>>> BLAM!!! BLAM!!! <<< ::: Moderator bangs gavel for attention :::
Quoting a full poem is NOT permitted here. You may quote a line or two, and then provide a link to some site that has copyright privileges. Please see Forum Rules: PLEASE READ and especially note post #2, about copyrights.
I have therefore edited away all but the first couple of lines. I do not have the time or energy to go through and try to pick the “best” line or the line that best makes your point. No way.
And some of the poems that I have edited might be long out of copyright; I don’t know and I don’t care. Moderators are far too busy to do your legwork for you, to determine whether a poem is or isn’t still under copyright. (BTW, my pref would be that you link to all poems, even Byron or Wordsworth, just so we don’t become cluttered here, but what the hell.)
All that aside: you may NOT quote full poems. We clear on this?
We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die,
We Poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why
Whoops! Sorry about the copyright thing. I’d use the facepalm smilie here but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to make it work. Clicking on it just scrolls the page back to the beginning.
That’s one of my favorites, too. Another one I like is The Illiterate, by William Meredith, about how difficult it can be, sometimes, to accept that someone loves you. Pure and simple and short in its language. I can’t quote enough to do it justice without potentially running afoul of the rules, but I like this line:
*Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. *
And then, of course, there’s Dorothy Parker, Henry Reed, William Carlos Williams…
The sausage is a cunning bird
It’s long and thin and wavy
It flies around the frying pan
And makes its home in gravy.
Mod, it’s not a whole poem. It’s from Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”. Honest.
There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.
Linda Pastan’s Near The Sacrificial Site:
…
I want the only figures of the past to be
ancestors of these wild
poppies, of this chestnut tree
whose blossoms break through
the hardest wood. I know that cruelty
flourishes just down the road, persistent
as these gnarled roots which overrun
the partly ruined woods…
Billy Collins’ Some Final Words:
I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear…
Robert Pinsky’s Impossible To Tell (My Two-Joke Elegy):
Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter…
Also Linda Pastan’s Prosody 101:
…When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn’t understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age…
*. . . Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the 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.*