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.

@wellthatsunusual

All these posts and no Seamus Heaney yet?

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

I was going to mentioned Seamus Heaney’s Digging

Loving this thread! Have saved a few of these poems. My favourite poem was written by a friend and would give me away! I know he’s very depressing but I love pretty much all Leonard Cohen poetry. Especially I Heard of a Man, and Letter so I’ll post both of them here

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.

If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.
it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside the door.

Letter

How you murdered your family
means nothing to me
as your mouth moves across my body

And I know your dreams
of crumbling cities and galloping horses
of the sun coming too close
and the night never ending

but these mean nothing to me
beside your body

I know that outside a war is raging
that you issue orders
that babies are smothered and generals beheaded

but blood means nothing to me
it does not disturb you flesh

tasting blood on your tongue
does not shock me
as my arms grow into your hair

Do not think I do not understand
what happens
after the troops have been massacred
and the harlots put to the sword

And I write this only to rob you

that when one morning my head
hangs dripping with the other generals
from your house gate

that all this was anticipated
and so you will know that it meant nothing to me.

Oh and a funny poem I’ve always loved is Pam Ayres, I think it goes

the day our nanny got the sack
The baby slipped up round the back
He banged his head and cut his knee
And ran to her and not to me.

When I was younger I thought it meant the baby ran to the nanny even though she’d been fired.... but now as a mother I see the fact the baby ran to the nanny first is why she’s been fired 🙈

Swans song before they die, twere no bad tging,
Should certain person for before they sing.
Coleridge.
Short and to the point.
I also like T.S. Eliot as John Betjamin.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Carol Ann Duffy

Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

I love W B yeats 'when you are old'

It makes me feel a bit happy sad ( sorry I'm not sure how to explain it better, melancholy maybe?)

sorry-missed off the first line

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

I love this one, it's very sweet and romantic

Pathways by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Understand, I’ll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:

You come too.

@Springfern that's lovely! I have one in the same spirit. It transports.
As dew leaves the cobweb lightly
Threaded with stars,
Scattering jewels on the fence
And the pasture bars;
As dawn leaves the dry grass bright
And the tangled weeds
Bearing a rainbow gem
On each of their seeds;
So has your love, my lover,
Fresh as the dawn,
Made me a shining road
To travel on,
Set every common sight
Of tree or stone
Delicately alight
For me alone.
Sara Teasdale

My favourite poem is My Daughter's Body, by Jennifer Franklin. It’s written about her autistic daughter. I have an autistic son, and this poem makes me sob every time I read it. Especially the part about the bodies in the museum. It’s how my son and I lay in bed before he goes to sleep. And the last sentence...

My Daughter’s Body
Jennifer Franklin

If you saw her, you would think she was beautiful.
Strangers stop me on the street to say it.

If they talk to her they see that this beauty
Means nothing. Their sight shifts to pigeons

On the sidewalk. Their eye contact becomes
As poor as hers. They slip away slowly,

With varying degrees of grace. I never know
How much to say to explain the heartbreak.

Sometimes, I tell them. More often,
I remain silent. As her smile sears me, I hold

Her hand all the way home from the swings.
The florist hands her a dying rose and she holds it

Gently without ripping the petals like she does
To the tulips that stare at us with their insipid faces,

Pretending that they can hold my sorrow
In their outstretched cups because I knew them

Before I knew grief. They do not understand that
They are ruined for me now. I planted five hundred

Bulbs as she grew inside of me, her brain already
Formed by strands of our damaged DNA

Or something else the doctors don’t understand.
After her bath, she curls up on me for lullabies—

The only time during the day that her small body is still.
As I sing, I breathe in her shampooed hair and think

Of the skeletons in the Musée de Préhistoire
In Les Eyzies. The bones of the mother and baby

Lie in a glass case in the same position we are
In now. They were buried in that unusual pose,

Child curled up in the crook of the mother’s arm.
The archaeologists are puzzled by the position.

It doesn’t surprise me at all. It would be so easy
To die this way—both of us taking our last breaths

With nursery rhymes on our open lips
And the promise of peaceful sleep.

@Speminalium that is beautiful. Thanks for sharing

*All these posts and no Seamus Heaney yet?

Mid Term Break. It's properly tear jerking, particularly as it is autobiographical.
I was going to mentioned Seamus Heaney’s Digging*

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away

Always brings a tear to my eye

I love this poem

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

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.

@Robbybobtail

To his mistress going to bed by John Donne

Because it’s soo sexy but also very romantic.

No it's not! It's not romantic and it's not sexy. He just wanted to talk a woman into bed. I wrote a reply to that poem for my folio. My English teacher loved it.

Seconding Prufrock. There is a beautiful version on YouTube with him reading some of the verses.

Also Stings by Sylvia Plath, part of the bee series she wrote during her separation from Hughes. Always loved it.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/genius.com/amp/Sylvia-plath-stings-annotated

I love this thread :D

I wasn't into poetry when I was young but I remember reading Dulce et Decorum Est at school and being blown away by it, it actually made my cry.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Say not the Struggle nought Availeth
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
Say not the struggle nought availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.

This one by Heaney. Nothing I have ever read has described the gaping loss of a baby quite so accurately. Every time I read it I find something new that resonates

ELEGY FOR A STILL-BORN CHILD
I
Your mother walks light as an empty creel
Unlearning the intimate nudge and pull
Your trussed-up weight of seed-flesh and bone-curd
Had insisted on. That evicted world
Contracts round its history, its scar.
Doomsday struck when your collapsed sphere
Extinguished itself in our atmosphere,
Your mother heavy with the lightness in her.
II
For six months you stayed cartographer
Charting my friend from husband towards father
He guessed a globe behind your steady mound.
Then the pole fell, shooting star, into the ground.
III
On lonely journeys I think of it all,
Birth of death, exhumation for burial,
A wreath of small clothes, a memorial pram,
And parents reaching for a phantom limb.
I drive by remote control on this bare road
Under a drizzling sky, a circling rock.
Past mountain fields, full to the brim with cloud,
White waves riding home on a wintry lough.

Little Black Dress

My carriage straight, your bosom taut,
I courted you smartly, as young men ought,
Applauded your shape in a little black dress,
Followed your arms as they rose to undress.
Now frames are bent, our breastwork sags,
And the little black dress is gone for rags.
So I court you gently, as old men must,
With a shade less ardor, a bit less fuss.

@LunaNorth

I have loads.

This one is wonderfully atmospheric and the repeated last line speaks to me about my anxiety,

This is mine, too. I love the last line - but it makes me feel like I'm on a quest, rather than anxious!

I'm Aragorn in my head.

Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

i love that @TheGirlOnTheLanding

@alittlebitofbreadandnocheese

Little Black Dress  My carriage straight, your bosom taut, I courted you smartly, as young men ought, Applauded your shape in a little black dress, Followed your arms as they rose to undress. Now frames are bent, our breastwork sags, And the little black dress is gone for rags. So I court you gently, as old men must, With a shade less ardor, a bit less fuss.

I love that. Who is it by?

Unending Love by Rabindranath Tagore

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.