I have a lot of favorite poems but some which have affected me deeply would include Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning
and T.S.Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
and W.B. Yeats’s “When You Are Old”
Black12,
The Moon is Always Female is by Marge Piercy.
T
OOPS! I always switch their names. :o
Also, I’m reading The Robber Bride at the moment so I have her on the brain.
I’ve always liked “The Second Coming” by Yeats:
*Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? *
Although in a fix, Anne Sexton does just fine.
pcubed.
Like Goboy my favorite poem is “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” My favorite lines are:
"I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. "
Other favorites include “Jabberwocky” By Lewis Carroll and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Keith
My favorite poem is Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. To me it’s a beautiful way of saying “stop and smell the roses”. In other words, don’t get bogged down in your busy life without stopping every once in a while to reflect on the moment.
I’m also partial to Carl Sandburg’s Chicago - a love poem to the author’s hometown that really captures the life of the city and why he loves it.
“Stopping by Woods” (as I mentioned before is one of my favorites too, for pretty much the same reason. But in grade 11 by english teacher parsed and analyzed it so hard she made the conclusion that the man was about to commit suicide. I was TERRIBLY upset! Good thing I am…
Tennyson’s Ulysses: http://www.raingod.com/angus/Poetry/Poems/a_tennyson.html
“Come, my friends
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world
[…]
and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven: that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Ozymandias by PB Shelley
Jabberwocky (as mentioned by many people)
(hijack: try to come up with a commonly known melody to which one can sing Jabberwocky… 'tis not easy)
Oh Captain My Captain by Walt Whitman
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
and a really beautiful poem that I read in high school about trumpets rolling over water on a Scottish lake or something… I’m usually not much for “beauty of language” and all that, but this was just so musical… anyone have any idea what I’m talking about?
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti…Very disturbing and beautiful at the same time.
The Fly by Ogden Nash.
And no bandwith concerns here; the poem is only 2 lines long.
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow…
And
Two road diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood…
I kvell over virtually anything by Dorothy Parker.
I also like:
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116;
Browning’s “My Last Duchess;”
a lot of Emily Dickinson;
Ginsburg’s “Please Master”;
Catullus’s Carmen 16;
and various others that I can’t think of right now because I’m too tired and sick. Goodnight.
Anything by A.E.Woodhouse
In elementary school, I learned cursive by copying Shel Silverstein poems my teacher wrote on the board. So he’s my favorite poet.
I’ve always loved these:
The Cremation of Sam McGee_by Robert Service
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot
The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
My vote goes to “Casey at the bat”. I almost cried when he struck out the first time I read it. Now, if it had been McGwire at the plate it might have been a different story…
Mine would have to be
The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
and
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
There is another one but I can’t remember its title. I need to dig out my Children’s collection again to find it.
“anyone lived in a pretty howtown” by e.e. cummings