"nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"
fr somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
OMG!!! (love e.e.)
"a glimmering girl with apple blossom in her hair"
-from William Butler Yeats (The Song of Wandering Aengus)
A wonderful ee cummings poem I read years ago. A genuine modern poet. Good pick.
'...They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:
Long, long shall I rue thee
Too deeply to tell.
'...In secret we met
In silence I grieve
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?
With silence and tears.
from 'When we two parted' by Lord Byron
(I know that is more than a few lines but I had to reference this one from Byron). Glad to see you hubbin' some more =]
"Hope is the thing with feathers,
That perches in the soul.
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all."
Pure Miss Emily Dickinson.
My favourite.
hey sandy!
actually it's a ploy as i'm kinda looking for inspiration to spark the plug so to speak. LOL I just came across that ee cummings poem again and I remembered liking it very much when i was in college. anyway, glad i started this as the byron verses you chose has kindled something - that's a start
"I long woo'd your daughter, my suit you denied; --
Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide --
And now I am come, with this lost love of mine,
To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,
That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar."
Sir Walter Scott
A T.S. Elliot quote that I find solace in
"I said to my soul be still, and wait without hope;
for hope would be hope of the wrong thing;
wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet fath. But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds
Anthem For Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen
"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. " - The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
I love the intensity of this poem
Wow these are great selections! Thanks for sharing your favourites as they also serve as introductions to poems I may be missing out on
"If right now, you
Were to capture this elation
In the framework of your mind,
Or find transcendence through these words,
Then at most you would know nothing
Of the beauty your existence throws to me"
Rider Strong (yes, the actor)
"One light, one mind, flashing in the dark,
Blinded by the silence of a thousand broken hearts."
- Greenday, Minority
And he, in fear, this naked man alone,
His fallen hands forgetting all their shells,
His lips gone pale, knelt low behind a stone,
And stared, and saw, and did not understand,
Columbus's doom-burdened caravels
Slant to the shore, and all their seamen land.
J C Squire
The spring clad all in gladness
Doth laugh at winter's sadness
Thomas Morley
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.
Cris - great to see you back
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
I also love:
Your children are not your children,
They are the sons and daughters
Of life's longing for itself.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Jenny
EDIT: Shailini, we crossed posts - great minds think alike, eh?
I really struggle to cut out any subset of this poem, I wish I could quote it in its entirety, but that's not the game here, so (deep breath) I think this part is my favourite:
I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
Oriah Mountain Dreaming, The Invitation
EDIT
No, dammit, this bit has to go in, too:
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
Jenny
"...Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken..."
Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare!
A couple of faves:
Firstly, Kipling's "Female of the Species":
She is wedded to convictions—in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies!—
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.
A. E. Housman:
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
Wilfred Owen:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
[it is sweet and proper to die for one's country]
Christina Rossetti
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
Shakespeare:
WHEN icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt, and ways be foul, 5
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tu-whoo!
Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When the moon stole away the glory of the sun.
-Vikram Chanbra(a very special poet friend of mine)
Birth is heaped on birth
That such cannonade
May thunder time away
Birth-hour and death-hour meet
Or, as great sages say
Men dance on deathless feet.
- W. B. Yeats
@ Jenny - that was incredible!
@ Paraglider - Red Earth and Pouring Rain? That was by Vikram Chandra.
I know, it's a favourite of mine. I was wondering if Chanbra was a typo.
If
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!
by Rudyard Kipling
(Couldn't pick just a couple of good lines on this one...they're all good!)
and I am glad you couldnt just pick a few, for I have never read this and can not thank you enough for taking the time to type it and sharing it here . .
Kipling's stuff is great.
He wrote a great poem about society's attitudes to soldiers, which is still true now. "Tommy Atkins" is a nick-name for British soldiers, and they were known as "red coats" in Victorian England after the colour of their uniforms.
A couple of verses are here, and the full poem can be found at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tommy :
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
That's good stuff, London Girl...Cheers to a "Manly" poet such as Kipling!
Before the moon,sun,and earth
before stars or comets free
Before e'en time had its birth
I was,I am,I will be.
-Swami Vivekananda
Being actually still, there burst a great Light
And he saw his own tracks
Crissing and crossing Universes and back
Wound in a maze that had covered no Space
He grew up and knew he had traveled...No Place.
From my own poem, The Little Boy Who Ran, written in 1979.
Only real bummer is I don't believe I've written one to match it since.
wow and wow again! loving each and every line! thanks for sharing - i could stay here all day and wait up for the next line/s!
@cosette - that makes two of us! cool!
@shalini - was away, but never gone
best forum thread ever. well, this week anyway
'k, another...unfortunately i can't just post one line because it's all too beautiful (especially that 'erasing statues' part):
We have lost even this twilight. No one saw us this evening hand in hand while the blue night dropped on the world. I have seen from my window the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops. Sometimes a piece of sun burned like a coin in my hand. I remembered you with my soul clenched in that sadness of mine that you know. Where were you then? Who else was there? Saying what? Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away? The book fell that always closed at twilight and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet. Always, always you recede through the evenings toward the twilight erasing statues.
-Pablo Neruda (Clenched Soul)
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Elegy Written in a country churchyard
by Thomas Gray
Maybe not of the calibre of the other quoted poems, but I love the romantic imagery in Banjo Paterson's poems. For some reason the last stanza of "The Man from Snowy River" always makes me smile.
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
And where around the Overflow the reedbeds sweep and sway
To the breezes, and the rolling plains are wide,
The man from Snowy River is a household word to-day,
And the stockmen tell the story of his ride.
...And for good measure my favourite Shakespeare Sonnet:
CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
I have to read the poem by "Banjo"...this story has always intrigued me!
I think this poem is a dead-on classic, Hovalis...worthy of same calibre as all the other ones mentioned...the last line says it all..."The man from Snowy River is a household word to-day,
And the stockmen tell the story of his ride." Awesome...!
I've always wondered if there were one person The Man was based on. The poem is the story of an underdog who makes good, because he's the right man for the job.
Actually Clancy of the Overflow, also in the poem, was based off a real person: Thomas Gerald Clancy, and he wrote a poem, after he retired in reply to Paterson's earlier poem Clancy of the Overflow.
This is the original poem. http://www.the-rathouse.com/ClancyoftheOverflow.html
And this is Clancy's reply:
http://www.wallisandmatilda.com.au/clancys-reply.shtml
It seems gone are the days when poetry was answered in verse. Somehow, I think we've lost something because of that.
From The Silken Tent by Robert Frost~
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
Seamus Heaney
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives--
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
This must be history in the making
Many poets coming together
Re living and re writing
Enjoying the space and time
Brenda Scully September 2009
REMEMBER
by: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
EMEMBER me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
Christian R wrote some lovely stuff - I think I posted another of hers further up in this thread.
Count me with the Robert Frost crowd, The Road Not Taken.
Now, the poetry of song lyrics, that's a whole 'nother matter...
Ah, "Duino Elegies," Rilke:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
Yes--the springtimes needed you. Often a star was waiting for you to notice it.
A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
- Thomas Gray
"Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."
Tennyson's line:
I am a part of all that I have met.
is a mantra that I can live with and have.
"Intellectual disgrace,
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye" from 'In Memory Of W.B. Yeats," by W.H. Auden.
Thanks for bringing this post back up again LEWJ:
Someone mentioned this poem lately: "Wow" is all I can say about this one! Here's a brief sample:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
From: The Charge Of The Light Brigade
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lady Lazarus
by Sylvia Plath
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
Sorry I know it's a lot to post...The poem in it's entirety is one of my all time favs.
This is a wonderful thread I'd love to see it alive for a long time to come!
The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
Water water everywhere and all the boards did shrink
Water water everywhere nor any drop to drink
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
Samual Taylor Coleridge
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda ----- from If you forget me
i think i just love this post . .another amazing one ! Thanks Pretty
In the original text, that quote from Auden on page 3 is WithOUT the commas shown.
Here's another---"There's no frigate like a book," Emily Dickinson.
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind. And therefore is winged cupid painted blind."
from "A Mid-Summer's Night Dream"
Shakespeare
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---Byron
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies... Byron
It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea...from ANNABELLE LEE, BY EDGAR ALLAN POE.
It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels
As you said in the words of your song.
Too many times married men think they're still single
And that's caused many a good girl to go wrong.
Marianne Faithfull - well its a song actually - but poetry to me!
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow, beneath the crosses row on row that mark our place
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