To ask for your favourite poem

[user365241987]

Just because. Do post the words as well if you can...

SparrowandNightingale i love your username!

Dalek: There are so many good poems in "A Shropshire Lad.'

There are also lots of good parodies which can be enjoyed without spoiling the originals.

John Donne's "The Sun Rising"

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

    Thy beams, so reverend and strong
    Why shoulds't thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th'Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me?
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, 'All here in one bed lay.'

    She's all states, and all princes, I;
    Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here, to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

Scaffolding by Seamus Heaney

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

Beatrix is Three by Adrian Mitchell

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.

Refugees by Brian Bilston

Refugees
They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

Mine which I would read to my kids when the were babies:
If—
Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

Thread of the year!
I love these, wild geese and everywhere she dies have moved me hugely, thank you

As "Here dead lie we" and Skimbleshanks have been taken, here is another favourite of mine, I read it every April!

April Inventory
BY W. D. SNODGRASS

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.

In one whole year I haven’t learned

A blessed thing they pay you for.

The blossoms snow down in my hair;

The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.

The sleek, expensive girls I teach,

Younger and pinker every year,

Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop

Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now

I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how

My teeth are falling with my hair.

In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,

I made myself a little list
Of all the things I’d ought to know,

Then told my parents, analyst,

And everyone who’s trusted me

I’d be substantial, presently.

I haven’t read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.

Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.

And one by one the solid scholars

Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;

One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.

Lacking a source-book or promotions,

I showed one child the colors of

A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;

To ease my woman so she came,

To ease an old man who was dying.

I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;

That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body’s hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,

My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.

There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,

We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.

There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

I'm struck by how many poems are centred around key moments in our lives: falling in love, break ups, bereavement, parenthood, growing old.

I love scaffolding too

Leading on from my last comment, one poem for the end of a life and one for the beginning...

“Flowers”

Margaret Atwood

Right now I am the flower girl.
I bring fresh flowers, dump out the old ones, the greenish water
that smell like dirty teeth
into the bathroom sink, snip off the stem ends
with surgical scissors I borrowed from the nursing station,
put them in a jar
I brought from home, because they don’t have vases
in this hotel for the ill,
place them on the table beside my father
where he can’t se them
becuase he won’t open his eyes.

He lies flattened under the white sheet.
He says he is on a ship,
and I can see it-
the functional white walls, the minimal windows,
the little bells, the rubbery footsteps of strangers,
the whispering all around
of the air-conditioner, or else the ocean,
and he is on a ship;
he’s giving us up, giving up everything
but the breath going in
and out of his diminished body;
minute by minute he’s sailing slowly away,
away from us and our waving hands
that do not wave.

The women come in, two of them, in blue;
it’s no use being kind, in here, if you don’t have hands like theirs-
large and capable, the hands
of plump muscular angels,
the ones that blow trumpets and lift swords.
They shift him carefully, tuck in the corners.
It hurts, but as little as possible.
Pain is their lore. The rest of us
are helpless amateurs.

A suffering you can neither cure nor enter-
there are worse things, but not many.
After a while it makes us impatient.
Can’t we do anything but feel sorry?

I sit there, watching the flowers in their pickle jar. He is asleep, or not.
I think; He looks like a turtle.
Or: He looks erased.
But somewhere in there, at the far end of the tunnel
of pain and forgetting he’s trapped in
is the same father I knew before,
the one who carried the green canoe
over the portage, the painter trailing,
myself with the fishing rods, slipping on the wet boulders and slapping flies.
That was the last time we went there.

There will be a last time for this also,
bringing cut flowers to this white room.
Sooner or later I too
will have to give everything up,
even the sorrow that comes with these flowers,
even the anger,
even the memory of how I brought them
from a garden I will no longer have by then,
and put them beside my dying father,
hoping I could still save him.

[This one I have feminist issues with the focus on feminine beauty as a measure of worth but I love the sentiment!]

Born Yesterday
Philip Larkin

For Sally Amis

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.

Then there is the parody on Poe:

Charnel-minded Edgar Allan, sure you are nodding: shall an
Architect in planning put a lamp so far above the floor
As to shine down on a raven
Which has found a shaky haven
On a graven image which is higher than the door?
As to shine down on a bird above a bust above a door?
They'd employ him
Nevermore!

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by
That here, obedient to command, we lie.

It was the first piece of Greek verse I was able to understand when I took Greek to A and A level so I have known it in the original for over fifty years. A wonderful couplet.

We need a bit of Shakespeare. I love Sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

MWestie thank you for sharing Refugees. Stunning and I had forgotten all about it. I must say that this thread is hugely lifting my spirits. At some point this weekend, I'm going to make a lovely cup of tea and quietly read through in peace.

Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy and Ode to a Nightingale by Keats.

poem
About this poet

Florence Margaret "Stevie" Smith was born on September 20, 1902 in Yorkshire, England. Her father left the family to join the North Sea Patrol when she was very young. At age three she moved with her sister and mother to the northern London suburb Palmers Green. This was her home until her death in 1971. Her mother died when she was a teenager and she and her sister lived with their spinster aunt, an important figure throughout her life, known as "The Lion." After high school she attended North London Collegiate School for Girls. She began as a secretary with the magazine publisher George Newnes and went on to be the private secretary to Sir Nevill Pearson and Sir Frank Newnes. She began writing poetry in her twenties while working at George Newnes. Her first book, Novel on Yellow Paper, was published in 1936 and drew heavily on her own life experience, examining the unrest in England during World War I. Her first collection of verse, A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), also contained rough sketches or doodles, which became characteristic of her work. These drawings have both a feeling of caprice and doom, and the poetry in the collection is stylistically typical of Smith as it conveys serious themes in a nursery rhyme structure.

While Smith's volatile attachment to the Church of England is evident in her poetry, death, her "gentle friend," is perhaps her most popular subject. Much of her inspiration came from theology and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. She enjoyed reading Tennyson and Browning and read few contemporary poets in an attempt to keep her voice original and pure. Her style is unique in its combination of seemingly prosaic statements, variety of voices, playful meter, and deep sense of irony. Smith was officially recognized with the Chomondeley Award for Poetry in 1966 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1969. Smith died of a brain tumor on March 7, 1971.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

A Good Time Was Had By All (1937)
Collected Poems (1975)
Harold's Leap (1950)
Mother, What is Man? (1942)
Not Waving But Drowning (1957)
Scorpion and Other Poems (1972)
Selected Poems (1962)
Tender Only to One (1938)
The Best Beast (1969)
The Frog Prince and Other Poems (1966)
Two in One (1971)

Prose

A Very Pleasant Evening with Stevie Smith: Selected Short Prose (1995)

Letters

A Novel on Yellow Paper (1936)
Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1981)
Over the Frontier (1938)
Some Are More Human Than Others (1958)
The Holiday (1949)

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Not Waving but Drowning
Stevie Smith, 1902 - 1971
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Oh...copy and paste fail....

I've always loved this poem by Langston Hughes.

Let America Be America Again

by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

I'll always remember reading the Langston Hughes poem "Children 's Rhyme " to a class of eleven year olds on the day Barack Obama went up to the White House. The opening lines are:
By what sends the white kids, I ain't sent
I know I can't be President.

NannyHJ - that's my favourite too.

What a great thread, OP - thank you

I also really like Morning Song by Sylvia Plath:

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.