Your favorite poem and why

[peachy]

This has just always been one of my favorites since I was young....

Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.


I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

[yukoncpa]

Lady Murasaki - I first saw this in the book Hannibal. I wasn't aware she was a real person. Evidently, many credit her with writing the first novel.

The memories of long love
Gather like drifting snow.
Poignant as the mandarin ducks
Who float side by side in sleep.

Stephen Crane - I liked The Red Badge of Courage and was very interested in his poetry:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter", he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Kurt Corbain - This pretty much sums up his angst right before he blew his brains out with a shotgun.

She eyes me like a Pisces when I am weak
I've been locked inside your heart-shaped box for weeks
I was drawn into your magnet tar-pit trap
I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black

Hey!
Wait!
I've got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice

Meat-eating orchids forgive no one just yet
Cut myself on angel hair and baby's breath
Broken hymen of your highness, I'm left black
Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back

Hey!
Wait!
I've got a new complaint
Forever in debt to your priceless advice

[PokrLikeItsProse]

There are some poems that I like. The poems of Emily Dickinson taken as a whole, although some of the charm may be how some people hate her so. A certain poem whose title would probably be censored by the software here because it is the plural of a slang term for a feminine body part, written by John Updike.

However, the poem that most sticks in my mind, one of the few I can still recite from memory, is "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. It's sad and beautiful and written to be read aloud.

[GinaSD]

Yes it was a typo... er... tKpo. lol.

But since I'm on this thread again reading these great poems, I'll add a poem by my favorite poet.

e e cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

[MikeNaked]

My favorite at the moment because I can relate to the struggle between focus and the wandering mind. Also, Billy Collins is just fantastically light-hearted.

Fool Me Good
Billy Collins


I am under the covers
waiting for the heat to come up
with a gurgle and hiss
and the banging of the water hammer
that will frighten the cold out of the room.

And I am listening to a blues singer
named Precious Bryant
singing a song called "Fool Me Good".

If you don't love me baby, she sings,
would you please try to fool me good?

I am also stroking the dog's head
and writing down these words,
which means that I am calmly flying in the face
of the Buddhist advice to do only one thing at a time.

Just pour the tea,
just look into the eye of the flower,
just sing the song
one thing at a time

and you will achieve serenity,
which is what I would love to do
as the fan-blades of the morning begin to turn.

If you don't love me baby,
she sings as a day-moon fades in the window
and the hands circle the clock,

would you please try to fool me good?

Yes, Precious, I reply,
I will fool you as good as I can,
but first I have to learn
to listen to you with my whole heart,
and not until you have finished

will I put on my slippers,
squeeze out some toothpaste,
and make a big foamy face in the mirror,

freshly dedicated to doing one thing at a time
one note at a time for you, darling
one tooth at a time for me.

[BigPoppa]

This poem sums me up better than I could have ever done myself:



There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.



If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.



And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.



He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.


- Robert Service

[SeeYouSoon]

The first part of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes"


The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.


And then the lighting of the lamps.

[quirkasaurus]

okay -- mine is from Akino Arai -- a japanese song writer,
in japanese, it's phonetically very beautiful, and
the translation is very cool.

she's actually singing about the moment of death when
the soul is transported away from the body...

in japanese:

kiri fukai mori no iriguchi
mezamete kuroi tori o miru
dare ga sono koe o kiita

at the entrance of a deep misty forest
awakening, i see a black bird
who's voice is that i heard?

The rest here ( in a page coincidentally I helped create )
http://www.shugotenshi.net/kimiko/so...carnation.html

[sokiraJ]

[ QUOTE ]
The first part of T.S. Eliot's "Preludes"


[/ QUOTE ]

Thanks.

I love T.S. Eliot. I find some parts in Four Quartets very inspiring.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Four_Quartets

"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."

"The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless."

"Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us — a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching."

[JJH3984]

Eh... so many... for now:

City of Light --Larry Levis

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island Minnesota --James Wright

A Blessing --James Wright

The Language --Robert Creeley

There are more, but that's good for now. The reasons are the same. Each of these shifts something about me when I read it.