Favourite poetry Lines

DickSwiveller

I couldn't find a thread so I thought I'd start one. What are your favorite lines of poetry? I love T.S. Eliot's poem, 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"

Sheridan81

Here's honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints' tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

From November Graveyard by Sylvia PLath

Gwen Cooper

When John Donne's wife Ann left him, he wrote

John Donne
Ann Donne
Undone

It touched me on a personal level.

Plague Maiden

I love this line, one spread across two stanzas, from Heaney's The Grauballe Man about the remains of the eponymous bog body.

"As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep

the black river of himself."

Captain Red Beard

... get off my ****ing daffodils!

Gets me every time.

Ipso

From The Rime of the ancient mariner

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

LionelNashe

A couple of times I've heard Americans refer to this as 'The Song of *the* Wandering Aengus', presumably because they never met anyone called Aengus and they don't know it's a name:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

TomOnBoard

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

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot

Sheridan81

Everywhere you turn is luck.

-From The Undertaking by Louise Gluck

reap-a-rat

"Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow."

From "Nothing Twice" by Wislawa Szymborska.

judeboy101

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

D.thomas

kanadams123

"Men work together" i told him from the heart "wether they work together or apart" ~ Robert Frost

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hense,
Two roads divereged in a yellow wood and I, I
Took the one less travelled by
And that made all the difference ~ Robert Frost

"The world is quiet hear" ~ ASOUE

Peace Treaty with Scientology

A poem I wrote about my pet black Labrador when I was 8 years old, or something;

'Judy is my friend
Her job is to mend
Mend what I hear you say
She doesn't receive any pay
She mends a broken heart
And we will never part
And if I was lost
In hail rain snow or frost
She'd find me
And lie across my knee.

cavu

"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.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

From Funeral Blues, W.H. Auden

tritriagain

An honest man here lies at rest,
As e’er God with his image blest;
the friend of man, the friend of truth,
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so informed;
If there is another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this

otnomart

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

(When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats)

corks finest

Knokcanure both mane(mean) and poor,a church without a steeple, bitches and whures, looking over half doors, criticizing decent People.,,,,,,,has my smallie reciting it for a laugh 30 plus years ago,,didn't he do the same in front of bishop Daly(Derry) in a pre communion talk at school,,,big red face for daddy

stabeek

Head Deadhead Dead

- The Onion, falsely announcing death of lead singer of band "The Grateful Dead".

It's poetry in the sense that every now and again, while waiting for something or bored, or what ever, I can recall it and remind myself how well it fits into various perspectives.

TheFortField

“I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.” ~ Pablo Neruda

Frankie5Angels

"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end".

Sonnet 60.

TheFortField

"I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams".

William Butler Yeats.

JustAThought

'Tell them I came, that noone answered
That I kept my word 'he said"

endacl

"O pointy birds, o pointy pointy,
Anoint my head, anointy-nointy."

John Lillison (The first man to ever be killed in a car crash)

byronbay2

A lot of Yeats in here so far but I still have to add another, from Adam's Curse:

We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

Absolutely magnificent image that has stuck in my mind all these years, since I first read it over 30 years ago. Needs to be seen in the context of the whole poem, of course.

TheFortField

"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".

(Stop all the clock, cut off the telephone - W.H Auden)

One line by Kavanagh embedded in memory:

"Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder."

TheShow

The Planter’s Daughter
Austin Clarke

When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went –
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

Deja Boo

Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I’ll not look for wine.


from "To Celia" by Ben Jonson

TheFortField

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference".

The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost

Deja Boo

“I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”

“With stammering lips and insufficient sound I strive and struggle to deliver right the music of my nature.”


― a few lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Blaizes

'We are the Dead.Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved and now we lie
in Flanders fields.'

( second verse of the poem In Flanders Field by John McCrae)

namenotavailablE

A beautiful sung version of ^^ above:

The Tetrarch

I have seen flowers come in stony places
And kind things done by men with ugly faces
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust too.

namenotavailablE

This poem by Irish composer Thomas Moore (1779–1852) has also been translated into a beautiful Russian folksong, "Vecherniy zvon" (available on Youtube). I actually prefer the folksong version (if possible, view it with an English translation) as it better captures the emotion of the poem (life is passing / the evening bells are tolling for me).

“Those evening bells”

THOSE evening bells! those evening bells!
How many a tale their music tells
Of youth, and home, and that sweet time
When last I heard their soothing chime!

Those joyous hours are passed away;
And many a heart that then was gay
Within the tomb now darkly dwells,
And hears no more those evening bells.

And so ’t will be when I am gone,—
That tuneful peal will still ring on;
While other bards shall walk these dells,
And sing your praise, sweet evening bells.

TheFortField

“Here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)”

E.E. Cummings

Imhof Tank

From "How to Kill" by Keith Douglas from the perspective of a sniper


Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost

A Summer In Provence

"Belonging"

Small spaces of silence
in between borrowed breaths
arms tighten
at the whisper of a name

all the words of the heart
the unanswered questions
are at this moment
blue rolling waves

Eileen Carney Hulme

branie2

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in heaven

Paradise Lost - book 1

Deja Boo

...weight him with the sleepiness of the moon...

It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.

TomOnBoard

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus... The New Colossus

Black Swan

"But we can be tranquil
And "thankfill" and proud,
For man's been endowed
With a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain
That some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off,
And we will all be blown away!"

(From Merry Minuet by Kinston Trio)

Wtf ?

''If I give my heart to you, I'll have none and you'll have two''
I'll get my coat.....

Deja Boo

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night...

Keats

Lefty Bicek

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

from 'Snow', by Louis MacNeice

Sheridan81

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?

-from No Second Troy, W.B. Yeats

Deja Boo

He tells her that the earth is flat —
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.
The planet goes on being round.

Differences of Opinion by Wendy Cope

She Is Gone by David Harkins

You can shed tears that she is gone
Or you can smile because she has lived

You can close your eyes and pray that she will come back
Or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left

Your heart can be empty because you can’t see her
Or you can be full of the love that you shared

You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
Or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday

You can remember her and only that she is gone
Or you can cherish her memory and let it live on

You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
Or you can do what she would want: smile, open your eyes, love and go on

Deja Boo

Be pleased to walk alone
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl...


From "Be Nobody's Darling", by Alice Walker
.

Day Lewin

"to the last syllable of recorded time"

(Shakespeare, Macbeth)

Ectoplasm

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven.
- William Wordsworth, The Prelude

A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside
- Edwin Morgan, Glasgow Sonnet i

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains.
- PB Shelly, Ozymandias.

Deja Boo

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders..
~Matsuo Basho