Favourite poems

In honour of National Poetry day (in the UK), I’m asking, what’s your favourite poem and why?

I’ve asked this question of many people, and I’m amazed at the number of people who don’t have one, so I’m turning to you, erudite Dopers, to restore my faith.

One request for posters, can we have a link to the poem in each case? With someone discussing a poem close to their heart you want to know what they’re talking about.

OK, here’s my offering:

‘High Flight’, John G. Magee

I love the imagery of this poem. I’ve done a bit of flying and I think it evokes beautifully the feelings and the sights. I don’t think that he has a word out of place. It’s not just the feelings of flying either, it’s the fact that he knows he’s the only one there, that feeling of being alone in the ‘long, delirious burning blue’.

Made all the more poignant because he died a few months later.

Some primal termite knocked on wood,
tasted it, and found it good,
and that is why your cousin May
fell through the parlor floor today.
–Ogden Nash

Favorite Limerick:

One day I went to the zoo,
For I wanted to see the old gnu.
But the old gnu was dead
And the new gnu they said
Was too new a new gnu to view.

Favorite Sentimental Poem to be Read in a Scottish Accent:

The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht
Wi’ muckle fash an’ din.
Oh, try and sleep, ye waukrife rogues;
Your faither’s comin’ in.
They never heed a word I speak.
I try to gie a froon;
But aye I hap them up, an’ cry,
Oh, bairnies, cuddle doon!
Wee Jamie wi’ the curly heid-
He aye sleeps next to wa’-
Bangs up an’ cries, I want a piece-
The rascal starts them a’.
I rin an’ fetch them pieces, drinks-
They stop awee the soun’-
Then draw the blankets up, an’ cry,
Noo, weanies, cuddle doon!
–Alexander Anderson

(I won’t inflict my favorite poem on the board again as I’ve already posted it a half dozen times.)

I like the Magee and the Nash too (I had never read Nash’s Custard the Dragon until someone posted it here in a favorite poem thread, and it is now my son’s favorite poem–he can recite the whole thing–so a belated thanks to whoever posted that).

Invictus by William Ernest Henley

Ozymandius by Percy Bysshe Shelley (the only thing shelley wrote that I liked)

I’m sure my choices say something profound about my philosophy, but I’m not sure what. :slight_smile:

Since Humble Servant has started the limericks, I’ll include my favorite as well. I first read it in one of David Gerrold’s Chtorr novels, but I doubt that it was original. It’s the definition of a limerick:

A limerick of classic proportion
Must have rhyme, meter, and a portion
Of humor quite lewd
And a frightfully crude
Impossible sexual contortion.

I have a weakness for penny-dreadful Victorian poems, like The Ice Floe, Will New Year’s Come Tonight? and The Face on the Bar-Room Floor. Great for Declaiming in Stentorious Tones. I have been known to throw myself backwards out a chair reciting The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Ooooooh, Eve, do you have a copy of Michael J. Turner’s Victorian Parlour Poetry (Dover, 1992), first published as Parlour Poetry: A Casquet of Gems (Viking, 1969)?

Best…anthology…EVAHHH!

“Five cents a glass!” Does anyone think
That this is really the price of a drink?
“Five cents a glass,” I hear you say,
“Why, that isn’t very much to pay.”
Ah, no, indeed; 'tis a very small sum
You are passing over with finger and thumb;
And if that were all that you gave away
It wouldn’t be very much to pay.

The price of a drink! Let him decide
Who has lost his courage and lost his pride,
And lies a groveling heap of clay
Not far removed from a beast today…

– fron Josephine Pollard, “Price of a Drink”

Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe.

Is that the one you once gave me a copy of?

“Over the hill to the poor-house I’m trudgin’ my weary way—
I, a woman of seventy, and only a trifle gray—
I, who am smart an’ chipper, for all the years I’ve told,
As many another woman that’s only half as old.”

The world is too much with us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

I like epic poetry, and very little else (although I have to agree with Balance’s choice of Ozymandias). So i like the translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

In English poems, I like Samuel Tayler Colerdige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Interestingly enough, I’m reading it right now at bedtime – the annotated edition, with notes by Martin Gardner.

Hey look! My first post!

My favorite poem is T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi.

Sorry I could not provide a link, but apparently copyright restrictions apply in this case.

Welcome to the boards, MSU 1978. Excellent choice for a first post.

Here’s a link to the Journey of the Magi. You’re right that some of Eliot’s stuff appears to remain under copyright and some not; since this link goes to a university website established in 1996, I’m willing to think that they got permission to post.

I like Eliot too. Here’s a lesser-known one: Sweeney Among the Nightingales.

I like Rime of the Ancient Mariner a lot now too, although I quite hated it when I first read it in high school.

Ok, this is funny since I’m an atheist, but one of my favorite poems is God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think it is beautiful and can be interpreted symbolically and appreciated from a secular viewpoint.
God’s Grandeur, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Mmmmm…poetry…

That’s one of my favorites too, Tangent.

I could probably come up with a really long list – I’ll try to keep it relatively brief (and exclude stuff like verse drama and epic ;))…

On My First Son, Ben Jonson
Hymn to God My God, In My Sickness, John Donne
Caliban upon Setebos, Robert Browning
Dulce et decorum est, Wilfrid Owen
Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art, John Keats (Swooniest. Poem. Ever.)
Denial, George Herbert

Ozymandias is one of my favorites, too. It makes a great memorize and recite aloud poem.

This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams

Birches by Robert Frost

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

A Poison Tree by William Blake

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning

The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln.

And this, which I got from, IIRC, a Seven Up commercial:

Off in the distance, the game’s dragging on.
There’s strikes on the batter, some runners are on.

When suddenly everyone’s looking at me.
My mind has been wandering, what could it be?

I look all around, then I look up above,
And a baseball falls into my glove.

I play right field, it’s important, you know,
You gotta know how to catch, you gotta know how to throw.

That’s why I play in right field,
Way out, where the dandelions grow.

With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.

Solid comment on the fragile nature of our friendships and out lifes. Kinda makes you want to appreciate them a little more.

AND

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
`Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
`The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

The bell-headed nature of youth and how easily one is stricken with love at such a young age. Warning people (especially young ones) to guard their feelings does no good at all. :slight_smile:

Novus

Um, also I think that should be “bull-headed”. Hmmmm.

Novus

A) I am quite aware at how this poem has not…um…aged…well. It’s racist as hell by today’s standards, and while I think his heart was in the right place, his head was firmly up his rectum it wasn’t all that enlightened by his own time’s standards. W.E.B. Dubois had some unkind and very thoughtful things to say about it “All of which is well meant, but some of it is nonsense. Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.”) but nonetheless…

B) If you put the subject matter aside, this is an amazingly fun poem to read out loud…read properly, it rolls like thunder off the tongue. (the part italics are Lindsay’s instructions tot the reader.)

Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo (this is only the first part that I’m quoting…it’s about 3 times longer)

I love the guy’s use of meter and raw power of the rhythm in the poem. The subject matter, not so much.

Also, I’m getting into Robert W. Service, especially his Yukon stuff like Dangerous Dan McGrew (note again, I’m only quoting part of it.)

In the same vein as Service is a poem called The Ballad of Eskimo Nell which is hysterical. And filthy. Filthy enough that I had to hunt down a url that followed the “two click” rule.

A tiny fragment ( just about every stanza is doity, so I can’t easily quote much) goes:

Um…I think, even if I * out the vowel in the final word, Euty’ll slap me around. Suffice it to say that the last word is exactly what you think it is. :smiley:

Basically, I like stuff that rhymes, has rhythm, is fun to read aloud and (if possible) tells a story.

And Eskimo Nell certainly tells a story!

I can’t believe we’ve got this far without mentioning the best poet of all…William McGonagall.

www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/index.shtml

Hard to pick one favourite but I guess the ultimate is the Tay Bridge Disaster…makes you weep!

http://www.spda.com/mcgonagall/lexicon3.cfm?title=The%20Tay%20Bridge%20Disaster