I’m also a big fan of Wilfred Owen, but my favourite is Strange Meeting. This is the one which begins It seems that out of battle I escaped
I cried in my English Lit class the first time we read it (it was a set book when I was 16) and I think I’ve cried every time I’ve read it since. It’s the first part of the last passage I love:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
Just sparse, powerful, beautiful.
Sorry but that is from Deteriorata by National Lampoon. A video of the song version.
The clean version may have come first. It dates back at least to 1924.
There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
But his daughter named Nan
Ran away with a man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
Dirty version:
Eh, it practically writes itself.
Love Rhombus, that’s “Ode,” by Arthur O’Shaughnessy.
Looks to be Ode, by Arthur O’Shaughnessy. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/6.html
“He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven” by W.B. Yeats
HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
My high school choir did a beautiful arrangement, and it has personal meaning.
Don’t forget the sequels:
And the lesser-known:
And see here:
I have two favorites at the moment. The first is To Amarantha; that She Would Dishevell Her Haire by Richard Lovelace. The last stanza is particularly poignant. The best imagery is in the fourth stanza, though it takes a bit of parsing.
Amarantha sweet and faire,
Ah brade no more that shining haire!
As my curious hand or eye,
Hovering round thee, let it flye.
Let it flye as unconfin’d
As it’s calme ravisher, the winde,
Who hath left his darling, th’ East,
To wanton o’re that spicie neast.
Ev’ry tresse must be confest:
But neatly tangled at the best;
Like a clue of golden thread,
Most excellently ravelled.
Doe not then winde up that light
In ribands, and o’er-cloud in night,
Like the sun in’s early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day.
See, 'tis broke! within this grove,
The bower and the walkes of love,
Weary lye we downe and rest,
And fanne each other’s panting breast.
Heere wee’ll strippe and coole our fire,
In creame below, in milk-baths higher:
And when all wells are drawne dry,
I’ll drink a teare out of thine eye.
Which our very joys shall leave,
That sorrowes thus we can deceive;
Or our very sorrowes weepe,
That joyes so ripe so little keepe.
My second is Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet 27. Note that this is a translation from the original Spanish.
Naked you are simple as one of your hands;
Smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round.
You’ve moon-lines, apple pathways
Naked you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked you are blue as a night in Cuba;
You’ve vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are spacious and yellow
As summer in a golden church.
Naked you are tiny as one of your nails;
Curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
And you withdraw to the underground world.
As if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores;
Your clear light dims, gets dressed, drops its leaves,
And becomes a naked hand again.
Henry Reed’s series “Lessons of the War”
I liked Bagpipe Music but my personal favorite is “The Cremation of Sam Mcgee” by Robert W. Service
http://ingeb.org/songs/thereare.html
I liked it when I was a kid but once I moved it a snowy place it took on special meaning. I’m going to get a professionally framed version when I move to Durango.
I’ve got a fondness for Poe’s The Bells, though I was shocked to hear that he wrote it as a celebration of the bells, rather than the final scream of someone being driven mad by them.
I’m also surprised to see that WordMan chose that poem by Stephen Crane - I memorized it years ago, and thought I was the only one to be so affected by it.
These days, my favorite poem is Robert W. Service’s The Man From El Dorado. The last stanza appeals to me. (Yes, I like my melodrama. :p)
V
He’s the man from Eldorado, and they found him stiff and dead,
Half covered by the freezing ooze and dirt.
A clotted Colt was in his hand, a hole was in his head,
And he wore an old and oily buckskin shirt.
His eyes were fixed and horrible, as one who hails the end;
The frost had set him rigid as a log;
And there, half lying on his breast, his last and only friend,
There crouched and whined a mangy yellow dog.
On preview: Oredigger77, Brother!
ETA: Of course, if you ask me tomorrow you may get a different answer.
Funny you should ask this. Just today I ran across this:
On Fiddler’s Green is a place I've heard tell
Where fishermen go if they don't go to hell,
Where the weather is fair and the dolphins do play,
And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away. (Chorus)
Where the sky's always clear and there's never a gale
Where the fish jump onboard with a swish of their tails,
Where you lie at your leisure, there's no work to do;
And the skipper's below making tea for the crew. (Chorus)
When you get back in dock and the long trip is through
There's pubs and there's clubs and there's lassies there too,
Where the girls are all pretty and the beer is all free,
And there's bottles of rum growing on every tree (Chorus)
Now I don't want a harp nor a halo, not me
Just give me a breeze and a good rolling sea,
And I'll play me old squeeze-box as we sail along,
With the wind in the rigging to sing me this song. (Chorus)
Just tell me old shipmates I'm taking a trip, mates,
I'll see you some day in Fiddler’s Green. *
Hear it set to music. The tune they chose did nothing to disabuse my new found affection.
“Fiddler’s Green” is one of my favorite songs. Was it a poem or song first, I wonder?
I have a wonderful version of the Frost “Stopping by the Woods” poem set to music. Can’t recall the artist at the moment, tho.
The folk show on Wisconsin Public Radio did an entire show recently of poems set to music. Some of the ones mentioned in this thread were included. Was a good concept, I thought
UncleRojelio, AIUI, that’s been a traditional seafaring song for ages, now.
Alas, Wikipedia disabuses me of that: It was apparently written for the 1923 US Army Cavalry manual.
I’d always thought it was simply one more iteration of the Unfortunate Rake series of folk songs. Don’t be surprised that the link goes to the Wikipedia article about The Streets of Laredo, it will explain the connection if you read the link.
As a devotional poem, this shouldn’t be my style, but I like it anyway: The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson (who I suspect of being Jack the Ripper, but that’s neither here nor there).
Here’s Lessons of the War, btw, starting with part one, “Naming of Parts”.
Hard to say. Two favorites are both terribly cynical, but start off seeming not at all cynical. First, a Margaret Atwood poem:
We fit together
Like hook and eye:
A fish hook
An open eye
The second is one of e.e. cummings’s many misanthropic works: humanity i love you. He’s got a bunch of them, including several hilariously mean sonnets; they’re tons of nasty fun.
Daniel
Can I pick the entire book “The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills” by Bukowski? They all work together so well that it is hard to pick only one.
Excerpt:
and she says
when I defame her
dream:
you are trying to
pull me down
by the wings.
I posted a few on my blog here
I came into this thread thinking “well, I’m not much for poetry but…” and after about the fifth poem I came up with that I really like I’m having to reconsider my stance on the subject. Maybe I really DO like poetry after all!
I love this fragment from Swinburne’s “The Garden of Proserpine”
*From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea. *
I love Poe–especially The Raven, which I used for a dramatic reading in high school and got a standing O from the class for. Not the only reason I like it, though.
Wallace Stevens’ The Emperor of Ice Cream has always been a favorite, the language is so evocative and it just obscures the subject matter enough for it to come getcha later:
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
*Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.*
I’m not really a morbid person, I swear! I have a longstanding fondness for Don Marquis’ archy poems, especially mehitabel and her kittens,which I swear is a perfect encapsulation of my parenting skills… 
I love Peter Beagle’s poem “The Way I Behaved” from The Last Unicorn and I had a chance to let him know that the poem was quite often performed as a sung piece (to the Welsh tune “The Ash Grove”) which he did not know. He was quite pleased and surprised–and autographed a very nice note into my first edition of Folk of the Air. Such a nice man.
*When I was a young man and very well thought of
I couldn’t ask aught that the ladies denied
I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins
And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied
But I said to myself “Ah, they none of them know
The secret I shelter and savor and save
I wait for the one who will see through my seeming
And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave”
The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens
The ladies went by me like snow on the wind
I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled
And I sinned and I sinned and I sinned and I sinned
But I said to myself, “Ah, they none of them see
There’s part of me pure as the whisk of a wave
My lady is late but she’ll find I’ve been faithful
And I’ll know when I love by the way I behave”
At last came a lady both knowing and tender
Saying you’re not at all what they take you to be
I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking
And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea
And I say to myself when there’s time for a word
As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved
“Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger
And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved”*
koeeoaddi thank you for that sestina–it’s an incredibly difficult verse form and that was a masterful example.
Trunk, ouch! But wow.