Your Favorite Poem

[readertim109]

What's your favorite poem? How long has it been your favorite? Why do you like it?

[LoveHatesYou]

Not my favorite poem, but a wonderful one is "The Flea" by John Donne

Also, "To His Coy Mistress"

I also love Shakespeares sonnets, read in order- believe me, they are not love poems. They are written from the view of an older man to a young boy. It's all normal for the time period. They are extremely clever.

[ktmayo05]

ah crap. I can't remember the name of it. but it goes as follows:

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

than 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
-------------------
I first read it several years ago when I was a junior in highschool. It was in a text book and I loved it. I actually wanted to say it at my wedding, but. well. didn't think it was a good idea. And I love it because it just captures the feeling better than I have ever heard. Just gives me goosebumps.

[knightss]

A Flower was offer'd to me,
Such a flower as May never bore;
But I said "I've a Pretty Rose-tree,"
And I passed the sweet flower ov'r.

Then I went to my Pretty Rose-tree,
To tend her by day and by night;
But my Rose turn'd away with jealousy,
And her thorns were my only delight.

-William Blake - My Pretty Rose-Tree

this is currently my favorite poem.

[nola]

this is my favorite memorized poem to recite to people.

(forgive the strange line breaks, i pasted it)


by Barbara Ras

You Can't Have It All



But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green.

You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting
pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold
hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be
grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia,
grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot
sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,

how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,

it will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

[Tim1975]

heres my favourite:

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 cr?pe 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.

there is a nice jazz version by andreas schnermann on myspace

[Kiki]

Two amazing poems....

Jon Silkin - Death of a Son (who dies age one in a mental hospital)
Its long - so I won't post it here. Jon write this, as the title implies, shortly after his son died. I have never read so much tenuously restrained anguish and raw pain. The poem leaves you feeling likes claws through your insides. Its very dark and sad but stunning

Dylan Thomas - In Country Sleep
My countryman! (a Welshman) DT is a legend. I heard the first stanza of this poem when I was 10 or 11 - then spent the next 10 years trying to track it down and find out where it came from. The whole poem is incredibly evocative. Again its huge so I won't paste it here.

Wendy Cope - Flowers
Some men never think of it.
You did. You'd come along
And say you nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong

The shop wash closed. Or you had doubts-
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up incessantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers

It made me smile and hug you then
Now I can only smile
But look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.

[Kiki]

If you're interested;

Dylan Thomas - In Country Sleep
http://www.undermilkwood.net/poetry_incountrysleep.html

Jon Silkin - Death of a son
http://www.spoem.com/english_p8/silkin1.htm

[Linda]

The Cold Within
Six humans trapped in happenstance in dark and bitter cold,
Each one possessed a stick of wood, or so the story's told.
Their dying fire in need of logs
The first woman held hers back,
For of the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.
The next man looking across the way
Saw not one of his church,
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.
The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use,
To warm the idol rich?
The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store,
And how to keep what he had earned,
From the lazy, shiftless poor.
The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.
The last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain,
Giving only to those who gave,
Was how he played the game.
The logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin,
They did not die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.

-James Patrick Kinney

[dukeloath]

This recently struck me:

Prelude III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

T.S Elliot

[Tigers2B1]

Jon Silkin's poem, the one linked above, is also a favorite.

[Linda]

right now my favorite poem is a short one by Dorothy Parker.

UNFORTUNATE COINCIDENCE

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying--
Lady, make note of this:
One of you is lying.

[Linda]

i kno Derek mentioned one, but here's another William Blake poem i like.

The Lily

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threat'ning horn:
While the Lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

[sleepydumpling]

heres my favourite:

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 cr?pe 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.

there is a nice jazz version by andreas schnermann on myspace

This is one of my favourite poems too. It's beautiful.

[sleepydumpling]

Another favourite of mine, and many Aussies would say it's stereotyped or something, but I do love it because it sums up my country for me, is the following:

My Country
by Dorothea McKellar

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies -
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror ?
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold hush of noon,
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree-tops,
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die ?
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the rainbow gold,
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze.

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land ?
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand ?
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.