To ask you to tell me your favourite poet/poem

[Ethelfleda]

I’ve always been quite dense on the topic
I till recently reading ‘The Road Not Taken’ which I loved! I have started to read a little more and am really getting in to it!
So thought I would ask the great MN collective about favourite poets/poems/anthologies

I love poetry so it's very hard to choose. Top 5 would be

Mending Wall by Robert Frost
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
When I am Old and Grey by WB Yeats
The Destruction of Sennacherib by Lord Byron
How Do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

If I had to choose just one I think it would be Yeats.

@Lifeisgenerallyfun

See www.bl.uk/learning/images/changing/new/transcript4964.html for details of the changes Wilfred Owen made to Dulce et Decorum Est, including the change you noted.

I love poetry and lyrics. This is the poem I've been thinking about today (because I sent a really sweary text....I love swearing too!)

Advice on Swearing
By
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

I haven't seen a mention of Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias. Apologies if someone has mentioned it: the thread is quite long.

I met a Traveller from an antique land,
Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.'
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas and The Soldier by Rupert Brooke. My Dad requested the latter at his funeral.
I can’t read either of them without crying.

I love "THe Wreck of the Deutschland" by Gerard Manley Hopkins - beautiful language. Too long to copy here, but this is a link www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44403/the-wreck-of-the-deutschland

Love Wendy Cope - this is a favourite:

Going Too Far

Cuddling the new telephone directory
After I found your name in it
Was going too far.

It's a safe bet you're not hugging a phone book,
Wherever you are.

And this is a family favourite now from Brian Bilston - find it really moving (make sure you read to the bottom):

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)

Dorothy Parker -Men
They hail you as their morning star
Because you are the way you are.
If you return the sentiment,
They'll try to make you different;
And once they have you, safe and sound,
They want to change you all around.
Your moods and ways they put a curse on;
They'd make of you another person.
They cannot let you go your gait;
They influence and educate.
They'd alter all that they admired.
They make me sick, they make me tired.

-Indian Summer
In youth, it was a way I had
To do my best to please,
And change, with every passing lad,
To suit his theories.
But now I know the things I know,
And do the things I do;
And if you do not like me so,
To hell, my love, with you!

"Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Host fast to dreams
For if dreams go
Life is a barren field
Covered in snow"

(Langston Hughes)

• hold not host

Days

BY PHILIP LARKIN

What are days for?
Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats
Running over the fields.

I'm not a fan of poetry in general but this one has stuck with me. I don't want to say it's my favourite because it's so heartbreaking.

Small Pain In My Chest by Michael Mack.

The soldier boy was sitting calmly underneath that tree.
As I approached it, I could see him beckoning to me.
The battle had been long and hard and lasted through the night
And scores of figures on the ground lay still by morning's light.

"I wonder if you'd help me, sir", he smiled as best he could.
"A sip of water on this morn would surely do me good.
We fought all day and fought all night with scarcely any rest -
A sip of water for I have a small pain in my chest."

As I looked at him, I could see the large stain on his shirt
All reddish-brown from his warm blood mixed in with Asian dirt.
"Not much", said he. "I count myself more lucky than the rest.
They're all gone while I just have a small pain in my chest."

"Must be fatigue", he weakly smiled. "I must be getting old.
I see the sun is shining bright and yet I'm feeling cold.
We climbed the hill, two hundred strong, but as we cleared the crest,
The night exploded and I felt this small pain in my chest."

"I looked around to get some aid - the only things I found
Were big, deep craters in the earth - bodies on the ground.
I kept on firing at them, sir. I tried to do my best,
But finally sat down with this small pain in my chest."

"I'm grateful, sir", he whispered, as I handed my canteen
And smiled a smile that was, I think, the brightest that I've seen.
"Seems silly that a man my size so full of vim and zest,
Could find himself defeated by a small pain in his chest."

"What would my wife be thinking of her man so strong and grown,
If she could see me sitting here, too weak to stand alone?
Could my mother have imagined, as she held me to her breast,
That I'd be sitting HERE one day with this pain in my chest?"

"Can it be getting dark so soon?" He winced up at the sun.
"It's growing dim and I thought that the day had just begun.
I think, before I travel on, I'll get a little rest ..........
And, quietly, the boy died from that small pain in his chest.

I don't recall what happened then. I think I must have cried;
I put my arms around him and I pulled him to my side
And, as I held him to me, I could feel our wounds were pressed
The large one in my heart against the small one in his chest.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Yeats

@480Widdio, I love Belloc too, and live in the south downs, and can see those bare hills from my window.

But the only Belloc I can remember by heart goes:

The world is full of double beds
And most delightful maidenheads
Which, being so, there's no excuse
For sodomy, or self-abuse

I'm not even sure if that's all of it, but my best friend pissed himself laughing when I recited it to to him and would often repeat the last 2 lines and chuckle.

I couldn't pick just one poem/poet. I love Robert Herrick, Thomas Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Neruda, Walcott, Motion, Dickinson, but this is a favourite that never ceases to make me smile:

Rain

There are holes in the sky
Where the rain gets in
But the holes are small
That's why rain's thin

(Spike Milligan)

There's something so childlike and silly about it that I find it endearing, and as a child I always thought of the sky as a membrane that covered the earth, so it resonates well with me.

A PP has already mentioned it but mine us WB Yeats He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. It's the one that ends 'tread softly for you tread on my dreams.

I'm not a massive poetry fan and tend to like the more unusual, dark ones.

I like My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy by Keats and what was written of Coleridge's Christabel. I do like a Hardy poem about his wife's death but I can't for the life of me remember what it is! I also appreciate the satire of Swift's A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed, although controversial, as it's never been more fitting with the number of young women their fake hair, nails lashes, fillers etc.

@Charlieandthechocolatecake that is indeed heartbreaking.

This isn't a song lyrics thread, but it puts me in mind of David Gray's The One I Love

i like my body when it’s with your body by e.e. cummings

JamesTKirk

• it wasn’t at the Eskdale Tournament was it?

WB Yeats - He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I wanted to read this at my fathers funeral but just couldn't as i would have been a mess.
It's an amazing poem and one of my all time favourites

The Day He Died Ted Hughes

Was the silkiest day of the young year,
The first reconnaissance of the real spring,
The first confidence of the sun.

That was yesterday. Last night, frost.
And as hard as any of all winter.
Mars and Saturn and the Moon
Dangling in a bunch
On the hard, littered sky.
Today is Valentine’s day.

Earth toast-crisp. The snowdrops battered.
Thrushes spluttering. Pigeons gingerly
Rubbing their voices together, in stinging cold.
Crows creaking, and clumsily
Cracking loose.

The bright fields look dazed.
Their expression is changed.
They have been somewhere awful
And come back without him.

The trustful cattle, with frost on their backs,
Waiting for hay, waiting for warmth,
Stand in a new emptiness.

From now on the land
Will have to manage without him.
But it hesitates, in this slow realization of light,
Childlike, too naked, in a frail sun,
With roots cut
And a great blank in its memory.

Life Lessons Part II by Tony Harrison

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.

Wow @Bupkis I love that!

@Cam2020 You’re going to need to give us more clues about the Thomas Hardy one. I’m afraid I did TH poetry for A level, and there are a LOT of poems about how he’d been rubbish to his wife when she was alive but quite missed her once she was dead. (Sorry).

There’s quite a lyrical one which I think starts “Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me..”.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day'

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

@SirTobyBelch - thanks that explain it! Memory not so frazzled as I thought!

Cariadlet, I love Adlestrop too, It reminds me of a really amazing lady who has now sadly died and it makes me think of her with a smile.