One single line of poetry....

I Heard it set to music once, years ago, with just a bodhran for accompaniment, Pausing. It was slow and lilting and beautiful.

Bloody hell Sanity I came on to post just that. Thanks!

"Selfhood begins with a walking away
And love is proved in the letting go"

Cecil Day-Lewis - on his son's first day at school.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Wordsworth

We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time.

I wouldn't want to be faster
Or greener than now if you were with me O you
Were the best of all my days.

Frank O'Hara, Animals

If you said something particularly clever my dad would always say

"and still they gazed and still their wonder grew/that one small head could carry all he knew" (the deserted village by Oliver Goldsmith)

“Save us, save us”, they seem to say,
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”

from Derek Mahon's A Disused Shed in County Wexford. Probably the most complex and majestic poem written by an Irishman since Yeats.

We love the Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales and to this day when it happens that one of us makes a change or sees someone doing it and it turns out badly we say

"And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."

(from Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion)

Ooh, Cooger, I learnt that by heart at school.

"Running round a woodstump, if you chance to find
Little barrels roped and tarred all full of brandy wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor take 'em for you play.
Put the brushwood back again - they'll be gone, next day."

How her fist fits my palm,
a bunch of consolation.

'Beattie is three' - Adrian Mitchell

Wulf, min Wulf! (Wolf, my Wolf!)

'Wulf and Eadwacer'

Again, almost any line from Auden's Funeral Blues - captures grief so well.

homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/auden.stop.html

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

(The Lake Isle of Innisfree, WB Yeats)

Snow fell, undated.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days.

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun

from Auden's poem 'Funeral Blues'

DD (13) has recently started writing poetry and this is the last line from my favourite of the ones she has written so far:

"And now we wait"

The whole poem leaves you with this anticipation, it really is very good but then I am a bit biased :)

From "A Question" by Robert Frost:
"A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth."

Watch the wall my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.

trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love, though the stars walk backwards)

ee cummings

Lovely thread.

I keep coming back, but

This is the night mail crossing the border ...

You can hear the wheels and engine

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached unlocked her silent throat.
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
She sung her first and last and sung no more:
Farewell all joys, O death come close mine eyes.
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

Lovely lovely Gibbons.

I have measured out my life in coffee spoons

Wild nights Wild nights
Were I with thee
Wild nights would be
Our luxury.

I love Emily Dickinson.

Also Yeats:

Who will go drive with Fergus now
And pierce the deep woods woven glade
And dance upon the level shore?

Whenever I am on a beach I think about dancing on the level shore.

I'm a primary school teacher, and the favourite poem that the younger children like is Mister Moore. This is just a stanza from it;

Mister Moore wears wooden suits,
Mister Moore's got great big boots,
Mister Moore's got hair like a brush,
And Mister Moore don't like me much.

Whenever I do whole school assemblies, I tend to recite it, and all the classes I've taught join in - it's great! This year, I've got Year 6 and we're currently studying Emily Dickinson's work. I hadn't known much about her prior to this, but have fallen in love with her poetry, and so have the children. My favourites of hers so far are Hope is the thing with feathers, and Tell the truth, but tell it slant, success in circuit lies. She has such an amazing sense of rhythm.

On days when I look back with regret at the way I voluntarily ruined my own career to be a SAHM I think of .'Something is pushing them to the side of their own lives.' Afternoons by Larkin

The old lie; Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori

Wilfred Owen. That poem fundamentally changed how I saw the world when I first read it, aged 15.