Ulysses, though two small parts catch me each time.
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in 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.
Its hard to believe we’ve gone this far and noone has mentioned any poems by Emily Dickinson. For starters, off the top of my head, how about
Who are you? Are you nobody?
Then there’s two of us.
Don’t tell. They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody,
How public like a fog.
To tell you life the live long day
To an admiring bog!
Although I guess that is not a sentiment too common to SD posters!
David Clewell’s We Never Close is a great one. He has a lot of fun with diner slang, but it’s also very serious.
“Some nights you need to get into the car and drive…”
I meant, of course, to type “frog”, not “fog”.
I’ll second Emily Dickinson but offer this instead as my favorite Dickinson poem, just for the change that it is from her usual stuff:
As if I asked a common alms,
And in my wondering hand,
A stranger pressed a kingdom
And I bewildered stand.
As if I asked the Orient,
Had it for me a morn?
And it should lift its purple dikes
And shatter me with dawn.
I have lots. However, there are two I come back to.
One is Theodore Roethke
The Waking
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
The other is a fairly minor poet and unabashedly religious, but the hell with that. It reads aloud beautifully.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
A couple of my favorites:
**When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer **by Walt Whitman
I’m a sucker for poems about needing to make the most of our time in the face of impending death. Two of the best are Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress:
and
Mathtew Arnold’s Dover Beach
In a similar vein, but more pessimistic, I always loved this quote by Shakespeare in MacBeth:
Finally, a lot of pet lover’s are familiar with Lord Byron’s A Memorial to Boatswain. I actually prefer the lesser known part of the poem.
That may be my new favorite poem. That’s right. I’m easily influenced.
I, too, love “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
I also love much of Kipling’s verse, but none more than “Jubal and Tubal Cain”
And I love beat poetry. Since everyone knows of Ginsberg and his work has never spoken all that much to me anyway, I’m going to quote some Diane DiPrima. This is from “Poetics”, and it swims into view every time I think about English:
the language shall be my element, I plunge in
I suspect that I cannot drown
like a fat brat catfish, smug
a hoodlum fish
I move more & more gracefully
breathe it in,
success written on my mug till the fishpolice
corner me in the coral & I die
And one more snippet by her, from “Three Laments”:
I have
the upper hand
but if I keep it
I'll lose the circulation
in one arm
I loved this poem by Auden **before ** Four Weddings and a Funeral popularized it:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
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.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-W.H. Auden
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 sound’s 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.
( I do fear the lot of us are completely disobeying the rule against posting complete lyrics or poems or other copyrighted materials… )
Cartooniverse
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that most of this stuff is old enough that it is out of copyright by now.
Quoted this to someone I loved very much.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on. . .
It ended, sadly.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Strictly speaking not poetry but while looking for something else I came across this. I have always loved the imagery of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and was amazed to find the entire BBC broadcast version here with First Voice by Richard Burton. Listen while he launches into:
*To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs. *
I was going to mention The Hound of Heaven, but somebody beat me to it. I think it might be my very favorite.
I keep thinking of another, and another, that could be at the top of the list and it’s hard to pick one, but I think tied with *The Hound of Heaven * is Jenny Kissed Me, by Leigh Hunt. Sort, sweet, to the point, and always makes me smile.
I love Parker’s poems. My favorite is “Unfortunate Coincidence”
*By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
*
This was my first thought: I’ve alway loved this poem:
“'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wade;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe…”
The poem that has touched me the most in my life is:
First Writing Since by Suheir Hammad.
"there have been no words.
i have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of canal street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and dna.
not one word.
today is a week, and seven is of heavens, gods, science.
evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality.
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh…"
I have finally picked some -
“Fern Hill” of course, which has been mentioned
“Ithaka” by Cavafy
“Instructions” by Neil Gaiman (http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofhs/cofinstr.html)
“I Carry Your Heart” by e.e. cummings
and “Snow, Aldo” by Kate diCamillo. A Fantastic Beautiful poem about a man and a dog. (SimonSays’s On Demand Pages on Vimeo)
There are so many more. so hard to narrow it down. so many finds in this thread