Your Favorite Passage of Poetry

[Totenfeier]

Must throw in the first and last stanzas of Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light…
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

[Ludovic]

Of the ones that haven’t been mentioned yet, I’d say the first couple paragraphs, maybe the entire first page, of Lolita. Nabokov would be a genuinely appreciated outright poet if he could just have made 5 to 10 pages along the same lines (not that his other stuff doesn’t have rhythm and compactness of imagery.)

[Annie-Xmas]

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

[DaphneBlack]

@Ludovic

Of the ones that haven’t been mentioned yet, I’d say the first couple paragraphs, maybe the entire first page, of Lolita. Nabokov would be a genuinely appreciated outright poet if he could just have made 5 to 10 pages along the same lines (not that his other stuff doesn’t have rhythm and compactness of imagery.)

Good call! I also like his actual poem from Pale Fire, though I think maybe we aren’t supposed to.

So many brilliant poems already mentioned (I am a particular fan of Blake, ‘The Tyger’ especially).

I think my favorite part of Prufrock is:

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

But my favorite poet of all is Gerard Manley Hopkins. His unusual rhythm and word choice make him a bit of challenge, but I just love it.

from ‘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.

from ‘Spring and Fall’:
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.

I love formal poetry. I don’t think I could choose a favorite Shakespearean sonnet.

[Gyrate]

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

[DaphneBlack]

If I can offer a poem not in English, Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ is utter beauty and peace. I think that even without knowing the meaning of the words, the sense comes across somehow (English translations don’t do it justice, of course).

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.

(Over all the hills, it is calm; in all the treetops, you feel barely a breath; the birds are silent in the woods. Only wait! soon you will rest too.)

[Sattua]

I’ve already thrown in my lines, but wanted to say that Prufrock is special to me. The inside of my wedding ring says “There will be time.”

[Catamount]

I love the end of Wilde’s “Panthea”:

…We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!

We shall be notes in that great Symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart; the stealthy creeping years
Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die,
The Universe itself shall be our Immortality.

Also the third stanza of Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”:

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

And all of Dorothy Parker’s “Indian Summer” but I’ll just quote the last verse:

But now I know the things I know
And do the things I do,
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you.

[RealityChuck]

“This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams.

Second is any of “Bagpipe Music” by Louis Macniece

@Louis Macniece

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

I love the way it almost but never rhymes.

[aldiboronti]

Alexander Pope, from Epistles to Several Persons, Epistle 2: On the Characters of Women:

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin’d to please;
With too much spirit to be e’er at ease;
With too much quickness ever to be taught;
With too much thinking to have common thought:
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live.

Not seeing much love for the titans of English poetry here, other than Shakespeare. They’re titans for a reason.

[QuickSilver]

I always thought Sting was as much a poet as a musician:

*Chase the dog star
Over the sea
Home where my true love is waiting for me

Rope the south wind
Canvas the stars
Harness the moonlight
So she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso*

…

[Theodore_Striker]

@naita

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.

I love this about the continuation of life…

[DaphneBlack]

@aldiboronti

Not seeing much love for the titans of English poetry here, other than Shakespeare. They’re titans for a reason.

Tennyson, Donne, Yeats (Irish but?), Dryden, Wordsworth? Eliot? Don’t count?

I prefer of Pope:

from ‘An Essay on Man’
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

I’ll plump for Keats:

from ‘Endymion’*
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

And Shelley’s Ozymandias (my favorite individual poem):

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.”

And Byron:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

• Apparently, loathed upon its publication.

[Theodore_Striker]

[quote=“jtur88, post:34, topic:774116”]

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

It really is a shame that Coleridge did not produce more, because when he was on, wow, he was really on…

[Theodore_Striker]

@teela_brown

From Kubla Khan, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

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 ’twould 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.

This is my favorite complete poem (though it is only a fragment of the whole vision), and speaking it aloud still gives me chills. I was really hoping someone would contribute a portion of it!

[Theodore_Striker]

@don_t_ask

James Dickey Cherrylog Road. Best poem ever written about a junkyard. And sex.

*And I to my motorcycle
Parked like the soul of the junkyard

Restored, a bicycle fleshed
With power, and tore off
Up Highway 106, continually
Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
Wringing the handlebar for speed,
Wild to be wreckage forever. *

Dickey was a fantastic poet, but I wonder if people remember him always more for Deliverance (and poor Ned Beatty) than for his poetry. Looking for the Buckhead Boys is another great by him, especially if told in the southern drawl.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@RikWriter

Lord Byron:

So, we’ll go no more a roving…

A great poem, prominently featured in George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream.

@DaphneBlack

…And Shelley’s Ozymandias (my favorite individual poem)…

I’ve loved it since high school. The Watchmen association is just a bonus.

Ah, so many favorites. Guess I’ll start out with Whitman:

*Washington’s Monument, February 1885

Ah, not this marble, dead and cold:
Far from its base and shaft expanding—the round zones circling, comprehending,
Thou, Washington, art all the world’s, the continents’ entire — not yours alone, America,
Europe’s as well, in every part, castle of lord or laborer’s cot,
Or frozen North, or sultry South—the African’s—the Arab’s in his tent,

Old Asia’s there with venerable smile, seated amid her ruins;
(Greets the antique the hero new? ‘tis but the same—the heir legitimate, continued ever,
The indomitable heart and arm—proofs of the never-broken line,
Courage, alertness, patience, faith, the same—e’en in defeat defeated not, the same: )

Wherever sails a ship, or house is built on land, or day or night,
Through teeming cities’ streets, indoors or out, factories or farms,
Now, or to come, or past—where patriot wills existed or exist,
Wherever Freedom, pois’d by Toleration, sway’d by Law,
Stands or is rising thy true monument.*

[Theodore_Striker]

@DaphneBlack

If I can offer a poem not in English, Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ is utter beauty and peace. I think that even without knowing the meaning of the words, the sense comes across somehow (English translations don’t do it justice, of course).

(Over all the hills, it is calm; in all the treetops, you feel barely a breath; the birds are silent in the woods. Only wait! soon you will rest too.)

Absolutely, and thanks for the translation!

[Totenfeier]

And on the dual topic of titans of English poetry and Pope, how about this miniature from a poet known mostly for his broad canvases:

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Pope got the idea from the Roman poet Horace, but certainly did a beautiful job with it in English. P.S.: if anybody asks me for my personal credo, this will serve.

[Max_Torque]

“And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.”
– Edgar Allan Poe

“And silent as stone he rode down alone / From the floor of the double-damned.”
– Ogden Nash

“‘It is bitter–bitter,’ he answered, ‘but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.’”
– Stephen Crane