William Wordsworth, “She was a Phantom of Delight”:
…*The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light. *
A hell of a fat chance my orange bears had!
The Orange Bears, by Kenneth Patchen
Last night I paused at the edge of darkness,
And slept with green dew, alone.
I have come a long way, to surrender my shadow
To the shadow of a horse.
Sitting in a Small Screenhouse on a Summer Morning, by James Wright
“Old Ironsides” by O.W. Holmes Sr.:
*Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
O, better that her shattered hulk
Should sink beneath the wave;
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave;
Nail to the mast her holy flag,
Set every thread-bare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,—
The lightning and the gale!*
Background: Old Ironsides (poem) - Wikipedia
A high school here in town has, as on of it’s flagpoles, a mast from the USS Constitution. They are very proud of it, and though that school was my school’s arch rival, I envy them that mast.
I find **The Layers **by **Stanley Kunitz **always strangely moving and inspiring. The images lose something out of context so here’s the whole thing:
*I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.*
One for atmosphere, from Rudyard Kipling:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods …
But there is no road through the woods.
One for “interesting times”, by Thomas Hardy:
I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.
II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.
III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.*
One for passion, by John Donne:
*I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.
And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.*
And for reflection, this brief quotation from TS Eliot’s Little Gidding:
*We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. *
When I was about 11, I was going to a theatre-arts day camp, and one of my classes was Oral Interpretation. I had to memorize “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. It’s not my favorite poem, but after 60 years, I still have it memorized.
*The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
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.
*
Agreed, that is a wonderful and simple and elegant poem.
I debated on including some, but there are other threads for song lyrics I think. Often they are one in the same though, and James Taylor knew what he was doing with a pen and paper.
This was my grandmother’s favorite poem; she learned it as a child and could recite the entire thing for all her life.
*To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—
*
Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant
And here is one of mine. From the uncapitalized pen of don marquis:
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty …
Kipling’s “If” is high up there on my list…but “The Sergeant’s Weddin’” will always be my favorite:
*‘E was warned agin’ 'er –
That’s what made ‘im look;
She was warned agin’ 'im –
That is why she took.
'Wouldn’t 'ear no reason,
‘Went an’ done it blind;
We know all about 'em,
They’ve got all to find!
Cheer for the Sergeant’s weddin’ –
Give 'em one cheer more!
Grey gun-‘orses in the lando,
An’ a rogue is married to a whore!*
The whole poem, and the same put to music.
On the premise that anything the Bard wrote is poetry, I bring you the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V:
And for somebody you’ve never heard of, Forging by J.M. Gerlinsky
*Pulled from the heart of the forge’s fire,
the raw iron waits.
Incandesence placed on the anvil,
throwing circles of heat and light,
pushes back the nights deep dark.
Swiftly the hammer in the hand of the smith,
with a steady even measured blow,
a raw form begins to grow.*
The whole thing here. He’s an artisan smith so he knows what he is talking about.
No love for Bobby Burns?!?
To A Mountain Daisy
On Turning One Down with the Plow, in April, 1786
Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow’r,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonie gem.
Alas! it’s no thy neibor sweet,
The bonie lark, companion meet,
Bending thee ‘mang the dewy weet
Wi’ spreck’d breast,
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet
The purpling east.
Cauld blew the bitter-biting north
Upon thy early, humble birth;
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth
Amid the storm,
Scarce rear’d above the parent-earth
Thy tender form.
The flaunting flowers our gardens yield
High shelt’ring woods an’ wa’s maun shield:
But thou, beneath the random bield
O’ clod or stane,
Adorns the histie stibble-field
Unseen, alane.
There, in thy scanty mantle clad,
Thy snawie-bosom sun-ward spread,
Thou lifts thy unassuming head
In humble guise;
But now the share uptears thy bed,
And low thou lies!
Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!
By love’s simplicity betray’d
And guileless trust;
Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid
Low i’ the dust.
Such is the fate of simple bard,
On life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!
Unskilful he to note the card
Of prudent lore,
Till billows rage and gales blow hard,
And whelm him o’er!
Such fate to suffering Worth is giv’n,
Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,
By human pride or cunning driv’n
To mis’ry’s brink;
Till, wrench’d of ev’ry stay but Heav’n,
He ruin’d sink!
Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,
That fate is thine—no distant date;
Stern Ruin’s ploughshare drives elate,
Full on thy bloom,
Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight
Shall be thy doom.
In 7th grade we had to choose a poem to memorize and recite. I chose “The Raven” by Poe. Daunting, and I stumbled a bit, but did it. Every twist and turn of thought is explored as he works his way down into madness.
I also heard a recording of this in 7th grade. Such fun to imagine the language then. When we met, it was something my wife and I had in common.
Take take the eternal … And transcend it …
Many favorites already mentioned, but I’ll add this:
The wind was a torrent of darkness
As it poured through the gusty trees
The Moon was a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas
The road was a ribbon of moonlight
Over the purple moor
And a highwayman came riding
Riding, riding
Up to the old inn door
Alfred Noyes
And a nod to Kipling:
The engine room is a temple raised
To the God of the engineer!
Wallace Stevens’ eloquent observation that the possibility of loss is what makes things valuable:
[quote=“MacLir, post:136, topic:774116”]
Many favorites already mentioned, but I’ll add this:
The wind was a torrent of darkness
As it poured through the gusty trees
The Moon was a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas
The road was a ribbon of moonlight
Over the purple moor
And a highwayman came riding
Riding, riding
Up to the old inn door
Alfred Noyes
Man, that is really well done, intense and foreboding.
I really do enjoy that this thread has been a mix of classics and lesser known pieces. The formality of the classics seems to drive so many people away from poetry, and this thread has proven that formal language and structure is not necessary to touch the souls of the reader.
Before someone else slams me on it. :o
Re-reading it, I notice I left a line out of Noyes “The Highwayman”. :smack:
Should be:
“A highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding.
A highwayman came riding,
Up to the old inn door.”
There are several YouTube renditions of this, but I couldn’t find the one I saw once in 3D animation, which I wanted to link. 
But perhaps also that form/structure can touch the soul? Just have to stick up for formal poetry one more time.
I haven’t seen this one before. Lovely, thanks!