Probably the wrong place, but your favourite poems

Love this thread - some of favourites have already been posted (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening & I carry you in my heart) but here is another one I love;

Christina Rossetti
Remember

REMEMBER me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad

My mother used to tell me this first verse of the Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem when I was a child and it has still stuck with me:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you:
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth
Must borrow its mirth,
It has trouble enough of its own.

Wow, thanks to all. Made my day.

I've only put the last half of my favourite here, because it's long.

It's Yeats, 'Among School Children'

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Wow! What a wonderful wonderful thread.....I have tears in my eyes as I read some of these poems.

Another vote for The Cloths OF Heaven

From memory so might be wrong; by W. S. Graham. From memory so might have some mistakes.

I leave this at your ear for when you wake
A creature in its abstract cage asleep
Your dreams blindfold you with the light they make.

An owl called from the naked-woman tree
As I came down from the Kyle farm to hear
Your house silent by the sleeping sea.

I have come late but I have come before
Later with slaked steps from stone to stone
To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth-kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

And another one with a peacock (obviously in that kind of mood today!)

It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances.
It sports a mosaic of passions
Like a peacock?s tail,
It soars to the sky with delight, it quests, O wildly
It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances

...

It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances, it dances.
The woods vibrate with cicadas,
Rain soaks leaves,
The river roars nearer and nearer the village, O wildly
It dances today, my heart, like a peacock it dances.

From 'New Rain' by Rabindranath Tagore

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Hey, for anyone in the London area who followed the link to WOW! on this thread..all your support has led me to start a residency in Battersea Arts Centre to develop their toddler play area into a poetry stage where people with kids can come and see a gig / reading. My first days for anyone in London are here, and free: come along anytime, would be lovely to meet you..! www.bac.org.uk/whats-on/push-kick-scratch/ I'll be in the childrens play area on the 22nd and 23rd Sept, morning and early afternoon x

I've loved this one since I studied it for A-level. It sums up my approach to life and reminds me to keep going and be a good role-model to my daughters:

The Road not Taken by Robert Frost (1920)

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I?

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

That's lovely, thefirstMrsDV. I love Roger McGough. This is another of my favourites by one of my favourite poets, Edwin Morgan.

When you go,
if you go,
And I should want to die,
there's nothing I'd be saved by
more than the time
you fell asleep in my arms
in a trust so gentle
I let the darkening room
drink up the evening, till
rest, or the new rain
lightly roused you awake.
I asked if you heard the rain in your dream
and half dreaming still you only said, I love you.

sweetestthing that is beautiful and will be added to my collections. Have you seen this one?

We fall to the earth like leaves
Lives as brief as footprints in snow
No words express the grief we feel
I feel I cannot let her go.
For she is everywhere.
Walking on the windswept beach
Talking in the sunlit square.
Next to me in the car
I see her sitting there.
At night she dreams me
and in the morning the sun does not rise.
My life is as thin as the wind
And I am done with counting stars.
She is gone, she is gone.
I am her sad music, and I play on, and on, and on.
(Roger McGough

oh nooo! I think the last line should be "may it happen for you"! Damn c&p

To make up for that, here's another one:

Dog Days

When you stop to consider
The days spent dreaming of a future
And say then, that was my life.

For the days are long -
From the first milk van
To the last shout in the night,
An eternity. But the weeks go by
Like birds; and the years, the years
Fly past anti-clockwise
Like clock hands in a bar mirror.

Derek Mahon

I have been really enjoying all of these.

This is one of my favourites:

Sometimes

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 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 to you

~ Sheenagh Pugh ~

This is a fabulous thread! I'm really enjoying everyones poems. I hope we can keep it going

The Lanyard - Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly?
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that?s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift?not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Dont let me kill this thread

Mrs DV..........

The Recall

The night was dark when she went away, and the slept.
The night is dark now, and I call for her, "Come back, my
darling; the world is asleep; and no one would know, if you came
for a moment while stars are gazing at stars."
She went away when the trees were in bud and the spring was
young.
Now the flowers are in high bloom and I call, "Come back, my
darling. The children gather and scatter flowers in reckless sport.
And if you come and take one little blossom no one will miss it."
Those that used to play are playing still, so spendthrift is
life.
I listen to their chatter and call, "Come back, my darling,
for mother's heart is full to the brim with love, and if you come
to snatch only one little kiss from her no one will grudge it."

Rabinderath Tagore

This thread has had me bawling my eyes out and laughing out loud! This is one of my all time favourties (or perhaps one of the only ones I can remember in my permanent state of baby-brain).

Warning, by Jenny Joseph
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

I have always loved this one ('To a Mouse') by Robert Burns.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

And Yeats -- 'Prayer for my Daughter' and 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death'.

Lots of my favourites have already been posted. For a slight change of pace from the sad and the beautiful, here's a classic poem by northern (sadly departed) comedian Hovis Presley. We had it at our wedding...

I rely on you
like a Skoda needs suspension
like the aged need a pension
like a trampoline needs tension
like a bungee jump needs apprehension

I rely on you
like a camera needs a shutter
like a gambler needs a flutter
like a golfer needs a putter
like a buttered scone involves some butter

I rely on you
like an acrobat needs ice cool nerve
like a hairpin needs a drastic curve
like an HGV needs endless derv
like an outside left needs a body swerve

I rely on you
like a handyman needs pliers
like an auctioneer needs buyers
like a laundromat needs driers
like The Good Life needed Richard Briers

I rely on you
like a water vole needs water
like a brick outhouse needs mortar
like a lemming to the slaughter
Ryan's just Ryan without his daughter
I rely on you

glad you like the bit from the prophet. It's a lovely poem if you read the whole thing.

Another favourite of mine - although I can't get DS to enjoy.

The Dormouse and the Doctor
A.A. Milne

There once was a Dormouse who lived in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)
And all the day long he'd a wonderful view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)

A Doctor came hurrying round, and he said:
"Tut-tut, I am sorry to find you in bed.
Just say 'Ninety-nine', while I look at your chest...
Don't you find that chrysanthemums answer the best?"

The Dormouse looked round at the view and replied
(When he'd said "Ninety-nine") that he'd tried and he'd tried,
And much the most answering things that he knew
Were geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue).

The Doctor stood frowning and shaking his head,
And he took up his shiny silk hat as he said:
"What the patient requires is a change," and he went
To see some chrysanthemum people in Kent.

The Dormouse lay there, and he gazed at the view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue),
And he knew there was nothing he wanted instead
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

The Doctor came back and, to show what he meant,
He had brought some chrysanthemum cuttings from Kent.
"Now these," he remarked, "give a much better view
Than geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)."

They took out their spades and they dug up the bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),
And they planted chrysanthemums (yellow and white).
"And now," said the Doctor, "we'll soon have you right."

The Dormouse looked out, and he said with a sigh:
"I suppose all these people know better than I.
It was silly, perhaps, but I did like the view
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)."

The Doctor came round and examined his chest,
And ordered him Nourishment, Tonics, and Rest.
"How very effective," he said, as he shook
The thermometer, "all these chrysanthemums look!"

The Dormouse turned over to shut out the sight
Of the endless chrysanthemums (yellow and white).
"How lovely," he thought, "to be back in a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)."

The Doctor said, "Tut! It's another attack!"
And ordered him Milk and Massage-of-the-back,
And Freedom-from-worry and Drives-in-a-car,
And murmured, "How sweet your chrysanthemums are!"

The Dormouse lay there with his paws to his eyes,
And imagined himself such a pleasant surprise:
"I'll pretend the chrysanthemums turn to a bed
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)!"

The Doctor next morning was rubbing his hands,
And saying, "There's nobody quite understands
These cases as I do! The cure has begun!
How fresh the chrysanthemums look in the sun!"

The Dormouse lay happy, his eyes were so tight
He could see no chrysanthemums, yellow or white.
And all that he felt at the back of his head
Were delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

^And that is the reason (Aunt Emily said)
If a Dormouse gets in a chrysanthemum bed,
You will find (so Aunt Emily says) that he lies
Fast asleep on his front with his paws to his eyes.^

Another Sylvia Path one

Morning Song
by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

As a child, I was given "A Child's Garden of Verses" by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was just one of my favourites. I loved the book for both the poetry and the illustration.

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Some great choices here; loving that quote from The Prophet. Also so glad to see somebody else liking "somewhere i have never travelled", a poem that in pre-internet days long ago I heard once and eventually tracked down in Senate House library.

That's also the first time I actually read "Poem in October" properly and the first time I liked it.

Is it just me or does the experience of having children make poetry hit the reader harder?

JAD

Choufleur these lines have just made me weep a little bit:

You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

One I love is this bit from the end of Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road:

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Also a lot of Dylan Thomas, Poem in October is one of my favourites:

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

    My birthday began with the water-
 Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
    Above the farms and the white horses
            And I rose
        In a rainy autumn
 And walked abroad in shower of all my days
 High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
        Over the border
            And the gates
    Of the town closed as the town awoke.

    A springful of larks in a rolling
 Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
    Blackbirds and the sun of October
            Summery
        On the hill's shoulder,
 Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
 Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
        To the rain wringing
            Wind blow cold
    In the wood faraway under me.

    Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
 And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
    With its horns through mist and the castle
            Brown as owls
         But all the gardens
 Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
 Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
         There could I marvel
            My birthday
    Away but the weather turned around.

    It turned away from the blithe country
 And down the other air and the blue altered sky
    Streamed again a wonder of summer
            With apples
         Pears and red currants
 And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
 Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
         Through the parables
            Of sunlight
    And the legends of the green chapels

    And the twice told fields of infancy
 That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
    These were the woods the river and the sea
            Where a boy
         In the listening
 Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
 To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
         And the mystery
            Sang alive
    Still in the water and singing birds.

    And there could I marvel my birthday
 Away but the weather turned around. And the true
    Joy of the long dead child sang burning
            In the sun.
         It was my thirtieth
    Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
    Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
         O may my heart's truth
            Still be sung
    On this high hill in a year's turning.