Without quoting the entire poem, and with just enough words included to capture it, can you share the image from a poem that affects you the most as nearly perfect words to express something profound.
Two that have worked for me since I first read them are:
From Ozymandias:
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
From The Listeners:
“Aye, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.”
I love the whole poem (and I’m sorry I can’t recall the title or poet), but the essence for me is captured in the last four words.
“I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
An attendant lord, one that will do, perhaps to swell a scene or two.”
I probably haven’t quoted it precisely, but that’s from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. I think it’s a tremendous pity for Prufrock not to be Prince Hamlet in his own life. Of course, I could pull any number of liens from that poem that also capture it perfectly . . . I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? And, referring to the mermaids, I do not think they will sing for me.
Next door
There’s an old man
Who lived to his nineties
And one day
Passed away
In his sleep
And his wife, she stayed
For a couple of days
And passed away
I’m sorry, I know that’s a
Strange way to tell you
That I know we belong
Well, it’s from the Ben Folds song “The Luckiest,” but damn if that isn’t some beautiful poetry to me. Really just sums up something much great for me.
I do understand that sentiment. It’s the mark of a good poem that the image(s) can’t really stand alone. However, the ones that we seem to remember do carry some extra power due to word choice and the underlying idea or feeling. Now and then some piece of dialog in an otherwise prosaic movie will have the same effect. Sometimes, words just say way more than what they say.
I have lots of favorite ‘bits’ of poetry for various reasons, but I’m giving this post to my dad, because I love his reason for his favorite bit. He loves the refrain from “Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling. You know, "
Oooh, ooh. Let me play! (warning: English major and poetry geek ahead)
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
– William Butler Yeats, ‘Easter 1916’
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
– e.e. cummings, ‘somewhere i have never travelled’
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.
– Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle’
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
– Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy, ‘Ode’
A dream that a lion had dreamed
Till the wilderness cried aloud,
A secret between you two,
Between the proud and the proud.
…
Yet she, singing upon her road,
Half lion, half child, is at peace.
– William Butler Yeats, ‘Against Unworthy Praise’
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!"
If you ask him why he loves that, he says, “Because I’ve seen the sun rise off the coast of China and the dawn really does come up like thunder.” I’ve alwasy thought that was cool as hell – although, when he first told me this (when I was just a wee one), I was mostly interested in whether or not he’d seen flying fishes (he had) and whether or not they really flew (sort of, it’s more like really long jumping).
