One single line of poetry....

Who is that knocking on the moonlit door? (Walter de la Mare)

Come away oh human child, to the waters and the wild. (Yeats)

And she me caught in her arms long and small.(Wyatt)

Summer is acumen in, Lude sing Cucu, (13th Century)

I'm nobody who are you, are you nobody too?(Emily Dickinson)

My America, My Newfoundland (John Donne)

Put your head darling, darling, darling, your darling dark head my heart above. (Anon. 18th century Irish)

Western, wind, when will thou blow (16th century, anon)

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, (Shakespeare)

So far out all my life and not waving but drowning (Stevie Smith)

Bhi Subh Milis ar bhascranna an doras (Irish poem about jammy finger stains on the door that are left there because they won't be there forever).

June in her eyes, in her heart January.

Hackmum, a friend read Sometimes at her sister's wedding. It has remained with me ever since.

This is the weather the shepherd shuns
And so do I....
And rooks in families homeward go
And so do I.

Not a poem, but Walton's triumphant sentence on the death of John Donne, "..that body..which is become a small quantity of Christian dust.

But I shall see it reanimated. "

And Keats ' Autumn and nightingale, and Shelley's Ode to the West wind,

If winter come,
Can spring be far behind?

I love that poem isme
I have recited those last lines beneath my breath so many times

Dearest grow old with me
The best is yet to be

Lovers will die but love shall not
And death shall have no dominion

Dylan Thomas

Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.

Edwin Muir, The dying child

Came across this in a book of war poems and it always gives me the shivers

Loving this thread! Lots of favourites, but some of my favourite lines come from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald...

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan's Turret in a Noose of Light.

Dreaming when Dawn's Left Hand was in the Sky
I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry,
"Awake, my Little ones and fill the Cup
Before Life's Liquor in its Cup be dry."

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
(Philip Larkin)

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
(Tennyson)

The mams pig-sick of oilstains in the wash
wished for their sons a better class of gear,
?wear their own clothes into work? but not go posh,
Go up a rung or two but settle near.
(Tony Harrison)

Reading this thread, I've realised that I have lots of bits of poetry that come to mind at one time or another. Dylan Thomas:

"Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

And

"Do not go gentle into that good night
But rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

I'm very fond of the Sheenagh Pugh poem "Sometimes". I was just going to quote the final two lines, which are wonderful, but you have to read the whole thing to understand the context:

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!" The Jabberwock, CS Lewis

The whole of by Hollie McNish gets stuck in my head like a song...

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart

"They also live / Who swerve and vanish in the river."--Archibald MacLeish

sunt lacrimae rerum - there are tears in things. Half a line, from Virgil. Stayed with me for 30 years, so far. Sad and realistic and hopeful, all at once.

I've been thinking of this thread all day with gratitude - it's sent me back to some half-forgotten favourites and encouraged me to look up some neglected (by me) poets; I've never really got to grips with Yeats, for example.

I've thought of a couple more that I love:

"World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural." (MacNeice - Snow)

And John Donne:

"Oh, my America, my new found land."

Also, I'm never sure what I think about Ted Hughes, but I do love the first line of Full Moon and Little Frieda:

"A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -"

I've enjoyed reading all the posts, lovely thread.

Keats's Ode to Autumn is one of my favorites. I have lived most of my life in warm climates, with little change of seasons, so the loveliness of autumn is rare for me and so even more cherished.

Two lines in particular:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

"Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."

Catullus 85

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do this?
I do not know, but I feel it happen and I am torn apart.

Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.....

And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.

Sharon Olds

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish.

You're, by Sylvia Plath

I don't know why this has stayed with me, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.

'Turn away no more, why whilt thou turn away?
The starry floor, the wat'ry shore,
Are given thee til the break of day'

Blake. I always think of this when I'm walking on the beach.

This is such a beautiful thread (especially your posts pausing).

The line(s, sorry!) going round in my head are 'Your love is my metal, your kisses my rivets,/ You are like the ocean beneath a slick of spillage'.

I love how unexpected it is. The whole poem is brilliant too. It's called 'Fuck the Poem':

I haven't written in ages,
'cause I'd rather stare at you than stare at pages.

But what would be great is
making a poem that could be half as courageous
as you when you're naked.
I try for a minute -

Your love is my metal, your kisses my rivets,
You are like the ocean beneath a slick of spillage

Fuck the poem.

There's a bed here
and you want me in it.

Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?

~ Snow, Carol Ann Duffy

"Just living is not enough" said the Butterfly fairy, "one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."