Tell me your favourite poem

[Januarycold]

Want to get into reading and poetry
Need some starters Thanks!

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas and The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.

Mid-Term Break
BY SEAMUS HEANEY

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

Any ideas as to what you like? Classical, modern, feminist, stuff about parenthood? I've got lots of amazing modern female poets on my shelf, but I do find RS Thomas very evocative and accessible.

Under One Small Star by Symborska.

So beautiful

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all my jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
William Butler Yeats

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.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse

Primary teacher so Alison Hubble

www.amazon.co.uk/Alison-Hubble-Allan-Ahlberg/dp/0141359242?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

Vitea Lampada. My granda taught me the first two verses when I was young and it always reminds me of him. It wasn't until I worked in the library years later that I found out it has three verses.
Another that I like is by Stan Rice, something about a man carving a swan from ice with a chainsaw. The last line is "any rat will do" - it's short but powerful, and stuck with me.
For general "everything is good by him" I like John Betjeman, especially "Death in Leamington"

Leisure by William Henry Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

the cremation of sam mcgee by robert service

WH Auden - Stop All The Clocks

I Rise.

By Maya Angelou

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

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 despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Nation's 100 Favourite Poems is a good place to start.

For short, very accessible, modern classics try Brian Bilston's collection in You Took The Last Bus Home. Some are funny others really moving.

YOU TOOK THE LAST BUS HOME
you took
the last bus home

i still don’t know
how you got it through the door

but you’re always doing amazing stuff

like the time
when you caught that train

Anything by WB Yeats is worth a read

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Wizards by Alfred Noyes. (He also wrote The Highwayman which has a fabulous rhythm to it.)

A great place to start is the poemhunter site at www.poemhunter.com, as is www.poetryfoundation.org, and a few years ago the BBC published a couple of lovely anthologies based on their Poetry Please programme.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot

I'm not sure if this is technically poetry (probably it's prose, but it does have a poetic quality about it).

I love that it's seeking to know about the important things in life, not the trivia that dominates our often shallow world:

================

THE INVITATION

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, 'Yes.'

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

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A Blade Of Grass by Brian Patten
Daffodils by William Wordsworth
Follower by Seamus Heaney
Nature’s Politics by Benjamin Zephaniah
Once Upon A Time by Gabriel Okara
Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Tennyson
The Hero by Siegfried Sassoon
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Ode to Autumn by John Keats.

Wish for My Children

On this doorstep I stand
year after year
to watch you going

and think: May you not
skin your knees. May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.

May tide and weather
wait for your coming

and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving.

Evangeline Paterson

Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Source: www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/do-not-stand-by-my-grave-and-weep-by-mary-elizabeth-frye

Rain

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in,
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin.

Spike Milligan

I love lots of poetry and I don't have one particular favourite. So I've made a list of a few that I love (on a different day there would be a different list).

William Shakespeare - Sonnet 33
TS Eliot - The Journey of the Magi
John Donne - A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Frost at Midnight
Gerard Manley Hopkins - The Windhover
Derek Mahon - Everything is Going to be Alright
Louis MacNeice - Snow