The poem that made you love poetry?

[TheFifthElement]

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Do you have a particular poem that was the one? The one that made you love poetry? Do you still love it?

Mine is this one by Boris Pasternak. I don't know what it's called.

Don't touch: Fresh paint. The soul ignored
or thought itself too wise.
Now memory's streaked with hands and cheeks,
thighs and lips and eyes.

More than all good fortune and bad
I loved you for the light
that washed the sallow and yellow world
whiter than white.

And even my glooms, I swear, my dear,
will gleam more whitely now
than delerium or lampshade
or bandage on the brow.

I still love it!

[stormy sky]

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.




my mum used to read yeats out to me when i was four.this one stayed back with me.

[tinustijger]

I love the one by Boris Pasternak! Never heard that one before!
And I love When you are old and grey and full of sleep too! Very spectaculair poems! I also had one poem I just loved and loved and it made me love poetry!

W.H. Auden - Funeral Blues

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

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

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

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


I knew I heard it somewhere before, someone reading it with an Irish accent (I lovveee Irish accents!!!) so I searched and searched and everything.., it was read at the funeral from 'four weddings and a funeral'! Anyway, I still love the poem!

[Bakiryu]

Israfel by Poe. Don't have enough time to type it. Must watch doctor.

[Poppy]

Mending Fences ~ Frost
Its the first one I truely understood.

~Poppy

[motherhubbard]

I was going to say Frost too, but probably stopping by woods-

[schadenfreude]

Futility- Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.


Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved, - still warm, - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

[Three]

.....

[Clouder]

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;


:thumbs_up for this one.
There are quite a few. I would say those lines are so impressive that I love literature more. Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe, IF by Rudyard Kipling, and lots of others, like Neruda, Tagore...and lots of Chinese poetry of Tang/Song/Yuan dynasty; I love lots of lyrics writer too...Bob Dylan in one of my favorites

[dauntfreesparro]

The poem that made me love poetry was The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I just remember feeling as though I stood with him, trying to decide which I would take and which I would save. His words took my breath away and I fell in love.

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 marked the first for another day!
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.
Robert Frost

[PrinceMyshkin]

I don't remember if there was a first one that did it for me but, much later, this excerpt gets me every time I read it again:


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



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

[Demian]

And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

-Pablo Neruda

[blazeofglory]

Do you have a particular poem that was the one? The one that made you love poetry? Do you still love it?

Mine is this one by Boris Pasternak. I don't know what it's called.

Don't touch: Fresh paint. The soul ignored
or thought itself too wise.
Now memory's streaked with hands and cheeks,
thighs and lips and eyes.

More than all good fortune and bad
I loved you for the light
that washed the sallow and yellow world
whiter than white.

And even my glooms, I swear, my dear,
will gleam more whitely now
than delerium or lampshade
or bandage on the brow.

I still love it!

The poem really I like is the conference of the birds by Attar, one of the great Iranian poets, and his poems are really very rich, and they kind of always touch me.


The poem that made me love poetry was The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. I just remember feeling as though I stood with him, trying to decide which I would take and which I would save. His words took my breath away and I fell in love.

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 marked the first for another day!
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.
Robert Frost

This is one of the poems I am always fond of, and it always inspires me, and it urges me to take strides in life, to go ahead, and to take always more steps, and he was really impeccable.

[Virgil]

The very first poem that opened my eyes to poetry was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.



The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T.S. Eliot

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


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
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 … 10
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, 15
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, 20
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; 25
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; 30
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 35
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— 40
[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 45
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, 50
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— 55
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? 60
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!]
It is perfume from a dress 65
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 70
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! 75
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? 80
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, 85
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, 90
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”— 95
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, 100
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: 105
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.”
. . . . . 110
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, 115
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 … 120
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. 125

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 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

[Xcape]

I do not love you...
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

[Plauen]

Yes! Schiller's The Artists:

Only through beauty's morning gate
Didst thou the land of knowledge find.
To merit a more glorious fate,
In graces trains itself the mind.
What thrilled thee through with trembling blessed,
When erst the Muses swept the chord,
That power created in thy breast,
Which to the mighty spirit soared.

[blazeofglory]

I do not love you...
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way
that this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

This is a perfect example of what love is and the way they behave if they really for each other.

When they really love each other there will be no two entities and there will be complete surrender and both will be immersed into one whole.

Initially physical attributes induce two souls and in due course that attribute fades away. and there will be two souls only in perfect love.

[stlukesguild]

I don't think I can limit it to a single poem. As a child I certainly found that there was a sort of magic in the poetic language of Dr. Zeus... various other children's poems... and certain passages of the Bible. In high-school it was Poe who opened me up further to the possibilities of poetry and language; Whitman and Dickinson and all the others we read at that time fell upon deaf ears. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rilke, Dante, Yeats, Blake, and Chaucer in the original middle-English... these are the writers who truly turned me into a lover of poetry. My shelves currently strain under the weight of far more volumes of poetry than of anything else.

[Visionary3]

We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers
On which the pale moon gleams.
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever it seems.

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who present, Past, and Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked among the trees.
Wm. Blake

Be you near, or be you far
Let my blessing, like a star,
Shine upon you everywhere!
And in each lone evening hour
When the twilight folds the flower,
I will fold thy name in prayer.
Father Ryan, civil war priest

[blazeofglory]

We are the music makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers
On which the pale moon gleams.
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever it seems.

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who present, Past, and Future sees
Whose ears have heard
The Holy Word
That walked among the trees.
Wm. Blake

Be you near, or be you far
Let my blessing, like a star,
Shine upon you everywhere!
And in each lone evening hour
When the twilight folds the flower,
I will fold thy name in prayer.
Father Ryan, civil war priest
Beautifully presented indeed. the beauty if it is more elaborated by rhyming. I feel rhyming is the essence of poetry. Despite the fact that there were numbers of objections against rhyming and yet with rhyming I find kinds of orderliness in poetry. Since through poetry we are really ordering phenomena and why should we withdraw from rhyming.

In fact poetry is what we seek in ordering the course of things, and art in point of fact stands for it and rhyming also serves that end and for that matter adding or using rhymes is what adds beauty to a poem.

It is often believed that rhyming restricts the meaning of a poem or what a poet wants to express, but that is a wrong concept.I believe rhymes are organs of poems, the way a man can not be a full man if one of the eyes or ear is disfigured or mutilated. All combination makes a full man, and therefore a poem is also in the like manner is what it needs different combinations put together in perfect order, and from that perspective a good poem needs more of such things and it is indeed a rhyme is a vital requirement in a good poem.

[Aiculík]

In fact there were two - both by Jacques Prévert - Barbara and Breakfast. But I can't find decent English translation of Barbara on the net - if you have some, please send it to me! I'd be really grateful.

Breakfast

He poured the coffee
Into the cup
He poured the milk
Into the cup of coffee
He added the sugar
To the coffee and milk
He stirred it
With a teaspoon
He drank the coffee
And put back the cup
Without speaking to me
He lit a cigarette
He blew some rings
With the smoke
He flicked the ashes
Into the ashtray
Without speaking to me
Without looking at me
He got up
He put his hat
On his head
He put on
His raincoat
Because it was raining
He went out
Into the rain
Without a word
Without looking at me
And I
I took my head
In my hands
And I wept

I still remember how fascinated I was when I first read it in my reader (I was in 6th grade I think). It was quite different from the poems I read untill then. I remember I insisted on reciting Barbara at the contest, though my teacher chose something else. And I won! The committee said they never heard more original and emotional recitation. But that was just thanks to that poem - I saw it so clearly in my mind, I quite forgot I was at the contest, reciting it aloud, and did it in quite different way than I practiced with my teacher...

[Granny5]

I have never seen this before and I love it. It's so moving and real.

[Aiculík]

Yesterday I discovered a pretty good site about Prévert, with few more poems translated into English, so if you like it, check it out:


http://xtream.online.fr/Prevert/indexeng.html

[Granny5]

Thank you, Aiculík. I will check it out.

I remember studing Carl Sandburg in Jr. High and thinking how pretty and simple his poem is. This is the first poem I can remember falling in love with.

Fog By Carl Sandburg

THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

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

[Petrarch's Love]

Of course there were many poems in my childhood that I enjoyed. I think the the first glimpse I had of what poetry could be was when I read Romeo and Juliet in the 5th grade, but at that age I think I was so interested in the story, that I was really only partly aware that the language was part of what kept drawing me back to it. My poetry epiphany moment, when it suddenly all clicked and I really began to read poetry in all its possible levels and dimensions was one quiet, and appropriately golden, afternoon in the 8th grade when I came across this sonnet by Keats:

Much have I traveled in realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He started at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

[firefangled]

I learned this poem when I was 5 years old by listening to my mother read it to me over and over. I loved its detail and rhyme. I still can recite it word for word after 50 years. I think this is when I started to love poetry, but it was decades before I wrote any.

The Yarn of the 'Nancy Bell (1866)
Sir William Schwenck Gilbert

'Twas on the shores that round our coast
From Deal to Ramsgate span,
That I found alone on a piece of stone
An elderly naval man.

His hair was weedy, his beard was long,
And weedy and long was he,
And I heard this wight on the shore recite,
In a singular minor key:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."

And he shook his fists and he tore his hair,
Till I really felt afraid,
For I couldn't help thinking the man had been drinking,
And so I simply said:

"Oh, elderly man, it's little I know
Of the duties of men of the sea,
And I'll eat my hand if I understand
However you can be

'At once a cook, and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig.'"

Then he gave a hitch to his trousers, which
Is a trick all seamen larn,
And having got rid of a thumping quid,
He spun this painful yarn:

"'Twas in the good ship Nancy Bell
That we sailed to the Indian Sea,
And there on a reef we come to grief,
Which has often occurred to me.

'And pretty nigh all the crew was drowned
(There was seventy-seven o' soul),
And only ten of the Nancy's men
Said 'Here!' to the muster-roll.

'There was me and the cook and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And the bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig.

'For a month we'd neither wittles nor drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we drawed a lot, and, accordin' shot
The captain for our meal.

'The next lot fell to the Nancy's mate,
And a delicate dish he made;
Then our appetite with the midshipmite
We seven survivors stayed.

'And then we murdered the bo'sun tight,
And he much resembled pig;
Then we wittled free, did the cook and me,
On the crew of the captain's gig.

'Then only the cook and me was left,
And the delicate question,"Which
Of us two goes to the kettle" arose,
And we argued it out as sich.

'For I loved that cook as a brother, I did,
And the cook he worshipped me;
But we'd both be blowed if we'd either be stowed
In the other chap's hold, you see.

"I'll be eat if you dines off me,"says TOM;
'Yes, that,' says I, 'you'll be, '
'I'm boiled if I die, my friend, ' quoth I;
And "Exactly so," quoth he.

'Says he,"Dear JAMES, to murder me
Were a foolish thing to do,
For don't you see that you can't cook me,
While I can and will cook you!"

'So he boils the water, and takes the salt
And the pepper in portions true
(Which he never forgot), and some chopped shalot.
And some sage and parsley too.

"Come here,"says he, with a proper pride,
Which his smiling features tell,
"'T will soothing be if I let you see
How extremely nice you'll smell."

'And he stirred it round and round and round,
And he sniffed at the foaming froth;
When I ups with his heels, and smothers his squeals
In the scum of the boiling broth.

'And I eat that cook in a week or less,
And as I eating be
The last of his chops, why, I almost drops,
For a wessel in sight I see!

"And I never larf, and I never smile,
And I never lark nor play,
But I sit and croak, and a single joke
I have--which is to say:

"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig!"