One single line of poetry....

Nurturing, healing love.

What cannot be said will be wept.

Water, water everywhere
And all the boards did shrink,
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Coleridge

That's from memory so probably horribly wrong. I adore the whole poem, it's wonderful.

Love this thread

I know Dulce et Decorum Est has been mentioned, but the final lines just contain so much raw, justified bitterness and anger, they give me the shivers, and bring a lump to my throat.

"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."

Another of Wilfred Owen's poems, Anthem for Doomed Youth, starts with the line

"What passing-bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns"

Beautiful, but I do adore the War poets

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Both from The Second Coming by WB Yeats; Always gives me the complete shivers.

also

And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

From Patrick Kavanagh's A Christmas Childhood; v poignant somehow, represents a type of living that has disappeared. We did the poem in school and those lines always come back to me...

I think that my soul is red
Like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower:
But when these are dead
They have had their hour.

The quiet house by Charlotte mew

I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

I hope this isn't too wanky but I love this line from a French poem by Jacques Prevert when he describes a kiss

"la petite seconde d'eternite"

Bumping this thread in honour of UK National Poetry Day, which was yesterday.

And I'll add:

And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell
The unreturning army that was youth
The legions who have suffered and are dust

• Sassoon

You are very welcome

Thank you Iggi999 it has plagued me for 20 years and google was no bloody use!

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Yeats

I also love this one:

Fog by Carl Sandburg
THE fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

The beginning of Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. The rest of it is stunning too.

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats

Its the penultimate line that sticks with me but you need the context here including the epigraph. By the Czech poet Miroslav

'We have a microscopic anatomy of the whale. This gives Man assurance' (William Carlos Williams)

We have a map of the universe
for microbes
We have a map of microbes for the universe
We have a Grand Master of chess
made of electronic circuits

But most of all we have the ability
to sort peas
to cup water in our hands
to seek the right screw under the sofa for hours
this
gives us
wings

Also an obscure poem that my mother often quoted 'Darling, let the children grow and do not falter/ There's little you can do, and nothing alter'. There's a couplet in the middle that goes:

'No bomb exists can blast away their choosing/ No way to substitute yourself for losing'

It's a

That was meant to be Twice Shy

Our juvenilia
Had taught us both to wait;
Not to publish feeling
And regret it all too late-

Seamus Heaney- Twice Shyp

"Each other is who they always marry"

From a lovely poem by Ogden Nash about how opposites attract. It describes DH and I perfectly.

I got the first one wrong:

That saddest dedication: "lastly my wife, who did the typing."

elquinto the poem is called A Child Born Dead, by Elizabeth Jennings.

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love. Mean Time, Carol Ann Duffy

Or
Safe in their alabaster chambers
Emily Dickinson

That saddest of lines, "to my wife, who did the typing."

The Poet's Companion, U. A. Fanthorpe

I loved you better than you knew.

The recurring line in Left Behind by Elizabeth Akers Allen

And since others have cheated a little too...

Here in a world without a sky,
Without the ground, without the sea,
The one unchanging thing is I,
Myself remains to comfort me.

White Fog by Sara Teasdale

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less travelled by- and that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, Road Not Taken