Favorite poem?

[mattieog]

may i feel said he by ee cummings

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


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


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

Love in the Guise of Frindship
by Robert Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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

[tinustijger]

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

[Alex Sheremet]

what I consider the greatest poem of all time ?

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



Heritage

by Countee Cullen


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

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

....

[/I]

[detritus]

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

"Sound, sweet song."

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

Now of joy, and now of woe!

Stars are wont to glimmer so.

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

[mattieog]

The Angel that presided o'er my birth


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

William Blake

[ellen c]

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

The Book Borrower

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

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

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

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

[ampoule]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ellen c]

Why do you never print my posts?

[pellegrino]

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

[Kiba]

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

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

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

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

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

[tome_keeper]

too many to choose, but some include...

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

[quasimodo1]

ULALUME.

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

[Lyn]

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

from Ineducable Me, Norman MacCaig

[Pensive]

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

from Ineducable Me, Norman MacCaig

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

[tinustijger]

Very 'cool' poem, I think!