Favorite Poetry

Writing Forum

Post your favorite Poems here. Name the author is you can. Add comments if you feel like it.

I love this one. It almost sounds like a limerick. Sweet.

I love the one by Kipling (i think it is) but I can't remember it except a few lines.

it finished like this:

"Your's is the Earth,
And Everything thats in it,
and what is more,
you'll be a man,
my son"

I found it for you White Tiger. I had not read it before, it's neat.

Thanks for finding the Kipling poem Whidden, I is great, timeless even.

Anyway about Poetry in school, I hated it as well. The difference between now and then is that we're not being forced to read it.

This thread is about favorite poetry to read correct ? So if this is OT, sorry ... but how about original poetry ?

Has reading of poetry inspired anyone -- Whidden and others here -- to try their hand at writing poetry ? I know I have seen some scattered throughout the general and maybe the creative forum ?

I have one for you, though it isnt a poem, its a song, but it was written by the Bard Bob Dylan.

Can't you just SEE it ... hear it ... feel it ?

I think I'll put my favorite poem written by me up, bearing in mind I have put it up before, tell me what you think about it, and who you think its about.

hmm...lets see..could it be...Gollum?

Here's one of my favorite pieces by Tolkien:

He chanted a song of wizardry,
Of piercing, opening, of treachery,
Revealing, uncovering, betraying.
Then sudden Felagund there swaying
Sang in answer a song of staying,
Resisting, battling against power,
Of secrets kept,, strength like a tower
And trust unbroken, freedom, escape;
Of and changing and of shifting shape,
Of snares eluded, broken traps,
The prison opening, the chain that snaps.
Backwards and forwards swayed their song.
Reeling and foundering, as ever more strong
The chanting swelled, Felagund fought,
And all the magic and might he brought
Of Elvenesse into his words.
Softly in the gloom they heard the the birds
Singing afar in Nargathrond,
The sighing of the Sea beyond,
Beyond the western world, on sand,
On sand pearls in Elvenland.
The the gloom gathered; darkness growing
In Valinor, the red blood flowing
Beside the Sea, where the Noldor slew,
The Foamriders, and stealing drew
Their white ships and their white sails
From lamplit havens. The wind wails,
The wolf howls. The ravens flee.
The ice mutters in the mouths of the Sea.
The captives sad in Angband mourn.
Thunder rumbles, the fires burn--
And Finrod fell before the throne.

I would say post your favorite poetry, whether it be from the greats, or one you wrote yourself.

Whidden's poetry sucks. I would post some, but my rep would be ruined and I would have no street cred.

All my bean poems were stolen from the great authors and words erased and replaced with Baked Beans. No talent needed there!

If you find something enjoyable, post it, so the rest of us can enjoy it too.

Here's another favorite of mine, though I don't understand it. I read an article on it, and no one understands it, so I don't feel so bad. But it's still a great poem.

A Meeting With Despair is a great one.

My mother actually writes poetry. I need to get permission from her to put a couple in here. I have really enjoyed reading a lot of this beautiful poetry. I have always liked the Raven.

I've really enjoyed finding this thread. I love some of the poems posted here.

One of my favorite poems is Elegy written in a country churchyard, by Thomas Gray. I would post it, but it's very long. If you aren't familiar with it, I'm pretty sure you can find it on the internet somewhere, or an anthology of old English poetry.

I have so many favorite Shakespeare sonnets, but one I like to remind myself of when I find my personality getting a little nasty is:


Sonnet XCIV


They that have the power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who moving others are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his didnity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

Sonnet XLVI


Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye mine heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My heart, mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierced with crystal eyes;
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impanelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part.
And thus: mine eye's due is thy outward part,
And thy heart's right thy inward love of heart.

- William Shakespeare

I have so enjoyed the poetry and felt I had to share my favorites from Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Hope you all enjoy the Sonnets i picked. D



How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

XIV
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
I love her for her smile--her look--her way
Of speaking gently,--for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of ease on such a day--
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,--and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheek dry,--
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou may'st love on, through love's eternity


What a great love was had by Elizabeth and Browning

VI
Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforth in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand
Serenely in the sunshine as before,
Without the sense of that which I forbore--
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

Dave are you back? That was great, love this place, you need to put it in the Inreview space on the front page so it can be found. Lots of poetry lovers out here.

I love it.

D

Yep, poetry is something special when it's done right.

somewhere i have never travelled - E.E. Cummings

One of my most treasured poems.

somehwere 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

e.e.cummings

Apart - Viggo Mortensen

You found my keys
on an angle's hip
Moved half the fallen trees
from the frozen road.

This trip is
all I thought
It would be
And we're not
even 1/2 way yet.

If I can't touch you
with snow-hung firs
our only witnesses
Can't have your eyes
when everyone's asleep
Then the fire's almost out.

You ask the un-named
attractions to leave town
But keep checking
If I'm still around

Should we sidestep
putting fingers to
words tracing lips that
would inform us?

Once said I'd missed
you every instant
before we met
Now believe we knew
how sad we'd be
Apart.

it is at moments after i have dreamed - E.E. Cummings

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always)and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

-turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

ee cummings

i love you much(most beautiful darling) - E.E. Cummings

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

ee cummings

since feeling is first - E.E. Cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis

ee cummings

Wow !!! Thats beautiful!!! Thanks for sharing.

D

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950). Renascence and Other Poems. 1917.

2. Interim


THE ROOM is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed 5
Each other room’s dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead; 10
And wheresoe’er I look is hideous change.
Save here. Here ’twas as if a weed-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago 15
And suddenly thought, “I have been here before!”

You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall; 20
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key!—
The room is as you left it; your last touch— 25
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly—hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust’s grey fingers like a shielded light.

There is your book, just as you laid it down, 30
Face to the table,—I cannot believe
That you are gone!—Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still. 35
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, “I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end”;
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed 40
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro… 45

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a “t,” 50
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric “e’s.” You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know 55
You would not write again. If you had known—
But then, it does not matter,—and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase 60
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, “I picked the first sweet-pea to-day.” 65
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow?—O my love,
The things that withered,—and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!) 70
That day—that day you picked the first sweet-pea,—
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see 75
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made, 80
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still. 85
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?—If only God
Had let us love,—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th’ eternal books 90
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet,—I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then 95
’Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all’s said and done, the things that are 100
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
“I had you and I have you now no more.”
There, there it dangles,—where’s the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that 105
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!

“I had you and I have you now no more.”

O little words, how can you run so straight 110
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God 115
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back 120
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? ’Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again! 125

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof 130
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart 135
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life,—a ship whose star has guttered out? 140
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor; 145
All else were contrast,—save that contrast’s wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now—what now to me 150
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
Plant things above your grave—(the common balm 155
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth 160
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.

I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice. 165
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, “My face is turned to you”;
I know not where you are, I do not know
If heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again; 170
But this I know:—not for one second’s space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured in the empty air.
Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears! 175
My sorrow shall be dumb!

—What do I say?
God! God!—God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God 180
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk awhile, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths 185
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless 190
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

O God, I see it now, and my sick brain 195
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl 200
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—

. . . . . . 205

Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood, and I must sleep.

Good poems girls!

Nice poem Delta. Very moving.

I get a lot from E.E. Cummings' work. He has such an unusual style of writing but the imagery in his work is just incredible.

Dave, is this the thread where we can post our own poetry as well?

Neo

And Miles To Go Before I Sleep



STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

Whose woods these are I think I know

His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake
The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep

Hey Dave, Whats with this good poems girls bit? HuH HUh.? You think us gals don't dig good poetry.?

I demand an apology for Delta and Neo.!!!

I should have said "good poems ladies".

No Dave you shouldhave let gender out of the equation. Nice job Guys, A name would be better GReat poems guys. Where was you when they gave out specifics on addressijg us on the board.? Drinking Water form Becker Land

Like should I say nice poem man, boy, kid?A name would be better.

Get the picture.? Just teasing you DAve.
D

But Wonder Woman is so pretty! I can't call her a non gender specific. It just don't work.

Hows this:

You Dames did good!

Ok, more poetry before I get kicked out of Inreview for harrassment:

Great Dave, Hey theres nothing like a dame, nothing in the world . So Peace. Man!! Brother of the Soul.

D