Post your favourite poems

[scatteroflight]

The best way to be encouraged to write your own poetry is to read great poetry. I thought it would be neat if people started posting some of their favourites by the greats or the lesser-knowns. I'm going to be snobbish here and say that my own preference would be for poems rather than song lyrics. I do think there is a difference. Most lyrics just don't come across as well on the page because they need music to make them whole. In the best poetry, the words are the music.

If no one else gets into this, I'll just have to post my own favourites at intervals

Here is one by my favourite Irish poet. And I'm afraid it's not Bono. W.B. Yeats--in my opinion the greatest poet of all time. If there isn't at least a line or two here that moves you, your soul is dead.

---------
SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

[Bacchus]

Not necesserily my favourite poem by L. Cohen, but it seems to fit in a U2 forum...

THE FLY

In his black armour
the house-fly marched the field
of Freda's sleeping thighs,
undisturbed by the soft hand
which vaguely moved
to end his exercise.

And it ruined my day-
this fly which never planned
to charm her or to please
should walk boldly on that ground
I tried so hard
to lay my trembling knees.

Leonard Cohen

 

[scatteroflight]

EVERYONE SANG

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on--on--and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.


-Siegfried Sassoon

 

[zooropamanda]

The Sorrow of Love by William Butler Yeats

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man?s image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers;

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man?s image and his cry.
~~~~~
A Dream By William Blake

Once a dream did weave a shade
O'er my Angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, 'wilder'd, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangled spray,
All heart-broke I heard her say:

`O, my children! do they cry?
Do they hear their father sigh?
Now they look abroad to see:
Now return and weep for me.'

Pitying, I dropp'd a tear;
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied: `What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

`I am set to light the ground,
While the beetle goes his round:
Follow now the beetle's hum;
Little wanderer, hie thee home.'
~~~~~

From a Midsummer Night's Dream by the Master

PUCK If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

 

[zooropamanda]

Also one Ive just discovered. The Wanderer put me onto this amazing American poet who I'd never known...

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

 

[zooropamanda]

me again? sheesh

Another of my faves by Yeats...

Down by the Salley Gardens
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.


---------------

I wanna hear other peeps fave poems please!!!

 

[scatteroflight]

me again?

THE LONG BOAT

When his boat snapped loose
from its mooring, under
the screaking of the gulls,
he tried at first to wave
to his dear ones on shore,
but in the rolling fog
they had already lost their faces.
Too tired even to choose
between jumping and calling,
somehow he felt absolved and free
of his burdens, those mottoes
stamped on his name-tag:
conscience, ambition, and all
that caring.
He was content to lie down
with the family ghosts
in the slop of his cradle,
buffeted by the storm,
endlessly drifting.
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

-Stanley Kunitz

---------
Stanley Kunitz is a poet I recently discovered. I believe he is the American poet laureate. I haven't spent enough time with his poems yet to know which ones I really love, but I was reading his Collected Poems and they all seemed pretty brilliant...This one really moves me, especially the last lines.

ZA, thanks for participating

I agree there is no one like Yeats...Shakespeare is indeed the master but somehow Yeats uses words better than anyone. I really love his later stuff, well, I love the early stuff too but the later poems are like huge powerful chords of music. Sylvia Plath, I know my mum likes some of her work, I haven't read a lot of it, to be honest. I think she scares me a little bit!

And Bacchus, thanks for the Cohen poem, there's another writer/singer I want to explore more. Mainly I know Hallelujah so far because of Jeff Buckley's amazing version.

Keep them coming! I'm liking this!

 

[Salome]

there is no one what will take care of you
by will oldham


Beneath a flow of water
You'll find yourself angling
You'll find the hallmark wetting

To spoil, you'll leave the days catch,
While you drift off to sleep

Hey, my baby
Don't drift away
Not on a sorry stow ole pal o' mine
Don't let eyebrows settle permanently
Unfrowed with affection
Unafflicted by karma, what new can I say?
For the magic of my appearance does not exist you know

For the sake of somebody
You must try and ride in the lives we so despise
and through this task the bait'll glean
ask not advice to your day of relief
a vision of his wife still o'er your head
but the sky is one of many for your heart
and the walls do they wallow?
which you've just been doin'
I've had vision on the skillet
to fish which is your art

------------------
Salome
Shake it, shake it, shake it

 

[Peaseblossom]

Love's Philosophy by P.B. Shelley

THE fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single, 5
All things by a law divine
In one another's being mingle?
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another; 10
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain'd its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea?
What are all these kissings worth, 15
If thou kiss not me?

 

[Peaseblossom]

and may Shakespeare himself bless whoever quoted Puck's final soliloquy. I am a Shakespeare scholar and it's still one of my favourites. . . hence the screen name.

------------------
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact.
- MSND, Vi

 

[zooropamanda]

Peaseblossom, I just saw you in another thread and was gonna say Very cool name!! hahaha

tis my fave play of all time

 

[zooropamanda]

me again...

This is probably in my top 3 fave poems of all time

Do not go gentle into that good night By Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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. [

*sigh*

oh to write like that..




[This message has been edited by zooropamanda (edited 10-09-2001).]

 

[scatteroflight]

My favourite Dylan Thomas poem is Fern Hill...

but now for something completely different, a short poem by my favourite Canadian poet and simply one of my favourite poets. She lives outside my hometown. I went to a poetry reading and asked her to read a particular poem and she did.

THIS HEAVY CRAFT

The wax has melted
but the dream of flight
persists.
I, Icarus, though grounded
in my flesh
have one bright section in me
where a bird
night after starry night
while I'm asleep
unfolds its phantom wings
and practices.

-P.K. Page

 

[Diemen]

Not my favorite, but good nevertheless and really appropriate for my current situation. A love poem.

Good Night

Good-night? ah! no; the hour is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be good night.

How can I call the lone night good,
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood --
Then it will be -- good night.

To hearts which near each other move
From evening close to morning light,
The night is good; because, my love,
They never say good-night.

--Percy Bysshe Shelley


------------------
Slow down my beating heart
?

 

[scatteroflight]

Salome, who is Will Oldham? Those poems (lyrics?) are very interesting.



------------------
Be a world, child, form a circle
Before we all go under

 

[Salome]

Kid of Harith
by will oldham


O will I be faithfull to you
And never to separate, now you have found me
Or will I, regardless, be true to how you
Think that I am and know that I should be

I watch things painted on public walls, now
But I see other things as well, behind
But right fuck in front of my spirit is how
The real road's laid out in a line

I see it lit up, headlights and lightening
While your eyes are fixed on the dark of the car
I no longer cry, I don't find it frightening
But wound up and bound up, so near where you are

For how can it be, to be so much with you
When there are those that totally laugh at me
I pray so often that some fluid will pass through
While I slowly strengthen my vocabulary

It isn't an urge, it is more like a duty
To begin to explore again things of the world
To resaturate skin with injections of beauty
And to mess with, undress with some jewel

And I think you will not notice, do you
As I am only wind and weather, only to you

------------------
Salome
Shake it, shake it, shake it

 

[Salome]

Originally posted by scatteroflight:
Salome, who is Will Oldham? Those poems (lyrics?) are very interesting.

he is a singer-songwriter (well sort of)

I've posted some other lyrics of his in my "Bonnie 'Prince' Billy"-thread

------------------
Salome
Shake it, shake it, shake it

 

[The_Sweetest_Thing]

If--By Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

 

[BabyGrace]

oooh, a poetry-sharing festival!!

I'm sorry I havent had much time for this..
here's one of my all-time faves, it just expresses so perfectly how I feel about the critters that roam the earth and that I love so dearly..

Come into Animal Presence
Denise Levertov

Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.
The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.
Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.
An old joy returns in holy presence.

------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...

 

[BabyGrace]

another one I love...

Last Poem
Robert Desnos

I have so fiercely dreamed of you
And walked so far and spoken of you so,
Loved a shade of you so hard
That now I've no more left of you.
I'm left to be a shade among the shades
A hundred times more shade than shade
To be shade cast time and time again into your sun-transfigured life.

translated from the French by X. J. Kennedy

------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...

 

[BabyGrace]

and my last one for right now..

Voyages (III)
Hart Crane

Infinite consanguinity it bears-
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, where to this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,-
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,-
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands...



------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...

 

[BabyGrace]

it's world poetry day today..

actually i just forgot to say thanks for starting this thread scattero

------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...

 

[scatteroflight]

DOVER BEACH

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 Aegean, 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.


-Matthew Arnold



------------------
Love is the heartbeat of the universe

 

[The_Sweetest_Thing]

Babygrace--your signiture...it's beautiful..where's it from?

 

[Peaseblossom]

A new favorite:

Alfred Tennyson

Marriage Morning

Light, so low upon earth,
You send a flash to the sun.
Here is the golden close of love,
All my wooing is done.
Oh, the woods and the meadows,
Woods where we hid from the wet,
Stiles where we stay'd to be kind,
Meadows in which we met!

Light, so low in the vale
You flash and lighten afar,
For this is the golden morning of love,
And you are his morning start.
Flash, I am coming, I come,
By meadow and stile and wood,
Oh, lighten into my eyes and heart,
Into my heart and my blood!

Heart, are you great enough
For a love that never tires?
O' heart, are you great enough for love?
I have heard of thorns and briers,
Over the meadow and stiles,
Over the world to the end of it
Flash for a million miles.

 

[Peaseblossom]

Last one (for now), I promise!

My all-time favorite! We should all be so lucky!

John Donne (1573-1631)

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls, to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"The breath goes now," and some say, "No:"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refin'd,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begun.


------------------
The course of true love never did run smooth.-MSND, Ii

 

[scatteroflight]

That John Donne poem is great! I was trying to think the other day what it was called but couldn't remember.

I like Tennyson too! The Idylls of the King are amazing.

And BabyGrace, I love the poem about the animals. Very moving, and very accurate about that wonderful way animals are

------------------
Love is the heartbeat of the universe

[This message has been edited by scatteroflight (edited 10-15-2001).]

 

[BabyGrace]

I love John Donne!

Sweetest_Thing, it's off of the Smashing Pumpkins' album, Adore, which, strangely enough, Wanderer just got me into thanks to a signature that he had which I loved..ahh coincidence
if you can, I urge you to go buy it.. it's well worth the money

------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...

 

[Peaseblossom]

Woo-Hoo for old English dead guys!

 

[BabyGrace]

haha Peaseblossom

one of my faves



------------------
but for the grace of love I'd will the meaning of heaven from above...