Which one? There’s a clean version and a dirty version, with nothing in common but the first line.
Myself, I think my favorite is probably Poe’s “The Raven”. But I’m also partial to Frost’s “Fire and Ice” and several of Eliott’s cat poems (his others are very good, too, but damn, they’re depressing).
???
There’s a *clean * version?
For heaven’s sake, why?
Sonnet 29
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.
William Shakespeare
(1564 - 1616)Robery Creeley’s The Signboard:
*The quieter the people are
the slower the time passes
until there is a solitary man
sitting in the figure of silence .
Then scream at him ,
come here you idiot it’s going to go off .
A face that is no face
but the features , of a face , pasted
on a face until that face
is faceless , answers by
a being nothing there
where there was a man. *
I have no idea what it means, or even why I like it so much. I first read it back in junior high, and I’ve had it stuck in my head ever since.
I’m not partial to poetry, but I do like The Bells by Edgar Allen Poe.
My favorite as well.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I love Gustavo Adolfo Becquer’s Rima 21:
*¿Qué es poesía? dices mientras clavas
en mi pupila tu pupila azul.
¿Qué es poesía? ¿Y tú me lo preguntas?
Poesía… eres tú. *
I’ve seen it translated numerous ways. I would put it:
What is poetry? you ask while
your blue eye pierces mine.
What is poetry? And you ask me?
Poetry…is you.
Quick, economical, and the roguish wink practically jumps off the page. 
I’m fairly lowbrow when it comes to poetry–never been a big fan of much of it. But if the ability of a poem to make you tear up every single time you read it makes it a good poem, then I would have to say one of my favorites is 110 Stories by John M. Ford. I think he captured his subject beautifully. Just a small excerpt:
*…
I hugged the stranger sitting next to me.
So this is what you call a second chance.
One turn aside, into eternity.
This is New York. We’ll find a place to dance.
With resolution wanting, reason runs
To characters and symbols, noughts and ones.*
I read this one in junior high, and it always gives me a chill. I don’t know why.
The red rose breathes of passion
And the white rose whispers of love
O the red rose is a falcon
And the white rose is a dove
But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips
Because the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on its lips.
John Boyle O’Reilly. 1844–1890
my two favorites:
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
by Robert Frost
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.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
and Samuel Coleridge’s ‘rime of the ancient mariner’ which is far too long to post here.
chills abound. :eek:
I don’t think I’d call this my favorite poem ever, but it’s been in my head lately. I heard this recently on the Writer’s Almanac. Heart breaking poem.
A Boy in a Bed in the Dark by Brad Sachs
Born with a cleft palate,
My two-year-old brother,
Recovering from yet another surgery,
Toddled into our bedroom
Toppled a tower of blocks
That I had patiently built
And in a five-year-old’s fury
I grabbed a fallen block
And winged it at him
Ripping open his carefully reconstructed lip.
The next hours were gruesomely compressed
Ending with a boy in a bed in the dark
Mute with fear
Staring out into the hallway with horror
As the pediatrician went in and out of the bathroom
With one vast blood-soaked towel after another
Shaking his head worriedly.
My brother’s howls
And my parents’ cooed comfort
Became the soundtrack to this milky movie
That plays
In my darkest theatre,
The one that I sidle past each night
With a shudder
And a throb in my fist
For short poems, I’ll third “Ozymandias”.
Buut I’m partial to longer works. I like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the Iliad, and the Odyssey (although I only know the last two through translations, so you could argue I don’t really know them at all.)
O sweet spontaneous , by E. E. Cummings.
I like it because it’s about how, despite all the bullshit we humans spew, the Earth just goes about its business, such as doing the Spring thing.
Invictus by William Henley is my favorite, I think. It’s followed closely by Ozymandius. I don’t have any scholarly analysis to offer, or anything of the sort. They just resonate with me.
I came to say Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but thanks to Zsofia, would like to change it to Dulce Et Decorum Est.
As for the Frost poem, a skit I once saw on the Muppet show has doomed me to forever hear it in the voice of Fozzie Bear. 
The Desiderata by Max Ehrmann.
Go placidly amid the noise and waste, and remember what comfort there
may be in owning a piece thereof. Avoid quiet and passive persons,
unless you are in need of sleep. Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly
of those greater than yourself, and heed well their advice, even though
they be turkeys. Know what to kiss, and when. Consider that two
wrongs never make a right, but that three do. Wherever possible,
put people on hold. Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and
disillusionment, and despite the changing fortunes of time, there is
always a big future in computer maintainance.
Pushkin’s “The Upas Tree.” [url=http://szfski.livejournal.com/]inadequate translation taken from here
[/quote]
.
On sand the sun has seared and scarred,
In avaricious desolation,
The Upas like a baleful guard
Stands watching over all creation.
Sere nature of the thirsting plains
Begot it on a day of wrath
And steeped the green and deadened veins
And filled the roots with liquid death.
The venom oozes down the bark,
And liquefies beneath the sun
And hardens at the fall of dark
Into a cold, translucent gum.
This tree no bird or beast will try.
Alone the desert wind will dare
Assail that tree of death and fly
Away on black and murderous air,
And should a raincloud rove and strew
The brooding foliage with rain,
The boughs exude a lethal dew
And poison fills the blazing plain.
Yet to this tree was man by man
Dispatched with one despotic glance,
Went forth that evening and at dawn
Returned with poison in his hands.
He brought a black and deadly bough,
A branch with withered leaves, and sweat
Across his sick and sallow brow
Ran in a freezing rivulet.
He brought it, faltered and fell spent
Upon the reed for his reward
To die pathetic in the tent
Of that unconquerable lord.
That lord had servile arrows filled
With venom, and at his command
Destruction was fired forth, and killed
His neighbors in their native land.
I have been fascinated with this woman reading her poetry for the past few weeks (audio).
My favorite, which I carry in my wallet yet I don’t know the name or the author anymore…
We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers
On whom the pale moon gleams
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an Empire’s glory;
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an Empire down
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth
Built Ninevah with our sighing
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth
For each age is a dream that is dying
Or one that is coming to birth
Watch Death Proof.
It never dawned on me before seeing that, but it’s quite possible that poem is all about
fucking.
Perhaps Frost even wrote it about
fucking Kurt Russel