Your Favorite Passage of Poetry

Cafe Society
21

*Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. *

– W.B. Yeats

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

22

From Norwegian Rolf Jacobsen’s 1935 poem “Myrstrå vipper” - Marsh reeds teeter, where he contrasts human society with the constancy of nature. My translation:

-Fifty years and others live in the houses,
the street cars have new signs and new
leather on the seats.
-A hundred years and the cars have stopped
in long rows, side by side they stand in never
ending caravans, piled up in large heaps,
lie with their wheels up like dead insects.

  • A thousand years and the iron girder
    is a red line in the sand.

Marsh reeds teeter,
bend to the east, to the west
and whisper.

23

That’s a pretty good description of 2016, actually. :eek:

24

What, no Shakespeare? I’m going to put Sonnet 29 in here because it’s short, and public domain, and it’s beautiful.

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.

25

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible–
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so I wait–bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

Gregory Corso, *Marriage

*That explains me.

26

From Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

27

The whole poem is in the style of Anglo-Saxon poetry, but the verse that jumps out at me is this one:

Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.

perhaps because it has the meter, the alliteration, and the internal rhyme down perfectly.

28

Bertolt Brecht:

“Slave, who is it that shall free you?
Those in deepest darkness lying.
Comrade, only these can see you
Only they can hear you crying.
Comrade, only slaves can free you.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.
One alone his lot can’t better.
Either gun or fetter.
Everything or nothing. All of us or none.”

29

Easy answer, for me.

Somewhere I Have Never Traveled, by ee cummings.

(first and last stanzas)

30

My wife gave me this one, changing the words slightly from the original:

*You are my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I will love you forever, at least that long.

And the original:

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 forever, I was wrong.

-W.H. Auden

31

It’s a huge cliche, especially in geek circles, but it still imight be my favorite:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
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.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

32

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 machinery 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…

–Allen Ginsburg
Howl, Part I

33

All of Poe’s THE BELLS, but especially the first part.

HEAR the sledges with the bells –
Silver bells !
What a world of merriment their melody foretells !
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night !
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight ;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells –
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

also…and yes, I understand that this is not only politically correct, but outright racist–and even by the standards of the time, it’s pretty…um…backwards…but.:

FAT black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision.
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that riverbank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in files;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong.
And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,
“BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,
“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,
Harry the uplands,
Steal all the cattle,
Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle,
Bing!
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,”
A roaring, epic, rag-time tune
From the mouth of the Congo
To the Mountains of the Moon.
Death is an Elephant,
Torch-eyed and horrible,
Foam-flanked and terrible.
BOOM, steal the pygmies,
BOOM, kill the Arabs,
BOOM, kill the white men,
Like the wind in the chimney.
HOO, HOO, HOO.
Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost
Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.
Hear how the demons chuckle and yell
Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.
Listen to the creepy proclamation,
Blown through the lairs of the forest-nation,
Blown past the white-ants’ hill of clay,
Blown past the marsh where the butterflies play:—
“Be careful what you do,
Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo,
And all of the other
Gods of the Congo,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you,
Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.”

Vachel Lindesy THE CONGO (part one)

Both poems are ok on paper but awesome as hell in their meter/rhythm and language when read aloud.

34

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

–“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Samuel Coleridge

Also:

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral

–“Tract”, William Carlos Williams

35

I got a craving need for blazing speed
I got a souped up Mustang Ford
Climb into my wagon, throw your panties overboard.
I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind
I’m no pig without a wig; you better treat me kind.

36

Bob Dylan, “High Water (For Charlie Patton)”

37

Shel Silverstein from “Where the sidewalk ends”

38

Dylan Thomas:

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Rudyard Kipling:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

Robert Service:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

39

Oh yes, II love this one.

40

Lord Byron:

So, we’ll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.