Tell me your favourite poem

[Januarycold]

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

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Donkey by GK Chesterton

I like Aubade by Philip Larkin. It's about death

@splattt that's Wendy cope, right?

Tony Harrison ‘Initial Illumination’
John Donne ‘Nocturnal Upon St Lucies Day’
Are two of my favourites

I like the raven by Edgar Allan Poe. It's often touted as a creepy Halloween poem but it's actually pretty tragic.

If by kipling

The chaos (illustrates beautifully how complex English is)

The highwayman mentioned by a pp is really good too

Thank you so much so far for your suggestions! Really appreciate it!

But You Didn’t
By Merrill Glass

It’s set at the time of the Vietnam war. Quite short and very poignant.

Perhaps a bit morbid but I love Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe. Also another vote for Stop All The Clocks by WH Auden.

Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 which I learned by heart many years ago and still find astoundingly beautiful.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.’

Can I go for two (and there are so many more)

Celia, Celia
Adrian Mitchell

When I am sad and weary

When I think all hope has gone

When I walk along High Holborn

I think of you with nothing on.

Everyone Sang
By Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Mother Doesn't Want A Dog - Judith Viorst

Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they smell,
And never sit when you say sit,
Or even when you yell.
And when you come home late at night
And there is ice and snow,
You have to go back out because
The dumb dog has to go.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
Mother says they shed,
And always let the strangers in
And bark at friends instead,
And do disgraceful things on rugs,
And track mud on the floor,
And flop upon your bed at night
And snore their doggy snore.

Mother doesn't want a dog.
She's making a mistake.
Because, more than a dog, I think
She will not want this snake.

Wendell Berry - The peace of wild things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

It ain't what you do, it's what it does to you

I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi's and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.

I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I

skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone's inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.

I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light-aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.

And I guess that the tightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.

by Simon Armitage

A Smuggler's song by Rudyard Kipling

Gives me Asmr tingles

Robert Burns 'To a Mouse'
Gerard Manley Hopkins 'The Windhover'

The Tiger
By William Blake
1757-1827

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Walt Whitman, The Learn'd Astronomer.
Tennyson, Ulysses.

@daisychain01 that is one of my favourites

I saw this one on a memorial bench 20 years ago and have loved it ever since

“And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass…”
– Ezra Pound

Song of Wandering Aengus - WB Yeats.
The Twoheaded Calf - Laura Gilpin. Found this one here on Mumsnet a while ago, it's so sad and beautiful.

This thread is an absolute gold mine and my pockets are not as deep as my amazon wishlist is long!

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe.

In Memoriam by Ewart Alan Macintosh

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening by Robert Frost

I’ll post a link rather than copy and paste as it’s a bit lengthy!

wordsfortheyear.com/2014/02/19/b-if-i-should-have-a-daughter-by-sarah-kay/

@MuseumOfYou I love that!!

How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett browning.