extreme oddities.

Bix12

07-16-2005, 09:45 PM

Hi amuse! :wave: yessssss...I love that poem. I just posted it up above...I wanna go there. :nod:

amuse

07-16-2005, 09:55 PM

um, your posting's how i heard about it ;) (never heard of him before :blush:). is L.F. from Russia? btw, as a northern californian, your acquaintance with him is one of the first things to really impress me. how fortunate you are. :)

Bix12

07-16-2005, 10:03 PM

Noooo...he's an American, but he's obvioulsy been around the world once, or twice...as far as being fortunate that I know him, indeed, I consider it a priviledge...that's not to say we're great buds, or anything...I've just met him once or twice...

I love Northern California. Just now, I'm wayyyyy out in New England...about 45 miles N.E. of N.Y.C.

I love New York City...it's my favorite city in the world! :nod:

amuse

07-16-2005, 10:10 PM

where are you from?

Bix12

07-18-2005, 09:13 PM

I'm from Boston, my parents, however, are English. I'm a first generation American. I can trace my fathers side of the family back 800 years, and my mothers side a bit further than that. My family is from an area of Britain that is about 40 miles west of Manchester...an area known as Salford. :)

Scheherazade

07-20-2005, 04:30 AM

She Walks In Beauty Like The Night

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

Lord Byron

Gozeta

07-20-2005, 04:22 PM

A personal favorate. Is this poem by Jon Donne. You just got to love it.

(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 picture[s] 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'rt 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.

chispa

07-22-2005, 02:38 PM

To paint a bird's portrait (Jacques Prévert)

First of all, paint a cage
with an opened little door
then paint something attractive
something simple
something beautiful
something of benefit for the bird
Put the picture on a tree
in a garden
in a wood
or in a forest
hide yourself behind the tree
silent
immovable...

Sometimes the bird arrives quickly
but sometimes it takes years
Don't be discouraged
wait
wait for years if necessary
the rapidity or the slowness of the arrival
doesn't have any relationship
with the result of the picture

When the bird comes
if it comes
keep the deepest silence
wait until the bird enters the cage
and when entered in
Close the door softly with the brush
then remove one by the one all the bars
care not to touch any feather of the bird

Then draw the portrait of the tree
choosing the most beautiful branch
for the bird
paint also the green foliage and the coolness
of the beasts of the grass in the summer's heat
and then, wait that the bird starts singing

If the bird doesn't sing
it's a bad sign
it means that the picture is wrong
but if it sings it's a good sign
it means that you can sign

so you tear with sweetness
a feather from the bird
and write your name in a corner of the painting

Scheherazade

07-27-2005, 07:40 PM

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

Robert Frost

mono

07-27-2005, 11:34 PM

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost
A classic that never grows old! I have always had an immense respect for Robert Frost, but would have to call the following my favorite by him:

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Dyrwen

07-28-2005, 03:58 AM

More prose than anything, but its meant to be poetic. It's always made me smile to read, so I can only call it my favorite because it's one of the few I remember all the time.

I Know You by Henry Rollins

I know you
You were too short
You had bad skin
You couldn't talk to them very well
Words didn't seem to work
They lied when they came out of your mouth

You tried so hard to understand them
You wanted to be part of what was happening
You saw them having fun
And it seemed like such a mystery
Almost magic

Made you think that there was something wrong with you
You'd look in the mirror and try to find it
You thought that you were ugly
And that everyone was looking at you

So you learned to be invisible
To look down
To avoid conversation

The hours, days, weekends
Ah, the weekend nights alone
Where were you?
In the basement?
In the attic?
In your room?
Working some job - just to have something to do.
Just to have a place to put yourself
Just to have a way to get away from them
A chance to get away from the ones that made you feel
so strange and ill at ease inside yourself

Did you ever get invited to one of their parties?
You sat and wondered if you would go or not
For hours you imagined the scenarios that might transpire
They would laugh at you
If you would know what to do
If you'd have the right things on
If they would notice that you came from a different planet

Did you get all brave in your thoughts?
Like you going to be able to go in there and deal with it
and have a great time.
Did you think that you might be the life of the party?
That all these people were gonna talk to you and you
would find out that you were wrong?
That you had a lot of friends and you weren't so
strange after all?

Did you end up going?
Did they mess with you?
Did they single you out?
Did you find out that you were invited because they
thought you were so weird?

Yeah, I think I know you
You spent a lot of time full of hate
A hate that was pure sunshine
A hate that saw for miles
A hate that kept you up at night
A hate that filled your every waking moment
A hate that carried you for a long time

Yes, I think I know you
You couldn't figure out what they saw in the way they lived

Home was not home
Your room was home
A corner was home
The place they weren't, that was home

I know you

You're sensitive and you hide it because you fear
getting stepped on one more time
It seems that when you show a part of yourself that is
the least bit vulnerable someone takes advantage of you
One of them steps on you

They mistake kindliness for weakness
But you know the difference
You've been the brunt of their weakness for years
And strength is something you know a bit about because
you had to be strong to keep yourself alive

You know yourself very well now
And you don't trust people
You know them too well

You try to find that special person
Someone you can be with
Someone you can touch
Someone you can talk to
Someone you don't feel so strange around
And you find that they don't really exist
You feel closer to people on movie screens

Yeah, I think I know you
You spend a lot of time daydreaming
And people have made comment to that effect
Telling you that you're self involved, and self centred

But they don't know, do they?
About the long night shifts alone
About the years of keeping yourself company
All the nights you wrapped your arms around yourself
so you could imagine someone holding you
The hours of indecision, self doubt
The intense depression
The blinding hate
The rage that made you stagger
The devastation of rejection

Well, maybe they do know
But if they do, they sure do a good job of hiding it
It astounds you how they can be so smooth
How they seem to pass through life as if life itself
was some divine gift
And it infuriates you to watch yourself with your
apparent skill at finding every way possible to screw it up

For you life is a long trip
Terrifying and wonderful
Birds sing to you at night
The rain and the sun the changing seasons are true friends
Solitude is a hard won ally, faithful and patient

Yeah, I think I know you

blp

07-28-2005, 08:16 AM

THE PICTURE OF LITTLE J. A. IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS

He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty. Boris Pasternak

I

Darkness falls like a wet sponge
And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch
In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”
Her tongue from previous ecstasy
Releases thoughts like little hats.

“He clap’d me first during the eclipse.
Afterwards I noted his manner
Much altered. But he sending
At that time certain handsome jewels
I durst not seem to take offense.”

In a far recess of summer
Monks are playing soccer.

II

So far is goodness a mere memory
Or naming of recent scenes of badness
That even these lives, children,
You may pass through to be blessed,
So fair does each invent his virtue.

And coming from a white world, music
Will sparkle at the lips of many who are
Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens
To some transparent witch, will dream

Of a white hero’s subtle wooing,
And time shall force a gift on each.

That beggar to whom you gave no cent
Striped the night with his strange descant.

III

Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers:
My head among the blazing phlox
Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.
I had a hard stare, accepting

Everything, taking nothing,
As though the rolled-up future might stink
As loud as stood the sick moment
The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,
Still, as the loveliest feelings

Must soon find words, and these, yes,
Displace them, so I am not wrong
In calling this comic version of myself
The true one. For as change is horror,
Virtue is really stubbornness

And only in the light of lost words
Can we imagine our rewards.

- John Ashbery

Scheherazade

07-29-2005, 05:44 AM

ROAD LESS TRAVELED

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

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

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood
And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost

Jay

07-29-2005, 08:41 AM

In Good Hands by Roger McGough

Wherever night falls
The earth is always there to catch it

Scheherazade

08-02-2005, 08:30 AM

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass:

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night:

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began?

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

W.H. Davies

lavendar1

08-02-2005, 07:56 PM

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, -
dumbly calling, deftly listening - that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment, rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Marianne Moore

mono

08-12-2005, 01:17 AM

I read this one today, and could only express the greatest admiration:

Oh Yet We Trust (from In Memoriam)

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
that not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last - far off - at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Lord Alfred Tennyson

mono

08-31-2005, 12:40 PM

This morning, I read "The Triumph Of Life" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I have read a few times before, and it gets better and better with each read. For anyone with the determination to read the long terza-rima poem (500+ lines), though unfinished (Shelley never managed to finish the poem before his untimely death), I happened to find a copy online:
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1912.html

Themis

09-01-2005, 04:17 AM

My favourite poem is in german, so, I guess, I´ll have to settle for something else. (But the first one is called "The moon" by Kathinka Zitz)
Some of my other favourites are -
" To the moon" by Percy B. Shelley and "Hope is the thing ..." by Emily Dickinson

Sarah's_Chanson

09-01-2005, 06:42 AM

A tie between Plena Timoris by Thomas Hardy, Pibroch by Ted Hughes and Nothing's Changed by Tatumkhulu Afrika.

Lady19thC

09-01-2005, 07:10 AM

One of my favourite poems is

To My Books

Silent companions of the lonely hour,
Friends, who can never alter or forsake,
Who for inconstant roving have no power,
And all neglect, perforce, must calmly take,--
Let me return to you; this turmoil ending
Which wordly cares have in my spirit wrought,
And, o'er your old familiar pages bending,
Refresh my mind with many a tranquil thought:
Till, haply meeting there, from time to time,
Fancies, the audible echo of my own,
'Twill be like hearing in a foreign clime
My native language spoke in friendly tone,
And with a sort of welcome I shall dwell
On these, my unripe musings, told so well.

Caroline Norton-1840

alteredtome

09-04-2005, 09:46 AM

I just discovered this forum today, hallelujah! I've been reading all of your favorites, sighing with delight, and googling like a crazy chicken (see? even reading these poems has made me poetic). :blush: I wanted to share my favorite poem, by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I remember the first time that I read the first line, it hit me square in the gut. Then the next two lines washed over me with the most relieving forgiveness. I felt blessed and clean after reading this poem. Such an amazing power, huh? The power of well put together words.

Kristina

sir

09-04-2005, 10:17 AM

I love R.M. Rilke...there's a poem's translation...although,german language has more nuances in matter of poetry and filosofy (my opinion)..

-----Love Song------

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/4027/

hellodolly

09-07-2005, 12:56 AM

My new favorite poem is by the gay poet James Schwartz. The poem is called "On Death" and is from his e-book RESH REMIXED (http://reshremixed.tripod.com):

On Death

Have you ever smelled Death?

I have

it ate my mother who was an angel

and it's breath was cancer sweet

Have you ever seen Death?

I have

it's eyes are scarlet and it hides under beds

Have you ever heard Death?

I have

it's the rustle of wet leaves on an autumn day

Have you ever tasted Death?

I have

it tastes like cheap champagne

and is equally intoxicating

although the mornings after may be quite vile.

Scatterbrain

09-13-2005, 01:05 PM

I have countless and countless of favourite poems
But the favourite is Rimbaud's Season In Hell

Xander

09-13-2005, 05:20 PM

Hey, how are you? My favourite poem is The Raven by E.A. Poe, but it is too long, so I'll type a very beautiful poem, also by E.A. Poe. It is A Dream Within A Dream:

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow -
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand -
How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

the_imp

09-14-2005, 02:07 AM

I don't have the book in front of me, so I'll just type in what I have memorized.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor I muttered, tapping at my chamber door, only this and nothing more.

Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow, from my books surcease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost lenore.
For the rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named 'Lenore' nameless here for evermore.
...........
I am getting very tired now, can't remember much more, I have to study and get some shut eye. I suggest you read the rest of the poem, it's wonderful. All of Poe's writings are brilliant works of art.

Satine

09-14-2005, 08:59 AM

"To A Stranger" Walt Whitman

PASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me, 5
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you

All-time favorite (so far...)

Nocturnal

09-14-2005, 02:45 PM

If I had to choose a single poem as my favourite, I would say John Milton's "Paradise Lost", which for obvious reasons I cannot quite quote here.
However, I have a second fave that is as dear as Milton's masterpiece, albeit less monumental:

To-
by Percy Bsysshe Shelly

One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.

I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not,--
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?

Pensive

09-18-2005, 09:26 AM

Insomnia

09-18-2005, 01:54 PM

Well, I don't have anything in mind right now... Maybe something fo Robert frost.

I'm more into Arabic poetry :) No poetry in the world can compete with it. but you have to be an Arabic speaker to appreciate it, translation dosn't work

chatnoir1311

09-18-2005, 02:29 PM

I really love (like some other members) The Raven by E.A.Poe, "Ode to Joy" by Schiller and "The Prophet" by Alexandr Puschkin :

Parched with the spirit's thirst, I crossed
An endless desert sunk in gloom,
And a six-winged seraph came
Where the tracks met and I stood lost.
Fingers light as dream he laid
Upon my lids; I opened wide
My eagle eyes, and gazed around.
He laid his fingers on my ears
And they were filled with roaring sound:
I heard the music of the spheres,
The flight of angels through the skies,
The beasts that crept beneath the sea,
The heady uprush of the vine;
And, like a lover kissing me,
He rooted out this tongue of mine
Fluent in lies and vanity;
He tore my fainting lips apart
And, with his right hand steeped in blood,
He armed me with a serpent's dart;
With his bright sword he split my breast;
My heart leapt to him with a bound;
A glowing livid coal he pressed
Into the hollow of the wound.
There in the desert I lay dead,
And God called out to me and said:
'Rise, prophet, rise, and hear, and see,
And let my works be seen and heard
By all who turn aside from me,
And burn them with my fiery word.'

1827

Satirical

09-18-2005, 04:45 PM

Got to be the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Coleridge, beautiful.

YellowCrayola

09-22-2005, 01:12 AM

I withdraw my entry from 09-21-2005. Sorry. My favorite poem is actually Annabel Lee, by EAP. :cool:

blp

09-22-2005, 07:34 AM

If You, by Robert Creeley, is my current favourite:

If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?

A soft-bodied dog, a hen
Feathers and fur to begin it again

when the sun goes down and it gets dark
I saw an animal in a park

Bring it home to give it to you
I have seen animals break in two

You were looking for something soft
And loyal and clean and wondrously careful

a form of otherwise vicious habit
could have long ears and be called a rabbit

Dead died will die want
Morning midnight I asked you

If you were going to get a pet
What kind of animal would you get?

volvoreta

09-22-2005, 12:52 PM

It's not my favourite poems, but it's by one of my favourite poets, Rosalia de Castro
Once upon a time I had
a nail nailed unto my heart,
and no longer remember if gold,
iron, or love the nail was.
I only know it so deeply hurt me,
so much it tormented me,
that night and day, with no pause I cried
like Magdalene at the Passion cried,
“Oh Lord, You who everything can do,
-I prayed to God once-
give me courage to, such a nail
with a single pull take out.
And God did, I took it out,
But … Who would have thought?
Then I did not feel tormented,
did not know what suffering was;
knew only something was missing
where that nail missing was,
and it seems, it seems I longed
for that sorrow … Oh, Good Lord!
This mortal clay wrapping the spirit
Who will understand it, Lord …!

veronic

09-22-2005, 07:47 PM

Adore this one:

Shall Earth no more inspire thee,
Thou lonely dreamer now ?
Since passion may not fire thee
Shall nature cease to bow ?

Thy mind is ever moving
In regions dark to thee;
Recall its useless roving -
Come back and dwell with me -

I know my mountain breezes
Enchant annd soothe thee still -
I know my sunshine pleases
Despite thy wayward will -

When day with evening blending
Sinks from the summer sky,
I've seen thy spirit bending
In fond idolotry -

I've watched thee every hour -
I know my mighty sway -
I know my magic power
To drive thy griefs away -

Few hearts to mortal given
On earth so wildly pine
Yet none would ask a Heaven
More like this Earth than thine -

Then let my winds caress thee -
Thy comrade let me be -
Since nought beside can bless thee
Return and dwell with me -

Emily Bronte

Psycheinaboat

09-23-2005, 09:44 AM

I have loved poetry since childhood, and it is too difficult to narrow it down to one favorite.

I am not a huge fan of Emily Dickinson, but here is my fav. by her.

Because I could not stop for Death (712)
by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Get more Emily (and other poetry) here...

http://www.poets.org/

kev73107

10-02-2005, 12:49 AM

because of her masterful use of language...

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with it's yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
-- Sylvia Plath

yellowfeverlime

10-02-2005, 07:46 PM

Sadly, my favorite poem is my own:

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13666

geetanjali

10-03-2005, 01:24 PM

A Man's requirements - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Old Stoic - Emily Bronte
How Do I Love Thee- Elizabeth Barret Browning
Kubla Khan- S.T.Coleridge

Monkey Queen

10-03-2005, 05:02 PM

This is my first proper post, I'm afraid although I love poetry I can tell you guys are way ahead of me in a literary sense! But I'm really glad I've found this site to improve my knowledge. :)

My favourite poem is

How Do I Love Thee?
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

subterranean

10-04-2005, 07:52 PM

This one recently becomes one of my favs:

i like my body when it is with your by e.e. cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new

yellowfeverlime

10-04-2005, 07:55 PM

My favorite's are in the links on my signiature, but this one is OKAY:

The Perfect Day
I feel the wind
as it makes its way
i feel the sun
because it's a really hot day
i feel the rain
as it pounds the hard ground
i try to look up
but it forces me back down
i feel the rough ground
under my bare feet
i looked down
and see the raging waves
the blue and gray clashing together
the sharp rocks
creating mini tidal waves
i see a seagull
swiftly move above the water
as it picks up it's dinner in one quick move
i watch the lightning
making it's way to the ground
i hear the thunder
i suddenly turn around
i see my parents,
and their tear streaked faces,
running to wards me with incredible speed
i close my eyes
and start to fall back wards
as i reopen my eyes
i see my mom
on her knees
praying to me or the sun
i hit the rocks
with such great force
the last thing i heard
was my mother's scream
oh... what a perfect day...
for a suicide

Thanks for reading!!! Please Comment Thanks!!!
~Stevie~

Darlin

10-04-2005, 07:57 PM

Monkey Queen, that's an excellent poem, one of my favorites. I like both the Browning’s.

Another of my favorites is Edgar Allen Poe's the Bells which is so rhythmic I used to love to recite it. I like a lot of his poems, the Raven, Annabel Lee, really good stuff.

And welcome to the group! :wave:

Darlin

10-04-2005, 08:10 PM

subterranean

10-04-2005, 11:28 PM

Darlin, I can find In Just, but no luck for the first one you mentioned.

In Just

In Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame baloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the

goat-footed

baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

Darlin

10-05-2005, 03:55 PM

Subterranean, that is so nice of you! Thank you! I had no luck digging up my favorite poems by him - I'm awful and pulled them from the book I found them in - an old English Lit book that I bought ages ago. I never could find the other poem anywhere else either. Thanks again!

subterranean

10-05-2005, 08:07 PM

No probs Darl :D
I'm new to Cumming's and feel really excited with them. Am digging his works to get to know them and the poet himself as well.. :nod:

Darlin

10-06-2005, 04:10 PM

When I find it, though it might take a while I'll post it here. Will look for it over the weekend.

Scheherazade

10-09-2005, 05:15 PM

This poem is part of my course work and its nostalgia has really touched my heart:

If Life's a Lousy Picture, Why Not Leave Before the End

Don't worry
One night we'll find that deserted kinema
The torches extinguished
The cornish ripples locked away in the safe
The tornoff tickets chucked
In the tornoff shotbin
the projectionist gone home to his nightmare

Don't worry
that film will still be running
(the one about the sunset)
& we'll find two horses
tethered in the front stalls
& we'll mount
& we'll ride off
_____into

___________our

___________________happy

__________________________ending

-Roger McGough

miss tenderness

10-10-2005, 07:20 PM

i like many but most is IMMemoriam by Tennyson
:)i am so old an out of fashion

vidyanjali

10-25-2005, 05:20 AM

Well I like Donne too. Like his 'The Flea'. In fact I wrote a poem in reaction to the flea in my blog called 'The Flea's Last Words'. Do read it. Click link below:

http://vidyanjali.blogspot.com/2005/08/fleas-last-words.html

Shira

10-27-2005, 04:24 AM

Oh my, I could fill a whole thread with nothing but my favorite poems! Here's one...randomly chosen...

CREATIVE WORK (Bryusov)

The shadow of uncreated creatures
Flickers in sleep,
Like palm fronds
On an enamel wall.

Violet hands
On the enamel wall
Drowsily sketch sounds
In the ringing-resonant silence.

And transparent kiosks,
In the ringing-resonant silence,
Grow like spangles
In the azure moonlight.

A naked moon rises
In the azure moonlight...
Sounds hover drowsily,
Sounds caress me.

The secrets of created creatures
Caress me caressingly
And palm shadows gutter
On an enamel wall.

aceness2005

10-28-2005, 04:49 PM

I found this on the internet but it didnt state who the poet was, just who posted it. Its sad but strikes a chord...
TOO LATE
I didn't know I loved you
Until you went away.
I didn't much think of you
Up to that final day.
The music that was you
I only noticed when it stopped.
I didn't take the time to
Tell you that I cared a lot.
My love of life went with you
Too late for me to say
I didn't know how much I loved you
Until the day you went away.
:(
xxx

BigDaddy_GFS

10-28-2005, 05:58 PM

I've always liked Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'Ulysses'

"....Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Eva Marina

10-30-2005, 10:18 PM

I don't know if anyone's already posted this one yet, but I love Emily Dickinson's poem "Because I Could Not Stop for Death". My dad, the poetry love he is, always used to say the first couple of lines to me when I was growing up so it kind of has a personal connection.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

LadyLeigh

11-01-2005, 10:19 AM

I have to say that my favourite poem would be The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. Other than that Sylvia Plath's Daddy has a profound effect on me :nod:

Sandrine

11-06-2005, 07:21 PM

I know that there has been some discussion about e.e. cummings. This is one of my all time favorite poems:

in the rain-
darkness, the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you

the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles

your eyes half-
thrush
half-angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss

and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then

your dancesong
soul. rarely-beloved
a single star is
uttered, and i

think
of you

http://www.users.qwest.net/~mbenjamin4/mypages/poetry.html

Mortis Anarchy

11-13-2005, 10:53 PM

Oh way too many for me. I love Poe, William Blake, Lord Byron, Neruda and Keats. BUT, lately W.B Yeats has become my addiction. This is my favorite poem in the world.

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 you 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.

Andriy

11-14-2005, 10:40 AM

Hello, Monica

Just a couple of more words about the Lermontov poem. In Russian it is not clear who it is addressed to. Some say that it is addressed to God. The translation adds "my dear", which is absent in the original text. If you read it like this, it changes the meaning a lot. By the way, he wrote the poem in 1840 saying (again in the original) in the last two lines that "he hopes to thank you (God) not for long". Again an inaccurate translation. In 1841 at the age of 27 Lermontov is shot to death during a duel. His poem's request was granted.

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

blp

11-21-2005, 09:25 AM

Dear Thrasher ([URL=http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/sestinas/25SonyaHuber.html), from McSweeney's Sestina page is amazing.

letsgooilers

11-22-2005, 12:57 AM

The Creamation of Sam McGee By Robert W. Service

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 ‘taint 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.

jilliedub123

11-25-2005, 03:45 PM

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory -
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
-----P.B. Shelley

As of right now this is my favorite poem. I have recently lost a good friend of mine, and this poem has helped me greatly. It's beautiful.

Virgil

11-25-2005, 05:09 PM

So many great poems how could one have a favorite. Here's one that perhaps not everyone has come across.

"In A Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing woos--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in a broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

To all those who quoted In Memoriam, I too find that to be a magnificent work.

laura_c

12-02-2005, 02:24 AM

once on a yellow piece of paper,
he wrote a poem
and he called it "chops"
because that was the name of his dog.
and that's what it was about
and his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
and his mother hung it on he door
and read it to his aunts
that was the year father tracy
took all the kids to the zoo
and let them sing on the bus
that was the year his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
and his mother and father kissed a lot
and the girl around the corner sent him a
valentine signed with a row of x's
and he had to ask his father what the x's meant
and his father always tucked him in at night
and was always there to do it
once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem called "autumn"
because that was the name of the season
snd that's what it was all about
and his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
and his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint
and the kids told him
that father tracy smoked cigars
and left butts on the pews
and sometimes they would burn holes
that was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
and the girl around the corner laughed
when he asked her to go see santa claus
and the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
and his father never tucked him in at night
and got mad
when he cried for him to do it
once on a piece of paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
called "innocence; a question"
because that was the question about his girl
and that's what is was all about
and his professor gave him an A
and a strange steady look
and his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
becaue he never showed her
that was the year that father tracy died
and he forgot how the end
of apostle's creed went
and he caught his sister
making out on the back porch
and his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
and the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
that made him cough when he kissed her
but he kissed her anyway
because that was the thing to do
and at three a.m he tucked himself into bed
his father snoring soundly
that's why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
and he called it "absolutely nothing"
becaue that's what it was really about
and he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damned wrist
and he hung it on that bathroom door
because he didn't think
he could reach the kitchen

I'm not sure of the author, but this is my favorite poem. It was featured in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" (one of my all-time favorite books). Many people find the poem morbid, but I like it.

I like Blink182

12-02-2005, 04:37 AM

I'm not sure if this would really be considered a poem or whatever but i like it. it's a poem inside a book. It's from the Perks of Being a Wallflower. Charlie, the main character finds this poem, and gives it as a christmas gift. So here it is:

once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
he wrote a poem
and he called it "chops"
because thet was the name of his dog
and that's what it was all about
and his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
and his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts

that was the year that father tracy
took all the kids to the zoo
and he let them sing on the bus
and his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
and his mother and father kissed a lot
and the girl around the corner sent him a
valentine signed with a row of x's
and he had to ask his father what the x's meant
and his father always tucked him in bed a night
and was always there to do it

once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem
and he called it "autumn"
because that was the name of the seaon
and that's what it's all about
and his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
and his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint
and the kids told him
that father tracy smoked cigars
and left butts on the pews
and sometimes they would burn holes
that was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
and the girl around the corner laughed
when he asked her to go see santa claus
and the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
and his father never tucked him in bed at night
and his father got mad
when he cried for him to do it

once on a piece of paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
and he called it "innocence:a question"
because that was the question about his girl
and that's what it was all about
and his professor gave him an A
and a strange steady look
and his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because he never showed her
that was the year that father tracy died
and he forgot how the end
of the apostle's creed went
and he caught his sister
making out on the back porch
and his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
and the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
that made him caugh when he kissed her
but he kissed hre anyway
because that was the thing to do
and at three a.m. he tucked himself into bed
his father snoring soundly

that's why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
and he called it "absolutely nothing"
because that's what it was really all about
and he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damned writs
and he hung it on the bathroom door
because he didn't think
he could reach the kitchen.

Pages 70-73

I like Blink182

12-02-2005, 04:39 AM

oh yeah well i didn't notice but laura posted the same thing as me haha... we both have good taste ; )

DaniS

12-02-2005, 02:20 PM

Dream to Make Believe

If I were the sand
And you were the ocean
The moon would be
Why you're pulled to me.

I wake up and think dreams are real
I sleep so I don't have to feel
The truth that you can never be
The one person that won't ever forget me.

Love it.

Nevermore

12-06-2005, 10:52 PM

The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, of course!

http://www.emu-uo.org/images/upload/nevermore.gif

XoxangelFuryxoX

12-10-2005, 10:20 AM

love poe... "Tamerlane" is one of my favorites...

TAMERLANE

by Edgar Allan Poe
(1827)

Kind solace in a dying hour!
Such, father, is not (now) my theme-
I will not madly deem that power
Of Earth may shrive me of the sin
Unearthly pride hath revell'd in-
I have no time to dote or dream:
You call it hope- that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire:
If I can hope- Oh God! I can-
Its fount is holier- more divine-
I would not call thee fool, old man,
But such is not a gift of thine.

Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.
O yearning heart! I did inherit
Thy withering portion with the fame,
The searing glory which hath shone
Amid the jewels of my throne,
Halo of Hell! and with a pain
Not Hell shall make me fear again-
O craving heart, for the lost flowers
And sunshine of my summer hours!
The undying voice of that dead time,
With its interminable chime,
Rings, in the spirit of a spell,
Upon thy emptiness- a knell.

I have not always been as now:
The fever'd diadem on my brow
I claim'd and won usurpingly-
Hath not the same fierce heirdom given
Rome to the Caesar- this to me?
The heritage of a kingly mind,
And a proud spirit which hath striven
Triumphantly with human kind.

On mountain soil I first drew life:
The mists of the Taglay have shed
Nightly their dews upon my head,
And, I believe, the winged strife
And tumult of the headlong air
Have nestled in my very hair.

So late from Heaven- that dew- it fell
(Mid dreams of an unholy night)
Upon me with the touch of Hell,
While the red flashing of the light
From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,
Appeared to my half-closing eye
The pageantry of monarchy,
And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar
Came hurriedly upon me, telling
Of human battle, where my voice,
My own voice, silly child!- was swelling
(O! how my spirit would rejoice,
And leap within me at the cry)
The battle-cry of Victory!

The rain came down upon my head
Unshelter'd- and the heavy wind
Rendered me mad and deaf and blind.
It was but man, I thought, who shed
Laurels upon me: and the rush-
The torrent of the chilly air
Gurgled within my ear the crush
Of empires- with the captive's prayer-
The hum of suitors- and the tone
Of flattery 'round a sovereign's throne.

My passions, from that hapless hour,
Usurp'd a tyranny which men
Have deem'd, since I have reach'd to power,
My innate nature- be it so:
But father, there liv'd one who, then,
Then- in my boyhood- when their fire
Burn'd with a still intenser glow,
(For passion must, with youth, expire)
E'en then who knew this iron heart
In woman's weakness had a part.

I have no words- alas!- to tell
The loveliness of loving well!
Nor would I now attempt to trace
The more than beauty of a face
Whose lineaments, upon my mind,
Are- shadows on th' unstable wind:
Thus I remember having dwelt
Some page of early lore upon,
With loitering eye, till I have felt
The letters- with their meaning- melt
To fantasies- with none.

O, she was worthy of all love!
Love- as in infancy was mine-
'Twas such as angel minds above
Might envy; her young heart the shrine
On which my every hope and thought
Were incense- then a goodly gift,
For they were childish and upright-
Pure- as her young example taught:
Why did I leave it, and, adrift,
Trust to the fire within, for light?

We grew in age- and love- together,
Roaming the forest, and the wild;
My breast her shield in wintry weather-
And when the friendly sunshine smil'd,
And she would mark the opening skies,
I saw no Heaven- but in her eyes.

Young Love's first lesson is- the heart:
For 'mid that sunshine, and those smiles,
When, from our little cares apart,
And laughing at her girlish wiles,
I'd throw me on her throbbing breast,
And pour my spirit out in tears-
There was no need to speak the rest-
No need to quiet any fears
Of her- who ask'd no reason why,
But turn'd on me her quiet eye!

Yet more than worthy of the love
My spirit struggled with, and strove,
When, on the mountain peak, alone,
Ambition lent it a new tone-
I had no being- but in thee:
The world, and all it did contain
In the earth- the air- the sea-
Its joy- its little lot of pain
That was new pleasure- the ideal,
Dim vanities of dreams by night-
And dimmer nothings which were real-
(Shadows- and a more shadowy light!)
Parted upon their misty wings,
And, so, confusedly, became
Thine image, and- a name- a name!
Two separate- yet most intimate things.

I was ambitious- have you known
The passion, father? You have not:
A cottager, I mark'd a throne
Of half the world as all my own,
And murmur'd at such lowly lot-
But, just like any other dream,
Upon the vapour of the dew
My own had past, did not the beam
Of beauty which did while it thro'
The minute- the hour- the day- oppress
My mind with double loveliness.

We walk'd together on the crown
Of a high mountain which look'd down
Afar from its proud natural towers
Of rock and forest, on the hills-
The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers,
And shouting with a thousand rills.

I spoke to her of power and pride,
But mystically- in such guise
That she might deem it nought beside
The moment's converse; in her eyes
I read, perhaps too carelessly-
A mingled feeling with my own-
The flush on her bright cheek, to me
Seem'd to become a queenly throne
Too well that I should let it be
Light in the wilderness alone.

I wrapp'd myself in grandeur then,
And donn'd a visionary crown-
Yet it was not that Fantasy
Had thrown her mantle over me-
But that, among the rabble- men,
Lion ambition is chained down-
And crouches to a keeper's hand-
Not so in deserts where the grand-
The wild- the terrible conspire
With their own breath to fan his fire.

Look 'round thee now on Samarcand!
Is not she queen of Earth? her pride
Above all cities? in her hand
Their destinies? in all beside
Of glory which the world hath known
Stands she not nobly and alone?
Falling- her veriest stepping-stone
Shall form the pedestal of a throne-
And who her sovereign? Timour- he
Whom the astonished people saw
Striding o'er empires haughtily
A diadem'd outlaw!

O, human love! thou spirit given
On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!
Which fall'st into the soul like rain
Upon the Siroc-wither'd plain,
And, failing in thy power to bless,
But leav'st the heart a wilderness!
Idea! which bindest life around
With music of so strange a sound,
And beauty of so wild a birth-
Farewell! for I have won the Earth.

When Hope, the eagle that tower'd, could see
No cliff beyond him in the sky,
His pinions were bent droopingly-
And homeward turn'd his soften'd eye.
'Twas sunset: when the sun will part
There comes a sullenness of heart
To him who still would look upon
The glory of the summer sun.
That soul will hate the ev'ning mist,
So often lovely, and will list
To the sound of the coming darkness (known
To those whose spirits hearken) as one
Who, in a dream of night, would fly
But cannot from a danger nigh.

What tho' the moon- the white moon
Shed all the splendour of her noon,
Her smile is chilly, and her beam,
In that time of dreariness, will seem
(So like you gather in your breath)
A portrait taken after death.
And boyhood is a summer sun
Whose waning is the dreariest one-
For all we live to know is known,
And all we seek to keep hath flown-
Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall
With the noon-day beauty- which is all.

I reach'd my home- my home no more
For all had flown who made it so.
I pass'd from out its mossy door,
And, tho' my tread was soft and low,
A voice came from the threshold stone
Of one whom I had earlier known-
O, I defy thee, Hell, to show
On beds of fire that burn below,
A humbler heart- a deeper woe.

Father, I firmly do believe-
I know- for Death, who comes for me
From regions of the blest afar,
Where there is nothing to deceive,
Hath left his iron gate ajar,
And rays of truth you cannot see
Are flashing thro' Eternity-
I do believe that Eblis hath
A snare in every human path-
Else how, when in the holy grove
I wandered of the idol, Love,
Who daily scents his snowy wings
With incense of burnt offerings
From the most unpolluted things,
Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven
Above with trellis'd rays from Heaven,
No mote may shun- no tiniest fly-
The lightning of his eagle eye-
How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love's very hair?

DannyCreep

12-10-2005, 11:18 AM

Robert Frost, a little out there, and still not as great as Poe, but good all the same.

The rose is a rose,

And was always a rose.

But now the theory goes

That the apple's a rose,

And the pear is, and so's

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose--

But were always a rose.

Weeping Willow

12-10-2005, 12:12 PM

Emily dickinson Hope is the Thing with Feathers. I don't know why but i'm not the most
optimistic person and this song just makes my smile for some reason.

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 chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

MikeK

12-19-2005, 12:26 PM

"Come In" by Robert Frost:

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

Matilda

12-19-2005, 01:41 PM

So many of my favourite poems are in swedish, and I don't think they're translated, or I would love sharing them with you.
Otherwise one of my favourite egnlish poems is one by Emily Dickinson, called something like A Country Burial.
It's not so much the text I like, more the rythm of the words and the expression "sunrise' yellow noise", I would never have thought of describing sunrise as a noise!

prasanthja

12-25-2005, 11:43 PM

The best poem is " The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde.

My favourite portion is

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!"

Virgil

12-26-2005, 12:23 AM

Since this is Christmas day, how about a religious poem by Gerard Manly Hopkins, who also happened to be a Catholic priest.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manly Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-fire coal chestnut falls; finches wings;
Lanscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

alexanderpope

12-26-2005, 08:37 PM

My favorite poem is a metaphysical one by John Donne:

THE APPARITION.
by John Donne

WHEN by thy scorn, O murd'ress, I am dead,
And that thou thinkst thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see :
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink :
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie,
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee ; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

Virgil

12-26-2005, 10:32 PM

Nice poem. I don't recall reading that one before. Why your favorite? Do you have some wish to get revenge on an old girl friend?

socratica

12-28-2005, 02:13 PM

While we are on the subject of John Donne, let me share a poem of his that I like. It is one of my favorite carpe diem poems not only because of its subject, which is fairly obvious, but the metaphors and allusions that he uses to illustrate his point. Phrases like "O my America! my new-found-land..." (27) and "To enter in these bonds is to be free" (31) are worth making part of one's repertoire. Also, the allusion to the Greek myth of Atlanta and Hippomenes (36) and Mahomet's Paradise (21) are quite catchy. Well, here is the poem:

Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glistering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear
That the eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk (bodice) which I envy,
That still can be and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals
As when from flowery meads th’hills shadow steals.
Off with that wiry coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow;
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallowed temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven’s angels used to be
Received by men; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! My new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned,
My mine of precious stones, my empery (empire),
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free;
There where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee.
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be,
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s balls , cast in men’s views,
That when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings, made
For laymen, are all women thus arrayed;
Themselves are mystic books, which only we
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see revealed. Then since that I may know,
As liberally as to a midwife show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hencde
Here is no penance, much less innocence.
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then
What need’st thou have more covering than a man?

Xamonas Chegwe

01-07-2006, 02:14 PM

This may well have been posted before but I haven't got time to go back through all of the pages to see. It's one of my favourites anyway and should be required reading for anyone in the world thinking of joining the army.

Wilfred Owen

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 disappointed shells that dropped 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 floundering 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.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori = It is sweet and right to die for your country

Schokokeks

01-08-2006, 08:32 AM

My favourite would be I will make you brooches by Robert Louis Stevenson:

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

I will make my kitchen and you shall keep your room,
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom,
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.

And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

jinshui-yue

01-10-2006, 04:59 AM

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

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.

My Heart Leaps Up My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

jinshui-yue

01-10-2006, 05:08 AM

My Heart Leaps Up My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
:thumbs_up

Weeping Willow

01-13-2006, 12:29 PM

Just run into an nice poem.. can't say why exactly i like it .. but i do! and that's what matters most!

Jenny Joseph - Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

rachel

01-13-2006, 01:18 PM

er um,
I think one should grow even more noble as we age. I for one won't be inviting that little lady over to dinner any time soon. I hate the thought that we do honorable things only because it is a duty and not a passion from the heart.
I think that woman lives four doors down. I am ducking my head low as I speak for fear she will see me and come running over for yet another cup of coffee and vulgar gossip.

Weeping Willow

01-13-2006, 01:21 PM

Sorry you didn't like it Rach' ... :(... but she isn't that bad is she??? :blush:
It's just the spirit of nonsense...

rachel

01-13-2006, 06:20 PM

Actually because I have worked in a senior's residence I met my share of these 'little women.' They are meaner than a pit bull, brattier than Dennis the Menace and grosser than any scruffy ugly pirate you could ever meet. But I still thought it funny.
I miss you, did you get my thingy about your msn thingy?

rachel

01-14-2006, 10:54 AM

Everyone
please take care of my Willow when I am gone. See to it he eats well, gets his rest and please all of you help him with his homework. And of course hugs and lots of yummy treats.
thank you

butterfly
butterfly
whose the soul thou didst bear
butterfly
butterfly
yesterday to heaven.

an ancient Celtic poem/prayer

Weeping Willow

01-14-2006, 03:34 PM

Dearest Rachel! i promise to be here Safe and sound until you'll return!.. :)...

Aurora Ariel

01-16-2006, 11:23 AM

My favourite poem- I wouldn't know exactly where to begin!There are so many!I have such a vast list of poets, that I have read, from nearly every era.There are the shorter poems, and then there are very long works which I could not possibly post in this thread.I try to make these lists of my favourite works by each poet all the time, and recently I was reading quite a few favourites by W.B Yeats.The poem right below is one of the first poems I ever read by him, and remains one of my favourites from this particular poet.

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). The Wild Swans at Coole. 1919.

1. The Wild Swans at Coole

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

*These were included on my W.B Yeats list :but there are still many more!

THE FALLING OF THE LEAVES

AUTUMN is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.
The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

THE ROSE OF THE WORLD

WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any hearts to beat,
Weary and kind one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.

A POET TO HIS BELOVED

I BRING you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.

carina_gino20

01-17-2006, 01:59 AM

hi. I'm new to this forum and would like to share a poem by Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa

First, A Poem Must Be Magical
By Jose Garcia Villa

First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a seagull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What it seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover.

Virgil

02-04-2006, 09:55 PM

I try to make these lists of my favourite works by each poet all the time, and recently I was reading quite a few favourites by W.B Yeats.The poem right below is one of the first poems I ever read by him, and remains one of my favourites from this particular poet.

Always a good reason to read W.B. Yeats. Nice choices, Aurora.

Virgil

02-04-2006, 10:14 PM

Time for me to post a new "favorite":

Shadows by D.H. Lawrence

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft, strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon's in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens,
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding
around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
and the silence of short days the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth's lapse and renewal.

And if, in the charming phases of man's life,
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of renewal
odd wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me--

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unkown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

Fontainhas

02-13-2006, 03:39 PM

Aw man, this sucks. I have the best portuguese poems by Fernando Pessoa! *makes a wave with the wand and everyone understands the language*
It's a beautiful poem.... :nod:

kmwmn

02-15-2006, 07:03 PM

Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes -
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world by over-wise
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask.

Virgil

02-15-2006, 08:27 PM

Aw man, this sucks. I have the best portuguese poems by Fernando Pessoa! *makes a wave with the wand and everyone understands the language*
It's a beautiful poem.... :nod:
If you pick a short one, why not post it in Portuguese and then try to translate it for us?

Fontainhas

02-17-2006, 11:23 AM

If you pick a short one, why not post it in Portuguese and then try to translate it for us?

Okay.... here it goes:

Onda que enrolada tornas, pequena
Ao mar que te trouxe.
E ao recuar te transtornas
Como se o mar nada fosse.

Porque é que levas contigo
só a tua cessação?
E ao voltar ao mar antigo
não levas meu coração?

Á tanto tempo que o tenho
que me pesa de o sentir
Leva-o no som sem tamanho
Com que te oiço fugir!

You're going to have to wait awhile until I get this translated though.

malwethien

02-22-2006, 12:28 AM

This is one of my favorite poems. It's by Emily Dickinson.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Toombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow
First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go

Virgil

03-03-2006, 10:22 PM

belle ringer

03-04-2006, 11:47 AM

XVII: Cien sonetos de amor
Pablo Neruda

No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio
o flecha de chaveles que propagan el fuego:
te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,
secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.

Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva
dentro de si, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores,
y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo
el apretado aroma que acendio de la tierra.

Te amo sin saber como, ni cuando, ni de donde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
asi te amo porque no se amar de otra manera,

sino asi de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mia,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueno.

jptaylorsg

03-10-2006, 05:31 AM

W.C. Williams
Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the rood the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, to-morrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf

One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Virgil

03-10-2006, 08:18 AM

That's a really nice poem, jp. One of my favorites too. I was just thinking of it the other day when we got a touch of spring weather and I noticed my crocuses poping up.

Geochelonian

03-11-2006, 04:48 PM

I don't know if this has already been done, but I'd like to post my translations of some of Catullus' love poetry. Here's # 5 to start out:

VIVAMUS mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis!
soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda.
da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum.
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,
aut ne quis malus invidere possit,
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.

Let us live and let us love, my Lesbia,
And let us value all the gossip of cruel old men at a single as.*
Suns can die and be born again,
But for us, when the brief light dies,
The night is a perpetual sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,
Then anothe thousand, and a second hundred,
Then even another thousand, and a hundred more.
Then, when we have had many thousands,
We will mix them together, lest we know,
Or lest some evil person will curse us
When he knows how many kisses there are.

* as - a coin of a very low denomination

bluevictim

03-13-2006, 09:01 PM

Thanks for posting your translation, Geochelonian. I'd definitely enjoy reading more of your translations of Catullus.

For those who don't already know, there are a couple of other translations at www.perseus.tufts.edu

Geochelonian

03-14-2006, 06:15 PM

It's very interesting to read the Lesbia poems in order, and see how Catullus' feelings for her change over time. Compare #5 with #85, possibly the best 2 line poem ever written:

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

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do it.
I don't know. But I feel it happens (to me), and I am tortured.

The parenthetical 'to me' is my own interpolation, which I feel is strongly implied by the content of many of the earlier Lesbia poems. I once got into a disagreement with a professor at the University of South Carolina regarding that. I couln't convince him, but he couldn't convince me either. :p

Virgil

03-18-2006, 08:16 PM

Time to post a new "favorite" poem. I'm not a huge Tennyson fan, but when he hits the right note he is excellent. Here's one I'm sure everyone has read at some point, but I just felt like re-reading it, and so i'll post it.

Ullyses by Lord Alfred Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with and aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle -
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me -
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads -you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

rachel

03-18-2006, 11:54 PM

I on the other hand am a die hard Tennyson fan and this that you have chosen is the one I love best.It speaks to me on so many levels and is absolutely spilling over with noble and bejewelled thoughts that stand on their own.
My favorite lines are:
some work of noble note may yet be done-

tis not too late to seek a new world

and: though much is taken much abides and though
we are not now that strength which in old days
moved earth and heaven; that which we are we are.
those words speak to me of each of us that will to, living out our very own "once upon a time" with all the strength and courage we possess until we have done all we knew to do, could do, would do and hearing voices upon a far off shore go there full of length of days if maybe and memories we alone and corporately have carved with tools of blood sweat and tears.

Virgil

03-19-2006, 12:05 AM

Honey_Ryder62

03-21-2006, 05:31 AM

I've loved it since I was little, probally; like true things we charish what we know.

The Romany Girl
by: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sun goes down, and with him takes
The coarseness of my por attire;
The fair moon mounts, and aye the flame
Of Gypsy beauty blazes higher.

Pale Northern girls! you scorn our race;
You captives of your air-tight halls,
Wear out in-doors your sickly days,
But leave us the horizon walls.

And if I take you, dames, to task,
And say it frankly without guile,
Then you are Gypsies in a mask,
And I the lady all the while.

If, on the heath, below the moon,
I court and play with paler blood,
Me false to mine dare whisper none,--
One sallow horseman knows me good.

Go, keep your cheek's rose from the rain,
For teeth and hair with shopmen deal;
My swarthy tint is in the grain,
The rocks and forest know it real.

The wild air bloweth in out lungs,
The keen stars twinkle in our eyes,
The birds gave us our wily tongues,
The panther in our dances flies.

You doubt we read the stars on high,
Nathless we read your fortunes true;
The stars may hide in the upper sky,
But without glass we fathom you.

lavendar1

03-23-2006, 12:04 AM

Funny how 'stuff' -- mood, time of day...even the weather can bring a favorite poem to mind:

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighted with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

"Spellbound" -- Emily Bronte

bluevictim

03-29-2006, 05:07 PM

Here's a classic. In keeping with the spirit of the poem, I made a couple of "emendations" (source (ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/housman.html)).

FRAGMENT OF A GREEK TRAGEDY
by A.E. Housman

CHORUS: O suitably-attired-in-leather-boots
Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom
Whence by what way how purposed art thou come
To this well-nightingaled vicinity?
My object in inquiring is to know.
But if you happen to be deaf and dumb
And do not understand a word I say,
Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALCMAEON: I journeyed hither a Boetian road.
CHORUS: Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?
ALCMAEON: Plying with speed my partnership of legs.
CHORUS: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
ALCMAEON: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
CHORUS: To learn your name would not displease me much.
ALCMAEON: Not all that men desire do they obtain.
CHORUS: Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots.
ALCMAEON: A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that--
CHORUS: What? for I know not yet what you will say.
ALCMAEON: Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.
CHORUS: Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.
ALCMAEON: This house was Eriphyle's, no one else's.
CHORUS: Nor did he shame his throat with shameful lies.
ALCMAEON: May I then enter, passing through the door?
CHORUS: Go chase into the house a lucky foot.
And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,
And do not, on the other hand, be bad;
For that is much the safest plan.
ALCMAEON: I go into the house with heels and speed.

CHORUS

Strophe

In speculation
I would not willingly acquire a name
For ill-digested thought;
But after pondering much
To this conclusion I at last have come:
LIFE IS UNCERTAIN.
This truth I have written deep
In my reflective midriff
On tablets not of wax,
Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,
For many reasons: LIFE, I say, IS NOT
A STRANGER TO UNCERTAINTY.
Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls
This fact did I discover,
Nor did the Delphine tripod bark it out,
Nor yet Dodona.
Its native ingenuity sufficed
My self-taught diaphragm.

Antistrophe

Why should I mention
The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?
Her whom of old the gods,
More provident than kind,
Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,
A gift not asked for,
And sent her forth to learn
The unfamiliar science
Of how to chew the cud.
She therefore, all about the Argive fields,
Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,
Nor did they disagree with her.
But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts
I do not hanker after:
Never may Cypris for her seat select
My dappled liver!
Why should I mention Io? Why indeed?
I have no notion why.

Epode

But now does my boding heart,
Unhired, unaccompanied, sing
A strain not meet for the dance.
Yes even the palace appears
To my yoke of circular eyes
(The right, nor omit I the left)
Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,
Garnished with woolly deaths
And many shipwrecks of cows.
I therefore in a Cissian strain lament:
And to the rapid
Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest
Resounds in concert
The battering of my unlucky head.

ERIPHYLE (within): O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;
And that in deed and not in word alone.
CHORUS: I thought I heard a sound within the house
Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.
ERIPHYLE: He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,
Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.
CHORUS: I would not be reputed rash, but yet
I doubt if all be gay within the house.
ERIPHYLE: O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.
He stabs me to the heart against my wish.
CHORUS: If that be so, thy state of health is poor;
But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

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

45 ingenuity] ingunuity
73 shipwrecks] sphipwrecks

chook

03-30-2006, 04:50 AM

Yes those are great lines. I do like a bit of tennyson, but then there are poems I don't find in the least interesting. I will say that In Memoriam is a great, great poem and worthy of comparison with the great epics. On the other hand, everyone loves his King Arthur poems, but I don't find them that interesting. And I love Arthurian legends.

About 15 years ago I was watching Rumpole of the Bailey on the ABC when Rumpole entered Pomeroy"s wine bar and looked at Erskin Brown. He repeated these words.
"What doth ail thee Knight at arms.
Alone and palely loitering"

I had no more idea of poetry than my dog at that time. If I thought of it at all then I thought that it was at best a waste of space. But then the words of the poem cpatured me. I do not know why but I could not get them out of my head. Fortunately I found a librariian who new where the words came from and I was away. La Belle Dame San Merci was the first poem to ever capture my mind. Ullyssess was the second. Others in the forum have quoted parts that they enjoy. I want some of it read at my funeral (at some far distant date!). I am a recent newcomer to these forums. You may understand how wonderful it is to me to find that I am not alone in my love of these things. My friends and family are kind to me but I know that they (try as they might) cannot share the wonder at the sounds of the words or the images that they create. There is no one in my current environment to whom I can say "Isn't that amazing" and get sympathetic response.

I have a cassette called Epic poems and they are a set of old poems read by an english actor called Robert Powell. On it is the poem "The Death of Arthur" I think it is properly spelled Mort De Arthur. I you can get the cassette it is great. There are also such things as Gray's A Elegy written in a Country Church Yard and other wonders.

woeful painter

03-30-2006, 05:46 AM

Sonnets From the Portugese
Elizabeth Barret Browning

XIV. If thou must love me, let it be for nought

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
"I love her for her smile--her look--her way
Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day" -
For these things in themselves, Beloved, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry, -
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity.

ElizabethSewall

03-30-2006, 07:04 AM

This one is beautiful Woeful! It could go in the thread "What is love" as well.

chook

03-31-2006, 02:38 AM

Yes those are great lines. I do like a bit of tennyson, but then there are poems I don't find in the least interesting. I will say that In Memoriam is a great, great poem and worthy of comparison with the great epics. On the other hand, everyone loves his King Arthur poems, but I don't find them that interesting. And I love Arthurian legends.

It is interesting the way we see bits in a poem differently.

The part that goes
and: though much is taken much abides and though
we are not now that strength which in old days
moved earth and heaven; that which we are we are.

made me think about the processes of aging. Much is taken as we get older but the really important parts of us remain. The inner strength (or weakness) of character that we have built up over the years is not necessarily taken as we age. But as we lose our ability to hide what we really are the essential part of us can be more clearly seen. We are exposed in old age, when in youth mere stength and activity could have hidden us. What remains is the true core of us. "What we are , we are."

But be sure. I do not claim that this is what those verses in the poem mean. That is only the effect that the words had on me. Others apparently have been rightly effected in other and perhaps better ways. But that is what a good poem does. It comes to life in the mind of the reader.

fatsaint

04-05-2006, 05:55 PM

No stir in the air, no stir in the sea,
The ship was still as she could be,
Her sails from heaven received no motion,
Her keel was steady in the ocean.

Without either sign or sound of their shock
The waves flow’d over the Inchcape Rock;
So little they rose, so little they fell,
They did not move the Inchcape Bell.

The Abbot of Aberbrothok
Had placed that bell on the Inchcape Rock;
On a buoy in the storm it floated and swung,
And over the waves its warning rung.

When the Rock was hid by the surge’s swell,
The mariners heard the warning bell;
And then they knew the perilous Rock,
And blest the Abbot of Aberbrothok.

The Sun in heaven was shining gay,
All things were joyful on that day;
The sea-birds scream’d as they wheel’d round,
And there was joyaunce in their sound.

The buoy of the Inchcape Bell was seen
A darker speck on the ocean green;
Sir Ralph the Rover walk’d his deck,
And he fix’d his eye on the darker speck.

He felt the cheering power of spring,
It made his whistle, it made him sing;
His heart was mirthful to excess,
But the Rover’s mirth was wickedness.

His eye was on the Inchcape float;
Quoth he, ‘My men, put out the boat,
And row me to the Inchcape Rock,
And I’ll plague the Abbot of Aberbrothok.’

The boat is lower’d, the boatmen row,
And to the Inchcape Rock they go;
Sir Ralph bent over from the boat,
And he cut the Bell from the Inchcape float.

Down sunk the Bell with a gurgling sound,
The bubbles rose and burst around;
Quoth Sir Ralph, ‘The next who comes to the Rock
Won't bless the Abbot of Aberbrothok.'

Sir Ralph the Rover sail’d away,
He scour’d the seas for many a day;
And now grown rich with plunder’d store,
He steers his course for Scotland’s shore.

So thick a haze o’erspreads the sky
They cannot see the Sun on high;
The wind hath blown a gale all day,
At evening it hath died away.

On the deck the Rover takes his stand,
So dark it is they see no land.
Quoth Sir Ralph, ‘It will be lighter soon,
For there is the dawn of the rising Moon.’

‘Canst hear,’ said one, ‘the breakers roar?
For methinks we should be near the shore.’
‘Now where we are I cannot tell,
But I wish I could hear the Inchcape Bell.’

They hear no sound, the swell is strong;
Though the wind hath fallen they drift along,
Till the vessel strikes with a shivering shock,―
‘Oh Christ! It is the Inchcape Rock!’

Sit Ralph the Rover tore his hair;
He curst himself in his despair;
The waves rush in on every side,
The ship is sinking beneath the tide.

But even in his dying fear
One dreadful sound could the Rover hear,
A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell,
The Devil below was ringing his knell.
-Robert Southey

I just cant get it out of my head!

fatsaint

04-05-2006, 05:59 PM

If
by Rudyard Kipling

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 impostors 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!

Another one of my favorites! I also like "The Female Of The Species" By Rudyard Kipling. But i cannot post it!

Virgil

04-14-2006, 10:17 AM

What Are Years?

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, -
dumbly calling, deftly listening - that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

etc.

Marianne Moore
Lavender, that truely is a fine poem, that doesn't look like much poetry at first until you start breaking down the poetics and finding it's beauty. Plus it's a fine sermon as well.

edit: You can find the entire poem in this thread on page 4, post #60.

Virgil

04-19-2006, 01:05 PM

Here's a good one by Raymond Carver. He actually died of lung cancer, so I imagine this came out of his experience.

What The Doctor Said by Raymond carver
He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

_JadeRain_

04-19-2006, 03:33 PM

Gunga Din
By Rudyard Kipling

You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.
Now in Injia's sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.
He was "Din! Din! Din!
You limpin' lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din!
Hi! slippery ~hitherao~!
Water, get it! ~Panee lao~! [Bring water swiftly.]
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din."

The uniform 'e wore
Was nothin' much before,
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind,
For a piece o' twisty rag
An' a goatskin water-bag
Was all the field-equipment 'e could find.
When the sweatin' troop-train lay
In a sidin' through the day,
Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl,
We shouted "Harry By!" [Mr. Atkins's equivalent for "O brother."]
Till our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve us all.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been?
You put some ~juldee~ in it [Be quick.]
Or I'll ~marrow~ you this minute [Hit you.]
If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!"

'E would dot an' carry one
Till the longest day was done;
An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear.
If we charged or broke or cut,
You could bet your bloomin' nut,
'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear.
With 'is ~mussick~ on 'is back, [Water-skin.]
'E would skip with our attack,
An' watch us till the bugles made "Retire",
An' for all 'is dirty 'ide
'E was white, clear white, inside
When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire!
It was "Din! Din! Din!"
With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green.
When the cartridges ran out,
You could hear the front-files shout,
"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!"

I shan't forgit the night
When I dropped be'ind the fight
With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been.
I was chokin' mad with thirst,
An' the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din.
'E lifted up my 'ead,
An' he plugged me where I bled,
An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water-green:
It was crawlin' and it stunk,
But of all the drinks I've drunk,
I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen;
'E's chawin' up the ground,
An' 'e's kickin' all around:
For Gawd's sake git the water, Gunga Din!"

'E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean.
'E put me safe inside,
An' just before 'e died,
"I 'ope you liked your drink", sez Gunga Din.
So I'll meet 'im later on
At the place where 'e is gone --
Where it's always double drill and no canteen;
'E'll be squattin' on the coals
Givin' drink to poor damned souls,
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din! :thumbs_up

Jay

04-24-2006, 07:23 AM

Not sure if it wasn't already submitted...

Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Cloud

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noonday dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother's breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.

I sift the snow on the mountains below,
And their great pines groan aghast;
And all the night 'tis my pillow white,
While I sleep in the arms of the blast.
Sublime on the towers of my skiey bowers,
Lightning, my pilot, sits;
In a cavern under is fettered the thunder,
It struggles and howls at fits;

Over earth and ocean, with gentle motion,
This pilot is guiding me,
Lured by the love of the genii that move
In the depths of the purple sea;
Over the rills, and the crags, and the hills,
Over the lakes and the plains,
Wherever he dream, under mountain or stream,
The Spirit he loves remains;
And I all the while bask in Heaven's blue smile,
Whilst he is dissolving in rains.

The sanguine Sunrise, with his meteor eyes,
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack,
When the morning star shines dead;
As on the jag of a mountain crag,
Which an earthquake rocks and swings,
An eagle alit one moment may sit
In the light of its golden wings.
And when Sunset may breathe, from the lit sea beneath,
Its ardors of rest and of love,

And the crimson pall of eve may fall
From the depth of Heaven above,
With wings folded I rest, on mine aery nest,
As still as a brooding dove.
That orbed maiden with white fire laden,
Whom mortals call the Moon,
Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-like floor,
By the midnight breezes strewn;
And wherever the beat of her unseen feet,
Which only the angels hear,
May have broken the woof of my tent's thin roof,
The stars peep behind her and peer;
And I laugh to see them whirl and flee,
Like a swarm of golden bees,
When I widen the rent in my wind-built tent,
Till the calm rivers, lakes, and seas,
Like strips of the sky fallen through me on high,
Are each paved with the moon and these.

I bind the Sun's throne with a burning zone,
And the Moon's with a girdle of pearl;
The volcanoes are dim, and the stars reel and swim
When the whirlwinds my banner unfurl.
From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,
Over a torrent sea,
Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,--
The mountains its columns be.
The triumphal arch through which I march
With hurricane, fire, and snow,
When the Powers of the air are chained to my chair,
Is the million-colored bow;
The sphere-fire above its soft colors wove,
While the moist Earth was laughing below.

I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.

Gozeta

04-25-2006, 03:38 PM

First time I ever read this poem. Not bad....

Jay

04-26-2006, 07:14 AM

What I like most about the poem is the... can't remember what it's called, lol. The way the words make you as if hear what's described in the poem. You can almost hear and see the cloud on its journey.

Jarndyce

04-26-2006, 11:53 AM

Here's one of all-time favorites:

Eyes Fastened With Pins
by Charles Simic

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

Jarndyce

04-26-2006, 11:56 AM

Another:

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
by Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Bandini

04-26-2006, 12:06 PM

I haven't got a real favourite - this ones OK

trapped

don't undress my love
you might find a mannequin;
don't undress the mannequin
you might find
my love.

she's long ago
forgotten me.

she's trying on a new
hat
and looks more the
coquette
than ever.

she is a
child
and a mannequin
and
death.

I can't hate
that.

she didn't do
anything
unusual.

I only wanted her
to.

Bukowski

rachel

05-02-2006, 04:01 PM

I love it. it is just so unusual and real and surreal at the same time.

Ron Price

05-06-2006, 04:28 AM

BEGINNING IN ’59 OR WAS IT ’69?*

* In 1869 Baudelaire, arguably the founder of modern prose-poetry, published his Petits Poems en Prose. In 1959 Charles Simic published his first poem and I became a Bahá'í.

American poet Charles Simic's first works were published in 1959 when he was twenty-one. Between that year and 1961, when he entered military service, he churned out a number of poems, most of which he has since destroyed. My first poems came from these years as well. They were never published and they were thrown away soon after they were written. I was 15 in 1959 and had just joined the midget baseball league and the Bahá'í Faith, in that order.

Simic and I earned our BA degrees in 1966. I was 22; he was 28. Simic went on to publish poetry and I went on to the teaching profession. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. Simic's quite original poetry in English and translations of important Yugoslavian poets began to attract critical attention by the time I had moved to Australia in 1971. In The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century Geoffrey Thurley notes that the substance of Simic's earliest work was “European and rural rather than American and urban. The world his poetry created was that of central Europe and its woods, ponds and peasant furniture."

Simic's work defies easy categorization. Some poems reflect a surreal, metaphysical bent and others offer grimly realistic portraits of violence and despair. Hudson Review contributor Vernon Young maintains that memory with its taproot deep into European folklore is the common source of all of Simic's poetry. Simic is a graduate of NYU; he is married and a father living in pragmatic America. When he composes poems, Simic turns to his unconscious and to earlier pools of memory. I am a graduate of McMaster in Hamilton. I, too, married and became a father in pragmatic Australia. When I compose poems I turn to memory and to my experience in the Bahá'í community.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 5th 2006.

We both wrote a type of prose-poetry
whose rules are never clearly defined,
no resolution of its issues of meaning,
of its short expressions of feeling,
its stylistic, imagistic density,
its ornamental variation of prose,
its passionate promptings, undulations
and intimately inward contours.

Some say prose-poetry is not poetry;
it fights against the mainstream, flaunts
and flies in the face of poetic purists.
Evolving and elusive and valid, I’d say.
There’s a sort of formal speech here,
not metered but a natural rhythm,
identifying with the lyrical impulses
of the soul, revery’s ebbs and flows.

Some say it started with Bertrand
and Baudelaire in the 1840s-1850s
or the 1890s and others say you can
go all the way back to the Old Testament.

Our work is motivated by many
things: to turn the gaze inward
and trace the movement mind
and the gaze of readers, to turn
thought to the ills of society
and graphically describe in order
to analyse with a personal voice,
intimate matters, autobiographical
detail, a certain psychic weight,
something imponderable---yet
I want to ponder…..

….and I ponder using this
inherently ambivalent, hybrid,
generic instability, duality, traces
from two worlds, cross-discursive
discourse, with contradictions,
paradoxes and complications,
the sentence and the line with
loose borders between journals,
diaries and a lot of other stuff
right back to the birth of this
new Revelation when things
were separated and put together
again in new forms, ways, styles.

Ron Price
May 6th 2006

Ron Price

05-06-2006, 04:34 AM

I saw a Charles Simic poem here on this thread and attracted like bees to a honey-pot I posted two pieces. Here is one:
_____________________________
SIMIC

Now, everybody writes prose poems. Some critics claim the prose poem fits our media-driven sensibilities. It certainly fits my sensibility. I put a quick block of type on the page, then I move on. Is there a union between my short, lyrical stanzas and the prose poems I have written? Yes, say “yeh verily.” The prose poem has been around since Baudelaire maybe even early in the first millennium BC. There are many different species in the history of modern poetry, just about as many as there are prose-poets, but at its very best it is capable of greatness.-Ron Price with thanks to Charles Simic, Sleepless Nights of Poetry: An Interview With Charles Simic, Bloomsbury Review.com, March/April 2002.

hippolyta5

05-06-2006, 01:31 PM

I simply adore Shakespeare's sonnets...so here's 116. for you all:

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.

Loqurent

05-07-2006, 08:17 AM

Ode on a Grecian Urn- Keats
Isabella- Keats
St. Agnes' Eve- Keats
He wishes for the cloths of Heaven- Yeats
Some personal favorites
O captain, my captain- Whitman is nice too.

Nightmare9870

05-10-2006, 05:12 PM

I would just like to say that this thread is not complete without this poem:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

-Robert Frost

Ok, thread complete. Carry on, everyone. :D

Hillcrest

05-16-2006, 11:50 AM

I had not read Emily Brontë's "Love and friendship" nor Robert Frost's "The road not taken" before but I read them on this forum and they really touched me.. I think both of them are among my favourites now.. :)

Hillcrest

05-16-2006, 11:52 AM

There are simply way to many touching, brilliant poems out there for me to choose my favourite.. :)

Earnshaw

05-16-2006, 11:57 AM

When You Are Old
WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

superunknown

05-17-2006, 06:32 PM

If
by Rudyard Kipling
...

I have to say it, but I've never liked this poem. Sure, it's got a nice (though completely unrealistic and humanly impossible) message, but poetry is more about the beauty of language than anything else, and I've never found the use of language in this poem to be particularly noteworthy. Without a doubt my favorite poem is:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria sensa piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero
Sensa tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

. . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.’

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Nothing I've ever read captures the abject human fear of loneliness as well as this poem. No poem I've ever read speaks to me (being quite the loner) more than this one. Simply amazing.

superunknown

05-17-2006, 06:38 PM

I also love E.E. Cummings, in particular these two:

she being Brand

she being Brand

-new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff i was
careful of her and(having

thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.

K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her

up,slipped the
clutch(and then somehow got into reverse she
kicked what
the hell)next
minute i was back in neutral tried and

again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my

lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning)just as we turned the corner of Divinity

avenue i touched the accelerator and give

her the juice,good

(it

was the first ride and believe i we was
happy to see how nice she acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens i slammed on

the
internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
brakes Bothatonce and

brought allofher tremB
-ling
to a:dead.

stand-
;Still)

ygUDuh

ygUDuh

ydoan
yunnuhstan

ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged

yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn

LISN bud LISN

dem
gud
am

lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin

duhSIVILEYEzum

superunknown

05-17-2006, 07:24 PM

And how could I have forgotten this gem?

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Woland

05-26-2006, 03:08 AM

I love this one. The folly of those in power always amuses/horrifies me.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

- Wystan Hugh Auden

Asa Adams

06-03-2006, 02:48 AM

Only one cervantes

it's no use, Iv'e got to admit,
I am into my first real
writers block
over five decades
of typing.
I have some excuses:
Ive had a long illness
and im nearing the age of 70.
and when you are near
70 you always consider the
possibility of
slippage.
but i am bucked up
by the fact that
Cervantes wrote his
greatest work at
the age of 80.
but how many cervantes are
there?

i have been spoiled by
the easy way
i have created things,
and now theres
this miserable stoppage.
and now
spiritually constipated,
i have grown testy,
have screemed at my wife
twice this week,
once smashing a glass into the sink.
bad form, sick nerves, bad style.
I should accept this writers block.
hell, im lucky im alive,
im lucky i dont have cancer.
im lucky in 100 different ways.
sometimes at night, in bed,
at 1 or 2 a.m. i will think of how lucky i am
and it keeps me awake.
now ive always written in a selfish way, that is
to please myself.
by writing things down i have
been better to live with them.
now, thats stopped.

I see other old men with canes
sitting at bus stop benches,
staring straight into the sun and seeing
nothing.
and i know there are other old men
in hospitals and nursing homes
sitting upright in their beds,
grunting over bedpans.
death is nothing, brother,
its life thats
hard.

Writing has been my fountain of youth
my whore,
my love,
my gamble.

the gods have spoiled me.

yet look, i am still lucky,
for writing about writers block is
better than not writing at all.

Charles Bukowski

Anyone else like this poem?

Asa Adams

06-03-2006, 02:56 AM

Yes, SuperUnknown, that is the question. How could you have forgotten that gem :lol:

agreed. tis one of the best!

Anna G. Appel

06-04-2006, 08:05 PM

I will just state the fact that my favorite poem is "Broken Dreams" by William Butler Yeats.

Cormeister37

06-05-2006, 11:05 PM

William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; Robert Creeley's "Oh No"; Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and "The Raven"

Cormeister37

06-05-2006, 11:07 PM

and Cervantes died at age 68

rabid reader

06-05-2006, 11:46 PM

William Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"; Robert Creeley's "Oh No"; Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and "The Raven"
Wasn't The Raven done by Edgar Allen Poe

For me, I have always loved the Lady of Shallot by Lord Byron

Asa Adams

06-06-2006, 12:14 AM

and Cervantes died at age 68

I dont think i wrote the poem...wait...yeah, i didnt write it :lol: Perhaps it was Sarcasim... :brow:

bazarov

06-06-2006, 03:21 AM

Pushkin - The poor knight; Yesenin - Who am i? and one you probably never heard of; August Shenoa( a Croat) - Be yours

Asa Adams

06-07-2006, 12:47 AM

wow Baz, You sure do love your Russian Lit! :D

I am assuming it is Russian, but correct me if its not.

cuppajoe_9

06-07-2006, 12:57 AM

Bukowski is always good for...well, something. I'm not quite sure what it is, but he's good at it.

I've always like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, myself.

Asa Adams

06-07-2006, 01:40 AM

Never read it...going to read it now!

bazarov

06-07-2006, 02:36 AM

Who is Russian?? :confused:

Asa Adams

06-07-2006, 02:47 AM

Pushkin-maybe not. just thought, since you seem to enjoy alot of that. My mistake perhaps :D

bazarov

06-07-2006, 03:16 AM

You to, my son Asa??? :lol: :lol: It's very famous poet, Alexandar Sergevich Pushkin,his famous plays are Boris Godunov and Evgeny Onegin :D :D

earthboar

06-07-2006, 10:38 AM

Two verses of Flowers, from The Courtship of Miles Standish and Minor Poems:

"Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
God hath written in those stars above;
But not less in the bright flowers under us
Stands the revelation of his love.

Bright and glorious is that revelation,
Written all over this great world of ours;
Making evident our own creation,
In these stars of earth, these golden flowers."

Asa Adams

06-07-2006, 12:15 PM

Ah yes the full name brings memories and thoughts back into this barren attic! :lol: thanks Baz!

bazarov

06-07-2006, 01:32 PM

Pushkin, The poor knight

"Once there came a vision glorious,
Mystic, dreadful, wondrous fair;
Burned itself into his spirit,
And abode for ever there!

"Never more--from that sweet moment--
Gazed he on womankind;
He was dumb to love and wooing
And to all their graces blind.

"Full of love for that sweet vision,
Brave and pure he took the field;
With his blood he stained the letters
A. M. D. upon his shield.

"'Lumen caeli, sancta Rosa!'
Shouting on the foe he fell,
And like thunder rang his war-cry
O'er the cowering infidel.

"Then within his distant castle,
Home returned, he dreamed his days-
Silent, sad,--and when death took him
He was mad, the legend says."

It's a beautiful poem about man and his love for ideal, not only for some nice lady like all knights; his is more like Don Quixote, but there's no Sancho and it's not so comical.
Buddy, if you'll ever read The Idiot :mad: , you'll find it there. READ IT :D

Asa Adams

06-07-2006, 03:49 PM

Oh i plan on reading the idiot...For the july forum. lol :lol: kidding

I really like the poem. where could i find more Baz?

cheers

bazarov

06-07-2006, 06:08 PM

Look at http://www.poemhunter.com/ and http://www.jollyroger.com/classicalpoetry/.
Lads from forum told me for it, it's quite good.

Schokokeks

06-08-2006, 09:47 AM

Here's a poem by Blake that I came across recently:

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Sadly, I know so little about poetry that it could nearly be called a shame... When I got interested in literature, I enthusiatically launched into books, but deliberaly excluded poetry completely, thinking that it just wasn't my thing. :( Now having realised how much I have missed, I'm taking care to catch up. I'm quite curious for the poetry introductions at uni.

unknown_lady

06-10-2006, 05:43 PM

i have many poems which i like

i like death be not proud by donne , we are seven by william and alot of poems i will tell you about it later
in the second page i found some one was asking Scheherazade, he was wondering what Wordsworth was talking about in his poem the world is too much with us

i will tell you

in the first line he chose a perfect word and perfect contradictory title because he was talking about the the pleasure and the problem of the world what is the too much is the pleasure too much or is the problem is too much
and he thinks that we have waste our powers and we do not care about the nature and appreciate it we only care about materialistic thing he asked and wish if we could look to the nature and enjoy on it and this what we see in forst he done this when he wrote his poem stopping by woods on a snowy evening and also ', he said as if we gave our hearts away from our body we give it to some one else and live in alive which we donot enjoy our selves on it and follow our material things

i wish if i helped you on this i mean this is only a lil but realiy i have forgot the rest if you are intrested to learn more in what he was thinking tell me i will told you more

thevintagepiper

06-14-2006, 10:20 PM

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson
The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

I also love a short poem by Edwin Markham:

He drew a circle that shut me out;
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.

dalton

06-18-2006, 01:07 PM

In Rudyard's vein I would submit this inspiration from a sufferer of bodily ills:

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Reason is a cow

06-21-2006, 11:09 PM

At the moment my favorite poem is "Romance sonambulo" by Federico Garcia Lorca. He's absolutely awesome. Especially to a little Russian girl with hippie dreams. Another one of my favorite poems in English heh I can post here by ee cummings who is quite intriguing. My favorites change by the hour, so I can never stick to any, but these are definetely up there. --alina

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 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

_JadeRain_

06-21-2006, 11:45 PM

Seeker Of Truth by ee cummings

seeker of truth

follow no path
all paths lead where

truth is here

ani

06-27-2006, 06:25 AM

This poem was written by a terminally ill young girl in a New York Hospital.

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids

On a merry-go-round?

Or listened to the rain

Slapping on the ground?

Ever followed a butterfly's erratic flight?

Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?

You better slow down.

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.

Do you run through each day

On the fly?

When you ask How are you?

Do you hear the reply?

When the day is done

Do you lie in your bed

With the next hundred chores

Running through your head?

You'd better slow down

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.

Ever told your child,

We'll do it tomorrow?

And in your haste,

Not see his sorrow?

Ever lost touch,

Let a good friendship die

Cause you never had time

To call and say,"Hi"

You'd better slow down.

Don't dance so fast.

Time is short.

The music won't last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere

You miss half the fun of getting there.

When you worry and hurry through your day,

It is like an unopened gift....

Thrown away.

Life is not a race.

Do take it slower

Hear the music

Before the song is over.

Passenger

06-28-2006, 03:50 AM

My favourite Poem is (i think ) called somebody i don't actualy know who wrote it, anyhow it goes..:
Somebody always on my mind,
Like a beautiful thought all silver lined.
When I walk in the streets, or ride in the cars
Or stroll in the light of the silvery stars.

Somebody`s always on my mind.
Like an old sweet song, the lasting kind.
And it`s easy to see why I can`t forget,
for heaven began when we first met.

stlukesguild

07-21-2006, 07:48 PM

I would have to go with Dante's "Divine Comedy" as my absolute single favorite poem, although I suspect that what you are after is shorter, lyrical poetry. Nevertheless, among poetic works I would have to place Dante's masterwork (along with Milton's "Paradise Lost", T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland", the Bible's "Song of Songs" Coleridge's "Christabel", Shelley's "Adonais" and Tennyson's "In Memoriam") as my favorite of the great longer works of poetry. Milton's "Paradise Lost" seems clearly to be the greatest of such achievements in English... his sensuous language maintaining a poetic height that rival's even Shakespeare, and is even more moving when one considers that his many gorgeous descriptive passages of sheer delight are the product of a poor, discredited, blind man dictating to his daughters after his wife has died. Dante, however, I must give the advantage to. The poem is a formal masterwork that pushes the abilities of all attempts at translation. The work has such a range as to surpass any other single work of literature: it is by turns audacious, heretical, proud, humble, erotic, angry, spiritual, earthy, visionary, etc... There are passages of endless visionary beauty... as well as of the most extreme horror (Ugolino!) and there are countless memorable scenes and characters.
Beyond the large-scale poem, it is almost impossible, to my mind, to select a single favorite poetic work. There are certainly poetic cycles or collections that I find endlessly fascinating: Blake's "Song's of Innocence and Experience", Baudelaire's "Fleurs du Mal", Verlaine's "Fetes Galantes", Rimbaud's "Illuminations", Whitman's "Leaves of Grass", Boris Pasternak's "My Sister- Life", and Rilke's "New Poems" and "Duino Elegies". Such works, to my mind, achieve a certain grandure experienced as a unified whole (rather like a song cycle or a suite in music) although they may also be enjoyed as individual pieces. To chose a single short poetic work however? Impossible! I can only offer a few choices that popped into my mind at this time. Asked on any other day and my selections undoubtedly would have been entirely different:

Robert Herrick 1591-1674

"To His Mistresses"

Put on your silks; and piece by piece
Give them the scent of Amber-Greece:
And for your breaths too, let them smell
Ambrosia-like, or Nectarell:
While other Gums their sweets perspire,
By your owne jewels set on fire.

"Delight in Disorder"

A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in clothes a wantonesse:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson stomacher:
A Cuffe, neglectfull, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (desrving Note)
In the tempestuous Petticote:
A carelesse shooes-string, in whose tye
I see a wilde civility:
Doe more bewitch me, than when Art
Is too precise in every part.

"The Shooe Tying"

Anthea bade me tye her shooe;
I did, and kist the Instep too:
And would have kist unto her knee,
Had not her blush rebuked me.
"The Vine"
I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was Metamorphoz'd to a Vine;
Which crawling one and every way,
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.
Me thought, her long small legs and thighs
I with my Tendrills did surprize:
Her Belly, Buttocks, and her Waiste
By my soft Nerv'lits were embraced:
About her head I writhing hung
And with rich clusters (hid among
the leaves) her Temples I behung:
So that my Lucia seemed to me
Young Bacchus ravisht by his tree.
My curles about her necke did craule,
And armes and hands they did enthraull:
So that she could not freely stir,
(All parts there made one prisoner.)
But when I crept with leaves to hide
those parts, which maides keep unespy'd
Such fleeting pleasure there I took
That with the fancie, I awook;
And found (Ah me!) this flesh of mine
More like a Stock than like a Vine.

I've always loved Herrick's work. He's a master of the miniature... rather like those Elizabethan cameos. (Its only fitting that my collection of his poems is itself a miniature volume.) He's all flowers, perfume and other sweet scents, gems, and beautiful women. His touch is exquisitely light... "precious" in the finest sense of the world. "The Vine" has ever made me smile... if not burst out into laughter.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)

"Innocents We"

Their long skirts and high heels battled away:
Depending on the ground's and breezes whim,
At times some stocking shone, low on the limb-
Too soon concealed!- tickling our naivte.

At times, as well, an envious bug would bite
Our lovlies' necks beneath the boughs, and we
Would glimpse a flash- white flesh, ah! ecstasy!-
And glut our mad young eyes on sheer delight.

Evening would fall, the autum day would draw
To its uncertain close: our belles would cling
Dreamingly to us, cooing, whispering
Lies that still set our souls trembling with awe.

I might have chosen almost any work from Verlaine's great collection, Fete's Gallantes (and avoided the most famous, "Claire de Lune") which always remind me a bit of Herrick and such older poets, as well as of paintings by Watteau. Still, Verlaine's work's have a melancholy... a sense that such a world of gallant lovers is now lost, that it also reminds me of Ravel's "La Valse," the great musical expression of a lost world of romance.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

THE CAT

Come here kitty- sheathe your claws!
Lie on my loving heart
And let me sink into your eyes
Of agate fused with steel.

When my fingers freely caress
Your head and supple spine,
And my hand thrills to the touch
Of your electric fur,

My mistress comes to mind. Her gaze-
Cold and deep as yours,
My pet- is like a stab of pain,

And from head to heels
A subtle scent- a dangerous perfume,
Rises from her brown flesh.

"A PHANTOM (The Perfume)"

Reader, you know how a church can reek
from one grain of incence you inhale
with careful greed- remember the smell?
Or the stubborn musk of an old sachet?

The spell is cast, the magic works,
and the present is the past- restored!
So a lover from beloved flesh
plucks subtle flowers of memory...

In bed her heavy resilient hair
- a living censer, like a sachet-
released its animal perfume,

and from discarded underclothes
still fervent with her sacred body's
form, there rose a scent of fur.

"Metamorphoses of the Vampire"

The woman, meanwhile, writhing like a snake
across hot coals and hiking up her breasts
over her corset stays, began to speak
as if her mouth had steeped each word in musk:
'My lips are smooth and with them I know how
to smother conscience somewhere in these sheets.
I make the old men laugh like little boys,
and on my triumphant bosom all tears dry.
Look at me naked and I will replace
sun and moon and every star in the sky.
So apt am I, dear scholar, in my lore
that once I fold a man in these fatal arms
or forfeit to his teeth my breasts which are
timid and teasing, tender and tyrannous,
upon these cushions, swooning with delight
the impotent angels would be damned for me!'

When she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
and I leaned toward her listlessly
to return her loving kisses, all I saw
was a kind of slimy wineskin brimming with pus!
I closed my eyes in a spasm of cold fear,
and when I opened them to the light of day,
beside me, instead of that potent mannequin,
who seemed to have drunk so deeply of my blood,
there trembled the wreckage of a skeleton
which grated with the cry of a weathervane
or a rusty signboard hanging from a pole,
battered by the wind on winter nights.

"There are odors succulent as young flesh,
sweet as flutes, and green as any grass,
while others- rich, corrupt and masterful-

possess the power of such infinite things
as incense, amber, benjamin, and musk,
to praise the sense's raptures- and the mind's."

Don't you just love the weaving of the senses... the description of scent in terms musical, visual, moral (corrupt)? Baudelaire's "Fleur du Mal" has long been one of my favorite collections of poems. He often has the death obsession of many Anglo-American poets of the period (Poe, etc...) but has a darker, smoldering eroticism.

(all selections from Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" in translations by Richard Howard)

stlukesguild

07-21-2006, 07:49 PM

William Blake (1757-1827)

"The Tyger"

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

This most famous of Blake's "Songs of Experience" (deservedly so) is illustrative of the cycle as a whole, utilizing a deceptive simplicity to express rather profound concepts. I have long held this lyric in my memory, like many nursery rhymes and poems learned in my youth. Like a nursery rhyme, it's hynotic and chant-like... seeming oh so simple at first... but soon revealing greater depths of thought. I'm always struck with chills as the poet finally confronts us with the ultimate question, "Did he who made the Lamb, make thee?", before returning once again to the begining, "Tyger Tyger..."

My next two selected "favorites" illustrate a favorite conceit of poets everwhere and for all time: the expression of the idea that the lover will be sorry if she doesn't give in to the poet now... essentially, the use of the poem in an attempt to seduce the disdainful object of the poet's affections. Examples are endless throughout poetry, from the works of the great troubadors and Provencal poets, through Petrarch, Sidney, Spencer, Shakespeare, on through the famous, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may..." to the present. Two of my favorites, however, are Pierre Ronsard's "When You Are Old" and W.B. Yeat's poem of the same name. I have been told by those who should know (those who can easily read the French original) that Ronsard's is the greater poem, but I must say that I prefer Yeats':

Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585)

"When You Are Old" (Quand vous serez bienne vielle...)

When you are old, at eve, by candlelight,
Sitting by the fire, to unwind you skein and spin,
You'll sing my verses and in wonderment will say:
"Ronsard so honored me when I was young and fair."

Then every servent girl of yours, on hearing this,
Thenceforth, though she be half asleep at humdrum toil,
Will rouse herself to listen when she hears my name,
And lines that sanctify your name with deathless praise.

I'll be beneath the earth, and just a boneless ghost'
In the myrtle's shade, I'll be taking my repose;
And you beside the hearth will be a huddled crone

Regretting my lost love and your own proud disdain.
So heed my words, and live, 'wait not tomorrow's dawn,
But pick life's roses now, today, before they're gone.'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

"When You Are Old"

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled,
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

I also recently returned to a few poems by Goethe. I still have enough German (I can read it as long as I have a good dictionary along side) to appreciate a few in the original:

Meine Ruh ist hin
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr

Wo ich ihn nicht hab,
Ist mir das Grab,
Die ganze Welt
Ist mir vergallt.

Mein armer Kopf
Ist mir verruckt,
Mein armer Sinn
Ist mir zerstuckt.

Meine Ruh ist hin
Mein Herz ist schwer,
Ich finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr.

Nach ihm nur schau ich
Zum Fenster hinaus,
Nach ihm nur geh ich
Aus dem Haus.

Sein hoher Gang
Sein edle Gestalt,
Seines Mundes Lacheln,
Seiner Augen Gewalt.

Und seiner Rede
Zauberfluss,
Sein Handedrucke,
Und, ach, sein Kuss!

Meine Ruh ist hin,
Meine Herz ist schwer
Iche finde sie nimmer
Und nimmermehr

Meine Busen drangt
Sich nach ihm hin,
Ach durch ich fassen
Und halten ihn.

Und kussen ihn,
So wie ich wollt,
An seinen Kussen
Vergehen sollt!

The German original throbs and lurches just like the spinning wheel of the song (to my mind) although it may seem to do so even more due to my having experienced it often in Schubert's great song-setting. The English translation (by the way) goes like this:

No peace of mind
Heartache and pain,
No peace I find
Ever again

Wher he is not
For me to have
Is a bitter spot
For me the grave

Poor head of mine
Turned upside-down
Poor heart of mine
To shreds is torn

No peace.....

Go to the window
Only to see,
Or out of doors
If there he be.

His gracious figure
Lofty walk,
His mouth, the smile!
That piercing look,

And speech that flows
With sorceries
His hand, his touch,
And, ah!, his kiss!

No peace....

For him I long
with al my might,
Could I but touch
And hold him tight.

And kiss him, kiss him,
Just as I may,
Under his kisses,
Melt away.

As strong as Christopher Middleton's translation is (he is one of the greatest modern translators from German) his poem is but a pale echo of the magic in the original. One wonders how seemingly simple poems like Blake's "Tyger, Tyger" or Yeat's "When You are Old" translate into another language. Unlike a great narrative epic (The Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost) such lyrics seem to rely on the most subtle influections and suggestions of the language and the music they make. How must Emily Dickenson lose out in French or Spanish... all the suggestions of Milton, Puritan church hymns, old English children's songs are thus lost.
Other favorite poems by Goethe include his "Erlkonig" (also familiar through a Schubert setting) in which a father races against time on a stormy night to rush his sick child to medical care, while the boy hallucinates (?) the "Erlkonig" (death) seeking to seduce him, which the father suggests are merely the shadows of the trees or the howls of the wind... and yet... the boy ends up dead. Another beloved Goethe poem is the very short, "Another Night Song":

Uber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh
In allen Wipfeln
Spurest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vogelein schweigen im Wald
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

Which is beautifully rendered by R.W. Longfellow:

O'er all the hill-tops
Is quiet now
In all the tree-tops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait, soon like these
Thou, too, shalt rest.

stlukesguild

07-21-2006, 07:50 PM

Although these are perhaps not all that familiar to the English reader, I wouldn't think to call them esoteric in any way. They are probably as familiar to the German reader as "Ozymandias" is to the English. I guess that I am saying that although I have done more than my share of reading along esoteric lines... I, too, return to the well-worn familiar classics as my most favored poems. I still can't get away from:

Ulysses, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle–
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me–
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads–you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

or Shakespeare's:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And what the hell, I can't avoid Shelley's "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Auden's 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 for ever; 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.

Dickinson's:

THERE’S a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.

And just recently I came across this one by Robert Browning and I was immediately floored:

Porphyria's Lover:

The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soiled gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And called me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me--she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I looked up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untightened next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blushed bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propped her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorned at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gained instead!
Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!

stlukesguild

07-21-2006, 08:05 PM

As for more recent works, what of this devastating poem by Anthony Hecht, from his volume, "The Hard Years"?:

"More Light! More Light!":

Composed in the tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitting, declaring thus:
"I emplore my God to witness that I have made no crime."

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the kindly light.

And that was but one, and by no means the worst;
Permitted, at least, his painful dignity;
As such were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul's tranquility.

We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar, beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Luger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Luger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayer or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the oven, sifting through crisp air
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

I find this to be an unbearably heartbreaking poem... and yet... it is a poem in which heroism is unrewarded... in which their is no light from heaven... nor from art/culture (Weimar of Goethe). Every figure within is dehumanized. The Jews have already become soulless beings. The Pole's heroic actions are rewarded with a death as violent and slowly painful as that afforded to the Jews... only after his humanity is stripped from him... and even the German guard is reduced to nothing more than his unhuman attributes: his Luger and his boot.

On a similar theme... and equally devastating... there's Paul Celan:

"Death Fugue"

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown
we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink it
we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his pack out
he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave
he commands us strike up for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink in the morning at noon we drink you at
sundown
we drink and we drink you
A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes
he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair
Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith we dig a grave in the breezes there
one lies unconfined

He calls out jab deeper into the earth you lot you others sing now and play
he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it his eyes are blue
jab deeper you lot with your spades you others play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown
we drink and we drink you
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke you will rise into air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we drink you
death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue
he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his pack on us he grants us a grave in the air
he plays with the serpents and daydreams death is a master from Germany

your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamith

This fugue immediately calls to my mind the most tragic works of Bach the Passions and cantatas such as no. 80 (Ich habe genug) in the manner in which Celan almost echoes the contrapunctal structures of a fugue... the repetition theme that keeps reappearing... horribly... yet changes each time. I assume a similar intention by Celan (especially with the Death Fugue. title). The poem may also undoubtedly owe much to the tradition of German lyric love poetry by authors such as Heine and Goethe rooted in folk songs. Who cannot recognize Margarite as aluding to Goethe's "Faust". Like Faust... yet in a horrific, crude manner, Celan's "man who lives in the house"... the Nazi officer... also spars with the devil... with evil (Mephistopholes... the snakes with which he plays...). The image of the Shulamith's "ashen hair" is an almost unbearable perversion of how the dark Hebrew woman was portrayed in the Song of Solomon... or of the image of tribulations of the Hebrew people prophesized in various of the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. The conflict of high art with the crude... and the horrific remind me of some of the images from Spielberg's "Schindler's List". I am especially reminded of the scene in which a young German officer has discovered an abandonned piano in one of the homes they are searching in the ghetto, and he begins to play (is it Bach...? Mozart...? I forget) a very staccatto piece which is accented by the flashing and the burst of machine gun fire as the Jews are hunted down. The conflict of what the German people have achieved... the sublime heights of art contrasted with such absolute evil, reminds us that education and culture do not insure us against such. Again... like Hecht's poem... I find that the controlled artifice of the structure makes the horror seem even more unbearable... which it was, as Celan's ghosts continued to haunt him until he committed suicide.

Virgil

07-21-2006, 10:02 PM

St. Lukes Guild

Welcome to lit net. You seem like someone who will really enjoyed this place. I hope you check out the Poem of the Week thread where we discuss and debate a poem for an entire week. The "More Light! More Light!" poem drew a heated debate. I hope ypu'll join us. This week is a Wallace Stevens poem. Actually today (friday) is the start of a new poem for the week, and I don't believe anyone has selected any. Perhaps you can select one.

WilliamBlake

07-25-2006, 09:13 PM

The Garden of Love

I laid me down upon a bank,
Where Love lay sleeping;
I heard among the rushes dank
Weeping, weeping.

Then I went to the heath and the wild,
To the thistles and thorns of the waste;
And they told me how they were beguiled,
Driven out, and compelled to the chaste.

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

(I went to a Catholic school for 12 years so the last line "and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires" amuses me and William Blake in general is just so great).

Jean-Baptiste

08-06-2006, 11:18 PM

I've maintained for many years that Ezra Pound was a hack. But things change, and now I love him and can allow him the room to talk to his own poetry as to something that he loved dearly. "Half cracked," indeed.

"FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

Come, my songs, let us express our baser pas-
sions,
Let us express our envy of the man with a
steady job and no worry about the future.
You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bad end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that
I almost see you about me,
Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

But you, newest song of the lot,
You are not old enough to have done much mischief,
I will get you a green coat out of China
With dragons worked upon it,
I will get you the scarlet silk trousers
From the statue of the infant Christ in Santa Maria
Novella,
Lest they say we are lacking in taste,
Or that there is no caste in this family."

I love the humor of this poem, and the countless others like it in his writings; though, admittedly, Pound was a much better poet when dealing with reality.

collinsc

09-14-2006, 04:40 AM

What are peoples opinion on the best poem ever !?!

mono

09-15-2006, 12:30 AM

Hello, collinsc, welcome to the forum. :D
Despite its length, you may find this thread (http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2763) helpful regarding your question. Personally, I could never possibly narrow down one poem as my absolute favorite, but it ranges somewhere between Emily Dickinson, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and an uncountable number of others.

collinsc

09-15-2006, 03:17 AM

Thanks Mono.

I am a Literature Forum virgin! ;)
I will check out the link

Monica

09-15-2006, 09:28 AM

I've been reading recently poems by William Butler Yeats. I really enjoyed some of them. Here are a couple:

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.

Down by the Sally Gardens

Down by the Sally Gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Nossa

09-16-2006, 11:40 AM

My fav. poem is Shakespeare's 55th sonnet
"Not Marble nor the glided momuments"

Nossa

09-16-2006, 11:41 AM

Pendragon

09-26-2006, 08:57 AM

I'll just say Poe's The Raven, and let it go at that. I'm sure almost everyone knows the poem, so no need to post it. :)

THX-1138

09-26-2006, 01:00 PM

the road not taken by Robert frost and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

breaddough

10-25-2006, 10:38 AM

I tend to appreciate the poems that leave me with a kind of sense of a quiet mind, like everything becomes more still.
Here's one of my favorites by the fabulous Ms. Dickenson

Ample make this bed
Make this bed with awe
In it wait til judgment break
Excellent and fair

Be its mattress straight
Be its pillow round
Let no sunrise's yellow noise
Interrupt this ground

BibliophileTRJ

11-14-2006, 01:20 PM

"Sea-Fever"

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

By John Masefield (1878-1967).
(English Poet Laureate, 1930-1967.)

Perhaps it's my favorite simply because I have salt in my veins..... 3rd generation fisherman.

lime123

11-15-2006, 01:37 AM

I love poems by Emily Dickinson!
aren't her books the best???

My favorite poem begins:
Because I could not stop for death-
he stopped for me-
there was only me and him inside the Carriage-
and Immortality.

I know it's not exactly the same.
but i blanked for right now.

Charles Dickens is a plus too. :yawnb:

thefemalemind

11-16-2006, 09:52 PM

Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and thought that I might try it out. My fav's are:

Where the Sidewalk Ends By Shel Silverstein

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

And

The Little Boy and the Old Man by Shel Silverstein

Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."
Said the old man, "I do that too."
The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."
"I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry."
The old man nodded, "So do I."
"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems
Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"I know what you mean," said the little old man.

And

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And

Again--His voice at the doorby Emily Dickison

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!

And

I could suffice for Him,I knew by Emily Dickinson

I could suffice for Him, I knew --
He -- could suffice for Me --
Yet Hesitating Fractions -- Both
Surveyed Infinity --

"Would I be Whole" He sudden broached --
My syllable rebelled --
'Twas face to face with Nature -- forced --
'Twas face to face with God --

Withdrew the Sun -- to Other Wests --
Withdrew the furthest Star
Before Decision -- stooped to speech --
And then -- be audibler

The Answer of the Sea unto
The Motion of the Moon --
Herself adjust Her Tides -- unto --
Could I -- do else -- with Mine?

So, basically I like Emily Dickinson and Shel Silverstein.

overmydeadbody

11-18-2006, 11:51 AM

Bronte, Donne, any american writer. These poems are all so average!
And eliot...even a mention of eliot!

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

Eliot was best when writing about cats (my favourite being mccavity!!) The waste land is dreadful - all reference and no content. Contrived and deliberate intellectualised bollocks.

The best writer in the english language in the 20th century was easily yeats. My facvourite by him (so HARD to choose) Easter 1916, on the 1916 irish uprising. However here is one with less historical context, on the pilgrimage of an aging man.

Sailing to Byzantium
I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--- Those dying generations --- at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shalll never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Behemoth

11-18-2006, 01:44 PM

I love Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," personally. I used to hate "The Waste Land" but I have a sort of respect for it now; enjoyment is probably too strong a word but it's fascinating to examine all the allusions and literary traditions that went into it.

Niamh

11-19-2006, 05:55 PM

It's very hard to select just one favourite poem so heres a bit of a list;

At the round earths imagined corners- John Donne

Sonnet 116- William Shakespeare

The stolen Child- William Butler Yeats

Is it a month- John Millington Synge

Thoughts in a garden- Andrew Marvell

just to name a few!

rashikwa

11-24-2006, 06:09 PM

any poem by Keats or Emily Dickinson is my favourite:) :thumbs_up

rashikwa

11-24-2006, 06:16 PM

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

I like this one, so heart touching

rashikwa

11-24-2006, 06:24 PM

this was the last I read by ED and I like it so much

The Heart Asks Pleasure First by Emily Dickinson.

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

TEND

11-25-2006, 04:29 AM

Hmm,
Anything by T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollowmen
Most anything by Blake
oh....for my Scottish roots, my favorite Robbie Burns poem/song, Scots Wha Hae.

Lots more, but these are a few.

Riesa

11-25-2006, 11:13 AM

at the moment this is my favorite:

The Moon and the Yew Tree
by Sylvia Plath

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

toni

11-28-2006, 06:04 AM

I see nobody's mentioned of Thomas Hardy yet..:bawling:
It is hard to choose a specific favorite poem but here is one:

The Convergence of The Twain
(lines on the loss of titanic)

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II
Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III
Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls-grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV
Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V
Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?"...

VI
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII
Prepared a sinister mate
For her - so gaily great -
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX
Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

X
Or sign that they were bent
by paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august event,

XI
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres

Actually, any poem from Hardy is okay by me..
But this poem's vivid imagery just struck me.:lol:

Whifflingpin

11-28-2006, 07:18 PM

Not necessarily my favourite, but one I have been haunted by for over thirty years. It is

Jan Palach, by Jane Mapstone.

Now
I am only a thought in your mind
A headline on the paper of your thoughts
By tomorrow I will be relegated to a side column
And then I will disappear.
And maybe, in a year from today
Some line in the 'In Memoriam' will commemorate my death
But that's all
And in five years you will hear my name and think
'Now who the hell was he?"
And your kids will learn my name for one of their history tests.

But in spite of the fact
That today you are moved by the staring capitals, inch high,
You don't understand the enormity,
The reality
That made me
Twenty one
Burn
Myself
To
Death
You can't understand
You don't think about
The feelings that went through my body
As I poured the petrol over me
As I felt its stickiness running like blood down my arms
Down my legs
And you can't know
That with all my body
All my mind
Crying 'NO! NO!'
I found somewhere the necessity
To strike that match
To see it licking away at my clothes
To feel it biting away at my flesh
Consuming me
A person
Me
Watching it as though I was sat at
the back of a cinema, watching a film,
Completely detached
Watching me dying
And you'll never know
That before the clouds of laughing smoke, and whirling pain
Merged into darkness
I thought that
Maybe I was wrong.
Now
I am only a thought in your mind
A line in some volume of memory
I don't exist
I have no substance, flesh or feeling
Only decaying bones and decaying dreams
I died
You don't understand that
But think of this
I could have thrown stones and cracked your windows
I could have fought your policemen, burnt your cars
And made a public nuisance of myself
To gain attention

But what I did I can't do more than once
If you ignore it now then it is finished
If you just relegate me to your history books
Then there can be no point in what I did
No point. No reason
In burning myself to death
And I was wrong.

.

Riesa

11-28-2006, 07:24 PM

wow. . . . . .

Riesa

11-28-2006, 07:27 PM

this is one I found recently and I keep returning to. like your's, Whifflingpin, it's haunting me. I don't know if I'd consider it a favorite though.

The Blackboard of His Eyelid
by Michael Bassett

If he had Becky Wilson here,
he'd make her confess that she had lied
about how his parents make him drink
from the toilet and sleep
in a rabbit cage. A pale and skinny
clump of literature, always out past
the curfew of acceptance, behind
enemy lines of imagination, he plays
torturer of the inquisition,
brandishing the garden shears.

On the playground, while he practices
impossible contortions
of introspection, they bloody his nose,
hating the secrets hidden
in the scriptorium of his oddness.
They crack his sharp ribs, desperate
for the futures he reads
on the blackboard of his eyelid.
They shake from his green satchel
two dung beetles, most of a Mabel
Garden Spider, a scab from his skinned
knee, a sliver of bailing wire,
a cat's eye marble, and a quart
of Quick Start lighter fluid.

He's a Chihuahua-eyed chicken boy
with hundreds of freckles
his mother swears are seeds
from the pumpkin they carved
him out of. But he knows where
babies come from. He knows the darkness
of the closet, where he listens
to his mother's crying. He learns, under
the henhouse, the weasel's way.

He can't stop thinking about apricots
shriveling, paint belching, tiny frogs
dripping above matches. Outside
his secret fort, yellowing
sycamore leaves crackle.

http://www.uidaho.edu/fugue/The_Blackboard_of_His_Eyelid.htm

MissJaneEyre19

11-29-2006, 02:09 AM

i read this when i was 16, and was convinced that i was in love with yeats after reading it. :D

when you are old
by william butler yeats

when you are old and grey and full of sleep,
and nodding by the fire, take down this book,
and slowly read, and dream of the soft look
your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
how many loved your moments of glad grace,
and loved your beauty with love false or true,
but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
and loved the sorrows of your changing face;
and bending down beside the glowing bars,
murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
and paced upon the mountains overhead
and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

sanctus

12-01-2006, 08:13 AM

So many poets inspire and illuminate me. Shakespeare, Yoko Ono, Dylan Thomas, Marty Gervais..and the list goes on. I find I like the work sometimes over the author. I go for the words, more so than who wrote the words. And on an honest level, my favourites would include me:-)

mvr_moorthy

12-02-2006, 08:11 AM

I love all of Shakespeare's Sonnets.

And most of all :
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought...." for a marvellous fusion
of language,thought, rhythm and mood. I like the lines
"Then can I drown an eye,unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night "

Darl

12-02-2006, 11:06 AM

"The Wasteland," "...Prufrock," by Eliot, "The Cantos" and others by Pound aside, some of the most moving and accessible poetry I have ever had the pleasure of reading has been Charles Bukowski's. Visceral, blue-collar and nochalant in exposing itself to readers, he focuses on work, debauchery and suffering--pertinent to most of us, I think.

mockingbird

12-10-2006, 01:13 PM

Two favourites, one modern and one Shakespeare.

Before You Were Mine

I’m ten years away from the corner you laugh on
with your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.
The three of you bend from the waist, holding
each other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.
Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.

I’m not here yet. The thought of me doesn’t occur
in the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrows
the right walk home could bring. I knew you would dance
like that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the close
with a hiding for the late one. You reckon it’s worth it.

The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one eh?
I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,
And now your ghost clatters toward me over George Square
till I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,
with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?

Cha Cha Cha! You’d teach me the steps on the way home from mass,
stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even then
I wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewhere
in Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lasts
where you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.

I love this poem by Carol Ann Duffy because it's a stunningly unusual way of describing a mother-daughter relationship... it's not often the child describes itself as having a "loud, possessive yell". It's also got breathtaking imagery and metaphors; the "ballroom with the thousand eyes", the "fizzy, movie tomorrows", "clear as scent" and "stamping stars on the wrong pavement". I love the warmth within this poem.

Sonnet 130

MY mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red.
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

I love this because it's so unpretentious, even for Shakespeare, and evokes an image of genuine love.

ennison

12-10-2006, 03:47 PM

I don't really have a favourite poem. There's too many. Here's one called 'First Fight'. I like the energetic movement and the mimicry of the boxers rhythm.
I

Tonight, then, is the night;
Stretched on the massage table,
Wrapped in his robe, he breathes
Liniment and sweat
And tries to close his ears
To the roaring of the crowd,
A mirky sea of noise
That bears upon its tide
The frail sound of the bell
And brings the cunning fear
That he might not do well,
Not fear of bodily pain
But that his tight-lipped pride
Might be sent crashing down,
His white ambition slain,
Knocked spinning the glittering crown.
How could his spirit bear
That ignominious fall?
Not hero but a clown
Spurned or scorned by all.
The thought appals, and he
Feels sudden envy for
The roaring crowd outside
And wishes he were there
Anonymous and safe,
Calm in the tolerant air,
Would almost choose to be
Anywhere but here.

II

The door blares open suddenly,
The room is sluiced with row;
His second says, ‘We’re on the next fight,
We’d better get going now.
You got your gumshield, haven’t you?
Just loosen up – that’s right –
Don’t worry, Boy, you’ll be okay
Once you start to fight.’
Out of the dressing-room, along,
The neutral passage to
The yelling cavern where the ring
Through the haze of blue
Tobacco smoke is whitewashed by
The aching glare of light:
Geometric ropes are stretched as taut
As this boy’s nerves are tight.

And now he’s in his corner where
He tries to look at ease;
He feels the crowd’s sharp eyes as they
Prick and pry and tease;
He hears them murmur like the sea
Or some great dynamo:
They are not hostile yet they wish
To see his lifeblood flow.

His adversary enters now;
The Boy risks one quick glance;
He does not see an enemy
But something there by chance,
Not human even, but a cold
Abstraction to defeat,
A problem to be solved by guile,
Quick hands and knowing feet.
The fighters’ names are shouted out;
They leave their corners for
The touch of gloves and brief commands;
The disciplines of war.
Back in their corners, stripped of robes,
They hear the bell clang one
Brazen syllable which says
The battle has begun.

III

Bite on gumshield,
Guard held high,
The crowd are silenced,
All sounds die.
Lead with the left,
Again, again;
Watch for the opening,
Feint and then
Hook to the body
But he’s blocked it and
Slammed you back
With a fierce right hand.
Hang on grimly,
The fog will clear,
Sweat in your nostrils,
Grease and fear.
You’re hurt and staggering,
Shocked to know
That the story’s altered:
He’s the hero!

But the mist is clearing,
The referee snaps
A rapid warning
And he smartly taps
Your hugging elbow
And then you step back
Ready to counter
The next attack,
But the first round finishes
Without mishap.
You suck in the air
From the towel’s skilled flap.
A voice speaks urgently
Close to your ear:
‘Keep your left going, Boy,
Stop him getting near.
He wants to get close to you,
So jab him off hard;
When he tries to slip below,
Never mind your guard,
Crack him with a solid right,
Hit him on the chin,
A couple downstairs
And then he’ll pack it in.’

Slip in the gumshield
Bite on it hard,
Keep him off with your left,
Never drop your guard.
Try a left hook,
But he crosses with a right
Smack on your jaw
And Guy Fawkes’ Night
Flashes and dazzles
Inside your skull,
Your knees go bandy
And you almost fall.
Keep the left jabbing,
Move around the ring,
Don’t let him catch you with
Another hook or swing.
Keep your left working,
Keep it up high,
Stab it out straight and hard,
Again – above the eye.
Sweat in the nostrils,
But nothing now of fear,
You’re moving smooth and confident
In comfortable gear.
Jab with the left again,
Quickly move away;
Feint and stab another in,
See him duck and sway.
Now for the pay-off punch,
Smash it hard inside;
It thuds against his jaw, he falls,
Limbs spread wide.
And suddenly you hear the roar,
Hoarse music of the crowd,
Voicing your hot ecstasy,
Triumphant, male and proud.

IV

Now, in the sleepless darkness of his room
The Boy, in bed, remembers. Suddenly
The victory tastes sour. The man he fought
Was not a thing, as lifeless as a broom,
He was a man who hoped and trembled too;
What of him now? What was he going through?
And then the Boy bites hard on resolution:
Fighters can’t pack pity with their gear,
And yet a bitter taste stays with the notion;
He’s forced to swallow down one treacherous tear.
But that’s the last. He is a boy no longer;
He is a man, a fighter, such as jeer
At those who make salt beads with melting eyes,
Whatever might cry out, is hurt, or dies.

Vernon Scannell

ennison

12-10-2006, 03:50 PM

And although it's long there is so much in this that I reckon it repays the effort. The poet spent a long time on it.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

By Thomas Gray (1716-1721)
1. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
2. The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea ,
3. The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
4. And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
.
5. Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,
6. And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
7. Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
8. And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds .

9. Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r
10. The moping owl does to the moon complain
11. Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r ,
12. Molest her ancient solitary reign.
.
13. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
14. Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
15. Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
16. The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
17. The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
18. The swallow twitt’ring from the straw-built shed,
19. The ****'s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
20. No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
.
21. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
22. Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
23. No children run to lisp their sire's return,
24. Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
25. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
26. Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
27. How jocund did they drive their team afield!
28. How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
29. Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
30. Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
31. Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
32. The short and simple annals of the poor.
33. The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
34. And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
35. Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
36. The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

37. Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
38. If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
39. Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault
40. The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
41. Can storied urn or animated bust
42. Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
43. Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
44. Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
45. Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
46. Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire ;
47. Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
48. Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.
49. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
50. Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
51. Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
52. And froze the genial current of the soul.
53. Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
54. The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
55. Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
56. And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
57. Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
58. The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
59. Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
60. Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.
61. Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
62. The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
63. To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
64. And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes ,
65. Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
66. Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;
67. Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
68. And shut the gates of mercy on mankind ),
69. The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
70. To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
71. Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
72. With incense kindled at the Muse's flame .
73. Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
74. Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
75. Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
76. They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
77. Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,
78. Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
79. With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
80. Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
81. Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse ,
82. The place of fame and elegy supply:
83. And many a holy text around she strews,
84. That teach the rustic moralist to die.
85. For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
86. This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,
87. Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
88. Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind?
89. On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
90. Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
91. Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
92. Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.
93. For thee , who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead
94. Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
95. If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
96. Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate ,
97. Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
98. "Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
99. Brushing with hasty steps the dews away
100. To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
101. "There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
102. That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
103. His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
104. And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
105. "Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
106. Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove,
107. Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,
108. Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

109. "One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,
110. Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree;
111. Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
112. Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

113. "The next with dirges due in sad array
114. Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne.
115. Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,
116. Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."

THE EPITAPH
117. Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
118. A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
119. Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
120. And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
121. Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
122. Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:
123. He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,
124. He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.
125. No farther seek his merits to disclose,
126. Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
127. (There they alike in trembling hope repose)
128. The bosom of his Father and his God.