Post your favorite poems

Cafe Society
1

There have been a couple threads in the Pit lately concerning poetry, which reminded me again how little of it I’ve read, beyond what I studied in high school english class. I know that if I checked out a poetry anthology from the library I would never actually read it so please post your favorite poems (unless they’re under copyright or something) in easy-to-read post form. Uh, if your favorite poem is Paradise Lost, then just post your favorite passage, I guess. :wink:

I don’t have a favorite poem but here’s one I just came across and liked.

The City

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is – like a corpse – buried.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1910)

2

Slough (John Betjeman)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
:slight_smile:

3

Too long to post, so I’ll link instead,
Ash-Wednesday
by T S Eliot

Woo-hoo 500 posts :slight_smile:

4

So we’ll go no more a’roving,
So late into the night,
Thought the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself must rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a’roving,
By the light of the moon.—“So We’ll Go No More A’Roving,” Lord Byron

5

**We Real Cool **

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school.

by Gwendolyn Brooks

6

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert th’ Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.:slight_smile:

7

Elizabeth Bishop
One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

8

MY heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So be it when I shall grow old 5
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

9

I don’t know how anyone can have one favorite poem, but this one comes to mind as a little-cited example from a favorite poet:

a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat

e. e. cummings

10

[nitpick] E.E. Cummings [/nitpick]

11

Who pays any attention to the syntax of things?

12

Cinderella
Anne Sexton

You always read about it:
the plumber with the twelve children
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
From toilets to riches.
That story.

13

:confused:

14

since feeling is first

I use the non-capitalized name because that’s the familiar form for most Americans. If it offends you, I apologize. Cummings, I think, would not have been bothered.

15

Ah. didn’t recognize the quote.

I was just responding to the myth that Cummings wrote his name without capitals. That was a convention picked up from the graphic designer of one of his early books, to reflect Cummings’s unconventional syntax; Cummings himself was kind of annoyed by it.

(And not offended; that’s why I used the “nitpick” tags, to acknowledge that it really was not a large issue.)

16

I’m going to post a link here, just because the poem would make for a very long post. But here’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot.

17

“'Twas brilling and…”

besides that one:

The golf links lie so near the mill, That almost every day, The laboring children can look out, And watch the men at play
Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn

18

I’ve always loved Pushkin. I studied Russian specifically to read both him and Dostoevski. One of my favorites of Pushkin is The Talisman.

Where the sea forever dances
Over lonely cliff and dune,
Where sweet twilight’s vapor glances
In a warmer-glowing moon

It’s even better in Russian. Dark and beautiful. Bittersweet with more than a hint of gothic terror. I cannot believe mere human beings can write like this.

19

somewhere i have never travelled by E. E. cummings, Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas, and all the Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot. Also the Song of the Master and the Boatswain, by W. H. Auden.

20

Because I am ever-so-slightly evil and believe in having my cake and eating it too, I’m going to post links to four. Ha ha!

I also humbly request that my fellow posters, in order to save our dear Café Society moderators considerable stress, link to poems that you even suspect are still under copyright.

Funeral Blues by WH Auden

“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.”

[by WH Auden
"As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending. . . ."

[url=http://www.poetry-archive.com/t/the_ballad_of_bouillabaisse.html]The Ballad of Bouillabaise](]As I Walked Out One Evening[/url) by WM Thackeray

“A street there is in Paris famous,
For which no rhyme our language yields,
Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is–
The New Street of the Little Fields;
And here’s an inn, not rich and splendid,
But still in comfortable case;
The which in youth I oft attended,
To eat a bowl of Bouillabaisse.”

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti

"Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy . . .”

I have a major weakness and that is Victorian poetry. (Well, that excludes Auden, but him too.) Some day I shall conquer it, but (please, Lord!) not yet.