# What's your favourite poem? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 21, 2000, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041 "2000-09-21T19:52:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Vestal\_Blue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/5e9695/32.png) [@Vestal\_Blue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vestal_Blue)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2000, 7:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/41 "2000-09-22T19:14:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Saint Zero \* > \*\*In looking through two or three poets I wanted to quote (Tennyson and Poe, mainly) I found the poem I was looking for. In addition to being one of my favorite westerns, it’s also a poem that one of the characters quotes. So, without further ado… old Edgar Allen himself. > \*\* _excellent_ movie! I have it. Mississippi, played by a rather young James Caan. It’s great to see the poem, too! ---
**Author:** ![beagledave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/6de8d8/32.png) [@beagledave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/beagledave)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2000, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/42 "2000-09-22T19:19:05Z")
Falcon…didnt know if you were already aware…but Loreena McKennett has a nice rendition of Lady of Shalott [http://www.quinlanroad.com/the\_visit.html](http://www.quinlanroad.com/the_visit.html) ---
**Author:** ![Sledman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/839c29/32.png) [@Sledman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sledman)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2000, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/43 "2000-09-22T21:46:00Z")
I always loved this poem. Not sure the exact reason. Kubla Khan By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ``` In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced; Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail: And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean: And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves: Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 't would win me That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. ``` ---
**Author:** ![ProudAmerican](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f05b48/32.png) [@ProudAmerican](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ProudAmerican)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2000, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/44 "2000-09-22T22:02:10Z")
Fleas _by Ogden Nash_ Adam had 'em. ---
**Author:** ![Gunslinger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gunslinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gunslinger)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/45 "2000-09-23T00:43:28Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by mk9kahr \* > \*\*For some reason I like “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. No real reason to it. \*\* Who wrote that? I’ve always wanted to read it. My current favorite is _Gunga Din_, by Kipling. Too long to type, but a snippet: “But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of 'im that’s got it.” ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/46 "2000-09-23T01:07:26Z")
> [@](#): > > > [@](#): > > > > quote: > > Originally posted by mk9kahr > > For some reason I like “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. No real reason to it. > > Who wrote that? I’ve always wanted to read it. Alfred, Lord Tennyson [http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html](http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html) And in keeping with the war theme: In prison cell I sadly sit, A damned crestfallen chappy, And own to you I feel a bit– A little bit – unhappy. It really ain’t the place nor time To reel off rhyming diction; But yet we’ll write a final rhyme While waiting crucifixion. No matter what “end” they decide – Quick-lime? or “b’iling ile?” sir– We’ll do our best when crucified To finish off in style, sir? But we bequeath a parting tip For sound advice of such men Who come across in transport ship To polish off the Dutchmen. If you encounter any Boers You really must not loot 'em, And, if you wish to leave these shores, For pity’s sake, don’t shoot 'em. And if you’d earn a D.S.O., Why every British sinner Should know the proper way to go Is: Ask the Boer to dinner. Let’s toss a bumper down our throat Before we pass to heaven, And toast: “The trim-set petticoat We leave behind in Devon.” – Harry Harbord “Breaker” Morant ---
**Author:** ![hypergirl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/49beb7/32.png) [@hypergirl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hypergirl)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 3:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/47 "2000-09-23T03:54:50Z")
I love Shel Silverstein. I’m not sure what my favorite poems are, but I like Shall I Compare thee to A summers Day. I always have had a thing for Shakespeare. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/48 "2000-09-23T04:30:18Z")
Okay, here it is. Something I wrote during a slow afternoon at work several years ago: Solidity of Hamlet TUBBY, OR NOT TUBBY. Fat is the question. Whether 'tis globular in the hind to buffer the seats and benches of outrageous hardness, or thick in the arms or in a chin that’s doubled by impressive ingestion. To diet, to eat no more. And by a diet to say we end the heartburn and the Thousand Island slop we subject our flesh to. 'Tis a consommé devoutly to be dish’d. To diet, to fast; to fast, perchance to revert. Aye, there’s the rub: for after that Fast of Death what creams may come when we have stuffed ourselves with mortadella must give us pause. There’s the respect that makes calamity of such a backslide. For who would forego the trips to stores and bakeries, To birthday parties, to company luncheons, To outdoor barbecues, to fast-food restaurants, Suffer the pangs of horrid hunger and the too-slow reduction of unwieldy weight when he himself might his surrender make with an open fridge? Who would exercise, to grunt and sweat under free-weights, but that the dread of excess heft, that social stigma from which no fat person is free, troubles the will? Thus weight-consciousness does make dieters of us all, and to banquets of great diversity and amount we must therefore say good-bye, or lose the game of attraction. Hark! The fair Oprah! Be all thy sizes remember’d? ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/49 "2000-09-23T04:43:00Z")
With a quote like this (Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.) from the brilliant William Carlos Williams in its introduction, how could it have missed? It has it all: Perverse sex! Dangerous drugs! Licentious music! And it was inspired by his mother, who died with the manuscript unopened on her nightstand. (Sniff–great UL!) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . **Howl** _By Allen Ginsberg_ For Carl Solomon I I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machin- ery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn- ing their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- cohol and cock and endless balls, incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- tionless world of Time between, Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo, who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer after noon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook- lyn Bridge, lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon, yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement, who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind- ings and migraines of China under junk-with- drawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room, who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts, who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grand- father night, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep- athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in- stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis- ionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels, who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla- homa on the impulse of winter midnight street light smalltown rain, who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire place Chicago, who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom- prehensible leaflets, who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu- scripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may, who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword, who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom, who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can- dle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet- ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy- ment offices, who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion, who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology, who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish, who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade, who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess- fully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried, who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis- ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap- pened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas- saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes, who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz, who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave, who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp notism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury, who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in- stantaneous lobotomy, and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho- therapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia, who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia, returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock- ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night- mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, with mother finally \*\*\*\*\*\*, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur- nished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat- ing plane, who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intel- ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con- fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years. II What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac- tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky! Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave- ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit! Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De- spairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! III Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange I’m with you in Rockland where you imitate the shade of my mother I’m with you in Rockland where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland where you laugh at this invisible humor I’m with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter I’m with you in Rockland where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio I’m with you in Rockland where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses I’m with you in Rockland where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica I’m with you in Rockland where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss I’m with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void I’m with you in Rockland where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com- rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col- lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night San Francisco 1955-56 ---
**Author:** ![Saint\_Zero](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c4cdca/32.png) [@Saint\_Zero](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Saint_Zero)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 4:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/50 "2000-09-23T04:46:09Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Vestal Blue \* > \*\* > > > [@](#): > > > > \*Originally posted by Saint Zero \* > > \*\* \ > > \*\* > > _excellent_ movie! I have it. > > Mississippi, played by a rather young James Caan. > > It’s great to see the poem, too! > \*\* Thanks. 😃 I wasn’t really expecting to find it, but I’m glad I did. ---
**Author:** ![Gunslinger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gunslinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gunslinger)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/51 "2000-09-23T04:47:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Johnny L.A. \* > \*\* > > > [@](#): > > > > > [@](#): > > > > > > quote: > > > Originally posted by mk9kahr > > > For some reason I like “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. No real reason to it. > > > > Who wrote that? I’ve always wanted to read it. > > Alfred, Lord Tennyson [http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html](http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html) > > \*\* Thanks! One of the all-time great military blunders… Wrong guns. They were supposed to take the guns that were packed up and retreating, but an officer somewhere in the chain of command got his left and right mixed up, and put the LB one canyon over, where the guns were still set up. ---
**Author:** ![Salieri2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c67d28/32.png) [@Salieri2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Salieri2)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/52 "2000-09-23T04:49:33Z")
the lesson of the moth i was talking to a moth the other evening he was trying to break into an electric light bulb and fry himself on the wires why do you fellows pull this stunt i asked him because it is the conventional thing for moths or why if that had been an uncovered candle instead of an electric light bulb you would now be a small unsightly cinder have you no sense plenty of it he answered but at times we get tired of using it we get bored with the routine and crave beauty and excitement fire is beautiful and we know that if we get too close it will kill us but what does that matter it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with the beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while so we wad all our life up into one little roll that is what life is for it is better to be part of beauty for one instant and then cease to exist than exist forever and never be a part of beauty our attitude toward life is come easy go easy we are like human beings used to be before they became too civilized to enjoy themselves and before i could argue him out of his philosophy he went and immolated himself on a patent cigar lighter i do not agree with him myself i would rather have half the happiness and twice the longevity but at the same time i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself archy ---
**Author:** ![LCB032](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/5e9695/32.png) [@LCB032](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LCB032)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/53 "2000-09-23T05:45:21Z")
I don’t remember who wrote it, but I think it’s called “Allegro”. (I could be wrong though). Anyway, here is my favorite poem: Jenny kissed me when we met, Jumping from the chair she sat in. Time, you thief, who love to get Sweets into your list,put that in. Say I’m weary, say I’m sad, Say that health and wealth have missed me. Say I’m growing old,but add Jenny kissed me. ---
**Author:** ![capacitor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e47774/32.png) [@capacitor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/capacitor)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/54 "2000-09-23T06:00:44Z")
My favorite is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. As I know that I’ll be banned out if I were to paste the lengthy poem in this forum, a link to the poem is [here](http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Rime_Ancient_Mariner.html). ---
**Author:** ![Kilt-wearin\_man](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/82dd89/32.png) [@Kilt-wearin\_man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kilt-wearin_man)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 8:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/55 "2000-09-23T08:09:52Z")
Ok, here’s one of mine (the other being Jabberwocky!) It’s by Robert Burns, Scotland’s favorite poet, and one I just discovered recently exploring my Scottish heritage… Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to Victorie! Now’s the day, and now’s the hour; See the front o’ battle lour; See approach proud Edward’s power- Chains and Slaverie! Wha will be a traitor knave? Wha can fill a coward’s grave? Wha sae base as be a Slave? Let him turn and flee! Wha, for Scotland’s King and Law, Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, Free-man stand, or Free-man fa’, Let him on wi’ me! By Oppression’s woes and pains! By your Sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! Lay the proud Usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow!- Let us Do or Die! ---
**Author:** ![Scoop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de053/32.png) [@Scoop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scoop)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 10:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/56 "2000-09-23T10:53:50Z")
This one by e e cummings is one of my favorites: you shall above all things be glad and young for if you’re young, whatever life you wear it will become you; and if you are glad whatever’s living will yourself become. girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need: I can entirely her only love whose any mystery makes every mans flesh put space on; and his mind take off time that you should ever think, may god forbid and (in his mercy)your true lover spare: for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave called progress, and negation’s dead undoom. I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance ---
**Author:** ![Calredic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/74df32/32.png) [@Calredic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Calredic)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 3:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/57 "2000-09-23T15:51:41Z")
…this one by Dorothy Parker is one of my favorites: Razors pain you, rivers are damp, acids stain you, drugs cause cramp, guns aren’t lawful, nooses give, gas smells awful, you might as well live. ---
**Author:** ![rjk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ed655f/32.png) [@rjk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjk)\ **Post date:** [September 23, 2000, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/58 "2000-09-23T21:10:35Z")
Hey, archy! I’ll have to go and re-read that, now I’m reminded of it. Thanks, Salieri2! Meanwhile, here’s a couple that go together. Everybody has seen this one: * * * SUMER IS ICUMEN IN ## Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing Cuccu! Groweth sed, and bloweth med, and springeth wode nu. Sing Cuccu! Awe bleteth after lombe, Lhouth after calve cu; Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth Murie sing Cuccu, Cuccu, Cuccu! Wel singes thu Cuccu, Ne swik thu never nu. But the sequel is a little obscure: * * * ANCIENT MUSIC by Ezra Pound Winter is icumen in, Lhude sing Goddamm, Raineth drop and staineth slop, And how the wind doth ramm! Sing: Goddamm. Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us, An ague hath my ham. Freezeth river, turneth liver, Damn you, sing: Goddamm. Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm, So 'gains the winter’s balm. Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm. Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM. ---
**Author:** ![psychobunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/54ee81/32.png) [@psychobunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/psychobunny)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2000, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/59 "2000-09-24T05:23:20Z")
I love this one (Shakespeare is the KING of double entendre!): When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue. On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not she is unjust? And wherefore say not I that I am old? 0h, love’s best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not to have years told. Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be. ---
**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2000, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041/60 "2000-09-24T21:37:37Z")
I was going to post this last night, but the board winked out while I was copying it. Moon Folly by Fannie Stearns Davis. I will go up the mountain after the Moon; She is caught in a dead fir-tree. Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl, Like a great pale apple is she. I will leap and will catch her with quick cold hands And carry her home in my sack. I will set her down safe on the oaken bench That stands at the chimney-back. And then I will sit by the fire all night, And sit by the fire all day. I will gnaw at the Moon to my heart’s delight Till I gnaw her slowly away. And while I go mad with the Moon’s cold taste, The World will beat at my door, Crying, “Come out!” and crying, “Make haste, And give us the Moon once more!” But I shall not answer them ever at all. I shall laugh, as I count and hide The great, black, beautiful seeds of the Moon In a flower-pot deep and wide. Then I shall lie down and go fast asleep, Drunken with flame and aswoon. But the seeds will sprout and the seeds will leap, The subtle swift seeds of the Moon. And some day, all of the World that cries And beats at my door shall see A thousand moon-leaves spring from my thatch On a wonderful white Moon-tree! Then each shall have Moons to his heart’s desire: Apples of silver and pearl; Apples of orange and copper fire Setting his five wits aswirl! And then they will thank me, who mock me now, “Wanting the Moon is he,”– Oh, I’m off to the mountain after the Moon, Ere she falls from the dead fir-tree! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-your-favourite-poem/34041.md?page=4)