Favourite poems

[Readitandsleep]

Only type of thread I know how to start, favourite lines of poetry. Love hearing new lines and the reasons that make them important to others.

Will start with this

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

That is beautiful DrFox
Also love everything by Sylvia Plath

Swans sing before they die, twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

Coleridge
Also a big fan of T.S. Eliot
I have measured my life in coffee spoons - Prufrock

Swans sing before they die, twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.
He must have been watching X Factor when he wrote that

Great thread!

In A Bath Teashop by John Betjeman

"Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another—
Let us hold hands and look."
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop's ingle-nook.

Heaven by Rupert Brooke
Lovely lines. I learnt it aged about 9yo, when I didn't understand it really, but I still know it.
"Oh never a fly conceals a hook
Fish say in the eternal brook
But more than mundane weeds are there
And mud celestially fair
Fat caterpillars drift around
And paradisal grubs are found
Unfaded moths, immortal flies
And the worm that never dies

And in that Heaven of all their wish
There shall be no more land... say fish"

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

High Flight – John Gillespie Magee

OP yours is my absolute favourite as well.

I also love The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. It's so rhythmic and atmospheric. I used to know if off by heart. Too long to reproduce here though!