Tell me your favourite poem

[Januarycold]

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

AE Housman -

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Counting the Beats by Robert Graves

Coda by Louis Macneice

All of Ezra Pound (horrible twat though he was)

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot

The train at Pershore station was waiting that Sunday night
Gas light on the platform, in my carriage electric light,
Gas light on frosty evergreens, electric on Empire wood,
The Victorian world and the present in a moment's neighbourhood.
There was no one about but a conscript who was saying good-bye to his love
On the windy weedy platform with the sprinkled stars above
When sudden the waiting stillness shook with the ancient spells
Of an older world than all our worlds in the sound of the Pershore bells.
They were ringing them down for Evensong in the lighted abbey near,
Sounds which had poured through apple boughs for seven centuries here.

With Guilt, Remorse, Eternity the void within me fills
And I thought of her left behind me in the Herefordshire hills.
I remembered her defencelessness as I made my heart a stone
Till she wove her self-protection round and left me on my own.
And plunged in a deep self pity I dreamed of another wife
And lusted for freckled faces and lived a separate life.
One word would have made her love me, one word would have made her turn
But the word I never murmured and now I am left to burn.
Evesham, Oxford and London. The carriage is new and smart.
I am cushioned and soft and heated with a deadweight in my heart.

John Betjeman

I just love this one so much ❤️

I loved you first: but afterwards your love
Outsoaring mine, sang such a loftier song
As drowned the friendly cooings of my dove.
Which owes the other most? my love was long,
And yours one moment seemed to wax more strong;
I loved and guessed at you, you construed me
And loved me for what might or might not be –
Nay, weights and measures do us both a wrong.
For verily love knows not ‘mine’ or ‘thine;’
With separate ‘I’ and ‘thou’ free love has done,
For one is both and both are one in love:
Rich love knows nought of ‘thine that is not mine;’
Both have the strength and both the length thereof,
Both of us, of the love which makes us one.

Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

Edna St Vincent Milay or Stevie Smith.

I being born a woman
Renaissance
The simple but brilliant first and second figs

Because I could not stop for death

I read Edna St Vincent Millay's biography recently and was horribly disappointed by it and by how silly she seemed... Oh well. I hope it was just the rather awkward nature of biography generally and the fact I really didn't like the way Nancy Mitford writes, although I know it's well reviewed.

Elastic Jones had rubber bones
He could bounce up and down like a ball.
When he was six, one of his tricks
Was jumping a ten foot wall.

As the years went by, Elastic would try
To jump higher, and higher, and higher.
He amazed people by jumping a steeple
Though he scratched his behind on a spire.

But, like many a star, he went too far,
Getting carried away with his power.
He boasted one day 'Get out of my way!
I'm going to jump Blackpool tower!'

He took off from near the end of the pier,
Bit he slipped and crashed into the top.
Amid cries and groans, Elastic Jones
Fell into the sea with a plop.

One of the most childish poems ever but it is one I will forever remember from my childhood 😂

The Dead Tenor by Walt Whitman. One for us opera lovers.

The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered by the late Clive James. One for us embittered unsuccessful would-be writers, by a writer of absolute genius.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by WB Yeats. Unoriginal choice but so beautiful.

Oh I did do paragraphs. Not sure what happened there!

Although TS Eliot isn't my favourite bits of The Wasteland and The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock are Stück in my brain forever, and I sometimes quote lines to my children in the course of conversation ('April is the cruelest month'... 'Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky' ...'There will be time, there will be time, to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet' 'before the taking of toast and tea' as my own tiny private joke - I spend 90% of my life speaking German and don't speak English aloud to anyone who'd recognise Eliot...

I love The Highwayman.

Another Philip Larkin fan here!
Born Yesterday is my choice :

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love -
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull -
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

Anything by Emily Dickinson 😍

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.

Last Lesson Of the Afternoon- DH Lawrence
Vultures- Chinua Achebe

Prayer before Birth - Louis MacNeice

Maya Angelou. Still I rise

The Rose family - Robert frost

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose—
But were always a rose.

Full Moon and Little Frieda
Ted Hughes

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

And...

Advice on Swearing
Hollie McNish

you called me vulgar
after the gig
said it softly like a mother
as if it were advice

your head weighted to the side
sympathising with
something missing in my life
which i was obviously
filling with these obscenities

you gazed at me
the way my grandma did
softly tucking my hair
behind me ears
to let keep it off my face
saying things like
i wish you’d make something of yourself, Hollie
or
don’t you want to be pretty like your cousins
or
you look nicer with mascara on

you didn’t ask me
for my reasons
just advised
the lack of need
to swear inside a poem
as if a poem were a
a planet crust
unsuited to volcanoes

you suggested I channel a
‘little more Virginia Woolf’

i thought of stones in my pocket
i though of Plath in my pocket
i thought their beautiful poems
i thought depression and solitude
i thought how Aidan Moffat
was on the fucking stage just
after me swearing like a trooper
and you didn’t soap his mouth
i thought how few of my friends
who have dicks and read poems
have been advised against swearing
i thought Chaucer and broomsticks
i thought Robert Burn’s shagging
i thought Dylan Thomas
I thought Lord Byron
i thought orgies and heckling
in Shakespearean theatres
i thought how swearing
has been scientifically
proven to release oxytocin
so stop fucking advising
me not to swear in my poems
as if i know nothing about language
and have not chosen those words
deliberately because i find them
expressive and beautiful
and very fucking useful
sometimes you arrogant
arsehole

i didn’t say that though
i don’t like awkward
conversations

so i breathed in
for the
thousandth time

smiled like
a good women

smiled like a good girl

smiled like a good
female poet

smiled like a child

till you finished
your lesson
and nodded at me
like an ant you had
saved with a delicate leaf
in a literary puddle

then you went

I stood for a second

I said nothing
out loud

I said fuck you
very loud
in my head

and immediately
felt better able
to breath again

'Warming her pearls by Carol Ann Duffy

Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress
bids me wear them, warm them, until evening
when I'll brush her hair. At six, I place them
round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her,

resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk
or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself
whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering
each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope.

She's beautiful. I dream about her
in my attic bed; picture her dancing
with tall men, puzzled by my faint, persistent scent
beneath her French perfume, her milky stones.

I dust her shoulders with a rabbit's foot,
watch the soft blush seep through her skin
like an indolent sigh. In her looking-glass
my red lips part as though I want to speak.

Full moon. Her carriage brings her home. I see
her every movement in my head.... Undressing,
taking off her jewels, her slim hand reaching
for the case, slipping naked into bed, the way

she always does.... And I lie here awake,
knowing the pearls are cooling even now
in the room where my mistress sleeps. All night
I feel their absence and I burn.

They're my 2 favourites (at the moment!)

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in he winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

Robert Graves

Not my very favourite, but a good one for a parenting forum:

For a Five-Year-Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

I love the wittiness and bravery of Still I Rise by Maya Angelou especially the verse

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Stevie smith - not waving, but drowning