Like many people, I suspect, my favourite poem changes with time. One which often appears right at the top of my list is “To his coy mistress” by Andrew Marvell. I don’t know why, but it appeals to me. I think it is the way he changes… how he loses the plot, so to speak… his not-so-subtle manoeuvering.
The grave 's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Excellent stuff.
Twenty-one posts, and no mention yet of Vogon poetry? We’re slipping.
*Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon
See if I don’t. *
I do not know who wrote this poem. I heard it on AmberMUSH in about 1993 from a young man who was killed in a car wreck in December of that year. His character claimed she wrote it. I have never been able to find it in any poetry anthology, nor quoted anywhere on the 'net. So here is my favorite, for reasons of nostalgia:
The mercenary soldier takes his pay,
And saves the sum of things for someone else:
Counts up the butcher’s bill and goes away.
His contract states he never states who hired him,
The foe, or what the reason might have been;
So signed, so sealed, so lawfully endowed:
A paper shroud to wind an army in.
He says things must be so, perhaps they must.
A war’s a war, a fight’s by God a fight,
It profits nothing to be fair, nor just,
Or cloud the brain with thoughts of who was right.
For bombs and bullets speak just what they mean.
Of politics at least, his hands… are clean.
En sevilla no hay naranjas,
Ni tiene madrid amor
Federico Garcia Lorca – executed (taken from the world) at a very early age by the repubicans during the Spanish civil war.
I console myself sometimes with these lines:
Well, it’s consoling to me, anyway!
I’m also pretty fond of Ogden Nash. How could you not love a poet who writes lines like these:
And that’s just a small example of his charm.
I have simple tastes.
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “If I should learn in some quite casual way.”
Dirge Without Music, Edna St. Vincent Milay
I’ve always loved In Flanders Fields by John McCrae. Very simple, but it moves me.
I can also read Tennyson till my eyes fall out. The Splendor Falls is my favorite, I think.
But my answer changes every time I’m asked.
My real answer is Do not go gentle into that good night, but I guess that doesn’t earn any points for originality. Still, there’s never been anything like that last stanza to reduce a man to a blubbering mess.
I like The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy, too.
An American Prayer, written by one James Douglas Morrison.
“Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the Kingdom?
Have you been borne yet and are you alive?”
And even more poignant and appropriate to the moment, later in the same poem:
"Did you know freedom exists in a school book
Did you you know madmen are running our prison
Within a jail
Within a gaol
Within a white free Protestant Maelstrom
We’re perched headlong
On the edge of boredom
We’re reaching for death
On the end of a candle
We’re trying for something
That’s already found us"
Jim was a great friggin’ poet, I don’t care what anyone says.
Wow, thanks folks for reviving my old memories.
Lots of favorites:
WH Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts for illuminating painting through poetry
WH Auden’ s In Memory of WB Yeats for illiuminating poetry itself
Wallace Stevens **The idea of Order at Key West ** for capturing the rhythm of the sea
Wallace Stevens Peter Quince at the Clavier
Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress
Lots of poems with memorable lines, but these five stand out in their exquisite completeness (IMHO)
I loved poetry when I was younger, but really as an adult haven’t taken much interest in it at all. Back then I liked the Australian poet/story tellers like Banjo Patterson, especially his The Man from Snowy River and Clancy of the Overflow.
I also liked John Masefield’s West Wind and Sea Fever.
One I remember having to learn by heart while at school was The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I think I could still recite the entire poem today even after all this time.
The Perfect High ~or~ The Quest of Gimmesome Roy by Shel Silverstein.
I also favour Dr. Seuss, Lewis Carroll, and Edward Gorey.
Oooooh…poetry…
As if I could pick just one favorite. 
A few that I’m particularly fond of, confining these to fairly short poems rather than epic length…
“Ben Jonson Entertains a Man From Stratford,” by E.A. Robinson
“A Hymn to God My God, In My Sickness,” by John Donne
“The Sun Rising,” also by Donne
“On My First Son,” by Ben Jonson
“The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse”
“Denial,” by George Herbert
“At a Calvary Near the Ancre,” by Wilfred Owen (this is a GREAT site, btw)
Not my favourite poem, but one that I wish more people would esteem, is Naming of Parts by Henry Reed.
My favourite is Prufrock. What else?
Since Hal Briston beat me to the Vogon selection, I’ll have to go with my real favorite poem. This one, by James Wright:
**Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning **
Ten more miles, it is South Dakota.
Somehow, the roads there turn blue,
When no one walks down them.
One more night of walking, and I could have become
A horse, a blue horse, dancing
Down a road, alone…
Don’t miss the gorgous last line! You can find the rest of the poem here (scroll about half way down the page.)
Hands down my favorite:
Moving this to Cafe Society.