which poem do you remember by heart?

I guess poetry is complex but better when one recites it by heart.

so which poem can you recite by heart?
please do post it too :)

Mine is the Prisoner of Chillon by Lord Byron:

"My hair is grey, but not with years.
nor grew it white in a single night
as men's have grown from sudden fears.
My limbs are bowed but not with toil.
For they have been a dungeon's spoil
And mine has been the fate of those
to whom the goodly earth and air are banned and barred,
forbidden fare.

We were seven who now are one,
six in youth and one in age
proud of persecution's rage.

One in fire, two in field,
their belief with blood had sealed. Three were in a dungeon cast,
of whom this wreck is left the last.

There are seven pillars massive and cold, in Chillon's dungeons dark and old.
Dim with a dull imprisoned ray, a sunbeam that had lost its way..."

(I used to be able to recite more by heart, but the years have taken their toll, sadly.)

I know Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" by heart. Some times I catch myself saying it for no reason at all.

Of course there are a lot of popular songs that I know by heart. Some of these I wish I didn't know by heart, but I still enjoy them.

And there are also a few choice Mother Goose rhymes that come to mind such as "Mary Had a Little Lamb", but I only know the first stanza of that one.

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add
Jenny kiss'd me.
-Leigh Hunt

Lodged

The rain to the wind said
"You push and I'll pelt."
Together they smote the garden bed
"Til the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged,
Though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.

I may not have punctuated it the way Robert Frost did.


The 2nd verse of My Country by Dorothea MacKellar and bits of the rest.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains.
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons.
I love her jewelled seas.
Her beauty and her terrors.
The wide, brown land for me.

There are many. But I adore this little bit from Montale:

Do not cut, scissors, that face
alone in fading memory,
do not lose her listening wonder
in my everlasting haze.

Song of a Nightclub Proprietress

I walked into the nightclub in the morning,
there was Kummel on the handle of the door,
the ashtrays were unemptied,
The cleaning unattempted,
And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor.

I pulled aside the thick magenta curtains
So Regency, so Regency, my dear
And a host of little spiders
Ran a race across the ciders
To a box of baby 'pollies by the beer.

Oh sun upon the summergoing bypass
Where ev'rything is speeding to the sea,
And wonder beyond wonder
that here where lorries thunder
The sun should ever percolate to me.

When Boris used to call in his Sedanca,
When Teddy took me down to his estate,
When my nose excited passions,
And my clothes were in the fashion,
When my beaux were never cross if I was late,

There was sun enough for lazing upon beaches
There was fun enough for far into the night;
But I'm dying now and done for,
What on earth was all the fun for?
I am ill and old and terrified and tight.