Which poem do you love and why?

[AtlasPine]

I currently love this one by Philip Larkin. It’s called ‘Talking in Bed’. To me it speaks volumes about the impact of being thrown together 24 hours each frustrating day.

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

dont know why it posted his name 3 times

This poem slayed me when I first read it, and drifts of it come to mind at different times/when I'm going through something emotional- it reminds me its ok to have feelings , and not become a 'just doing my job' type of person

I always think that so many people on here would benefit from this (including me of course)

Musee de beaux arts, by WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I love this, thank you for starting not. It's great remembering the Philip Larkin from A level days. We did The Whitsun Weddings and I loved them, especially the title poem, I remember long-shadowed cattle and all the people and the seeds blowing in the wind.

I also loved Mr Bleaney's Room and Wild Oats. I'll try to link but am on phone so it might not work.www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48414/wild-oats

I also love one called cargoes about boats coming in, but cannot remember the name of the poet. Caveny?

Sorry, the ‘why’ fell off that post!
It’s because we are not just the stars of our own tragedies, romances etc, but also bystanders in the stories of others. And because life is always going on, we’re not the be all and end all, no matter what we think.

web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/cargoes.html

Sorry it is John Masefield.

[quote Monkeytapper]@VinylDetective...I was just going to post this poem!...by Leo Marks made famous by being in film ‘Carve her name with Pride’

This was read at my Mums funeral too.[/quote]
Oh, yes! Violette Zhabo.
I first watched Carve Her Name With Pride at school when I was 14

Never forgotton it.

Sea Fever

BYJOHN MASEFIELD

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

First poem I really loved.

Also love a lot of Pablo Neruda and e e cummings.

Oh god I have loads! I used to write poetry and was published a few times.

Current favourite

Two-Headed Calf by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

One of many favourites WB Yeats The Stares Nest outside My Window

The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

I'm not a huge poetry fan; mostly I like silly poems or limericks. But I do like this poem a lot:
Dangerous Coats

Someone clever once said
Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets
To spread sedition
Which means unrest
To you & me
A grandiose word
For commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies, start sewing
Dangerous coats
Made of pockets & sedition

Sharon Owens

Oh and this by Wendy Cope

After the Lunch

On Waterloo Bridge, where we said our goodbyes,
the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.
I wipe them away with a black woolly glove
And try not to notice I’ve fallen in love.

On Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:
This is nothing. you’re high on the charm and the drink.
But the juke-box inside me is playing a song
That says something different. And when was it wrong?

On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip. You’re a fool. I don’t care.
the head does its best but the heart is the boss-
I admit it before I am halfway across.

This, by Lorca

It's True
Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!

For love of you, the air, it hurts,
and my heart,
and my hat, they hurt me.

Who would buy it from me,
this ribbon I am holding,
and this sadness of cotton,
white, for making hankerchiefs with?

Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!

Also, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and My Boy Jack by Kipling. There's a great video of Martin Shaw reading the latter at a Festival of Remembrance.

This is quite possibly my favourite ever mumsnet thread and I have been around since the penguin bollards (on and off)

Desiderata is one of my all time faves

But I also love Christina Rossetti Remember Me, Wilfred Owen Dulce et Decorum Est, Philip Larkin is an amazing word Smith even though as a human he is not necessarily so great!

But I also love working with kids on Alan Ahlberg and the Mrs Butler poems, Michael Rosen. Such fun and a great way to get kids talking about poetry.

Am now off to add lots of these to my kindle reading list

And this by Iain Crichton Smith

Some days were running legs

Some days were running legs and joy
and old men telling tomorrow would be
a fine day surely: for sky was red
at setting of sun between the hills.

Some nights were parting at the gates
with day’s companions: and dew falling
on heads clear of ambition except light
returning and throwing stones at sticks.

Some days were rain flooding forever the green
pasture: and horses turning to the wind
bare smooth backs. The toothed rocks rising
sharp and grey out of the ancient sea.

Some nights were shawling mirrors lest the lightning
strike with eel’s speed out of the storm.
Black the roman rooks came from the left squawking
and the evening flowed back around their wings.

Margaret Atwood 'Variations on the word sleep' I have fallen out with her a bit lately but trying to disassociate art from the artist!

poets.org/poem/variation-word-sleep

Name changes as it would out me! I absolutely love this poem, it makes me smile and think of when my children were chubby handed toddlers.

BEATTIE IS THREE

At the top of the stairs
I ask for her hand. O.K.
She gives it to me.
How her fist fits my palm,
A bunch of consolation.
We take our time
Down the steep carpetway
As I wish silently
That the stairs were endless.

By Adrian Mitchell

Don't forget Grandmaster Flash:

A child is born with no state of mind
Blind to the ways of mankind
God is smiling on you, but he's frowning too
Because only God knows what you gon' do
You'll grow in the ghetto, living second rate
And your eyes will sing a song of deep hate

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
BY E. E. CUMMINGS

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

I read The Dash at my mums funeral. One of the hardest things I’ve ever done

Thank you for the Frank O’Hara and the Walcott. My contribution is the poem the Walcott answers:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

All these posts and no Seamus Heaney yet?

Mid Term Break. It's properly tear jerking, particularly as it is autobiographical.

I studied this poem in school and it moved me so much then and still does. Heart breaking.

Timothy Winters'
Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football-pool,
Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters:
A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters.

His belly is white, his neck is dark,
And his hair is an exclamation-mark.
His clothes are enough to scare a crow
And through his britches the blue winds blow.

When teacher talks he won't hear a word
And he shoots down dead the arithmetic-bird,
He licks the pattern off his plate
And he's not even heard of the Welfare State.

Timothy Winters has bloody feet
And he lives in a house on Suez Street,
He sleeps in a sack on the kithen floor
And they say there aren't boys like him anymore.

Old Man Winters likes his beer
And his missus ran off with a bombardier,
Grandma sits in the grate with a gin
And Timothy's dosed with an aspirin.

The welfare Worker lies awake
But the law's as tricky as a ten-foot snake,
So Timothy Winters drinks his cup
And slowly goes on growing up.

At Morning Prayers the Master helves
for children less fortunate than ourselves,
And the loudest response in the room is when
Timothy Winters roars "Amen!"

So come one angel, come on ten
Timothy Winters says "Amen
Amen amen amen amen."
Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen