One single line of poetry....

Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville (Verlaine)

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! (Shelley)

You cannot know, and should not bother; tide and market come and go and so shall your mother. (Pepper Clark)

Spring is sprung
The grass is riz
I wonder where de boidies is

Don't ask me why I should remember this so well but I always think of it when spring finally arrives!

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear;
Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair!
So Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy was he?

This one I remember because my mother used to say it to me when I was very young. You have to pronounce 'was he' as 'wuzzy', which I thought was hilarious when I first knew it. I find it very difficult to remember anything off by heart but stuff that went in when I was tiny does seem to have stuck, regardless of merit!

Oh, MadeMan, me too. That was what I came to post.

The boy stood on the burning deck

Lovely.

Here's the rest, for anyone who's interested:

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
trying to recite `The boy stood on
the burning deck.' Love's the son
stood stammering elocution
while the poor ship in flames went down.

Love's the obstinate boy, the ship,
even the swimming sailors, who
would like a schoolroom platform, too,
or an excuse to stay
on deck. And love's the burning boy.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.

Same poem as thumbcat but it's the last line for me that sticks in my head.

Great evening reading this!

Yes madcatters and I've seen it performed beautifully (teenage boys, and a very elderly veteran in the audience said the staging with mustard green lighting and lots of dry ice was frighteningly accurate).

But it sounds like teenage sex out of the context of the whole poem.

The more memorable part of it for me is later:

"If you could hear with every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs..."

Shudder.

Probably the Charge of the Light Brigade:
Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die

Ooh got a non sad one!!! This reminds me of my uncle's wedding when I was 6. He got married on my birthday and this was on the present he gave me

Isn't it funny how bears like honey,
Buzz, buzz, buzz, I wonder why he does.

Two in particular - one from a especially sad funeral

But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.”
? A.A. Milne, Now We Are Six

And being fortunate enough to have the most amazing sister, this has always struck a chord

“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.”

Goblin Market
By Christina Rossetti

Great thread. I love so many lines in Yeats' Easter 1916 but these are the ones that came to mind first:

And what if excess of love
bewildered them till they died?

And from Sylvia Plath's Nick and the Candlestick:

You are the baby in the barn.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

one line from Dulce Et Decorum Est

as other posters have already written.

Haunting.

The thistle rises, and forever will
Gathering the generations under it
It is a monument to a' we are
And a' we were and wondered.

Hugh mcdiarmid - a drunk man looks at the thistle

Or, in different tone, to echo Fishandjam

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

What a Beamish boy!

'Everyone suddenly burst out singing
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom.'

• Siegfried Sassoon

Fishandjam I'm not too sure I can actually recall any poetry that isn't miserable!!! What's that about!!

two sentences, but a favourite of mine

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

and one that has stayed with me since school

I have a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade ...english teacher was very fond of war poets.

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Patrick Shaw Stewart

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

Thomas Hardy

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
Shakespeare

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Intimations of Immortality-Wordsworth

We all seem to be picking somewhat dismal ones! To lighten the mood: "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/did gyre and gimble in the wabe/all mimsy were the borogroves / and the momeraths outgrabe. (Hope I've remembered it right!)

The old lie; Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

has always stuck with me since school

Their touch is velvet purgatory, their skin silken abduction
Their lust filled moans conquer your fear, their bodies ubiquitous seduction

^ This unforgetable poem echoes through my head often, and has been inspirational when creating work.

It's from 'I Hear The Mermaids Singing' by Cleo Brimstone.

â??Our two souls therefore, which are one, Â
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,Like gold to airy thinness beat.

John Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Dulce et decorum est

I find it impossible to read Mid-Term Break without welling up, no matter how many times I read it. It always feels raw.

Give me the splendid, silent sun, with all it's beams full dazzling

^Opening line of a poem of the same name by Walt Whitman. Love it.

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.
Satan from Paradise Lost.