Your favorite poem and why

[John Cole]

George Herbert's wonderful sonnet:

The Answer

My comforts drop and melt away like snow:
I shake my head, and all the thoughts and ends,
Which my fierce youth did bandie, fall and flow
Like leaves about me: or like summer friends,
Flyes of estates and sunne-shine. But to all,
Who think me eager, hot, and undertaking,
But in my prosecutions slack and small;
As a young exhalation, newly waking,
Scorns his first bed of dirt, and means the sky;
But cooling by the way, grows pursie and slow,
And setling to a cloud, doth live and die
In that dark state of tears: to all, that so
Show me, and set me, I have one reply,
Which they that know the rest, know more then I.

It's the poem of an older man who hasn't forgotten the convictions of his youth. Note how perfectly Herbert uses the three run on lines in the poems (they're the lines without punctuation at the end), pay attention to its lovely rhythm, and feel the force of the final couplet. A perfectly realized sonnet, I think.