Favourite poems - identify the writer and add your own?

[Swizzler]

(as I can't remember my Shakespeare )

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter

ok laydees: another hot fave :I'll give you the opening and closing lines.

Beloved sweetheart bastard...
Don't think it's only the heart that b-b-b-breaks.

Love love love her - have had her Collected Works since I was a teen and have always found something I identified with.

Nice to meet another fan. Am off to bed - don't want to appear rude by disappearing.. not sure of the etiquette.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, ? and done a hundred things...

LOL yajo

there is very little in the way f etiquette on here

sleep well and welcome to MN

Oh yes

yajo, when you come back it is your turn to suggest another poem for us to guess, since you guessed mine

You'll either know this one or not, iykwim

The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.

Sleep well, yajo
Bugger, alienears, know that one...

alien ears is that emily d or b?

Tenuous and Precarious
Were my guardians,
Precarious and Tenuous,
Two Romans.

Tha last one is John Magee. Dh swears that if anyone reads it at his funeral , he will come bacjk and haunt hem!

donnie that's Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy?

Only by the magic of Google I'm afraid, sorry but i was intrigued by the lines

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my arms
The span of my hips,
The stride of my step,
The curl of my lips.
I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me.

correct choosyfloosy - tis a great poem!

ah did that one earlier twig. Maya angelou

Twiglett, sounds like Maya Angelou

bugger .. haven't read thread .. love Maya

how's about

"I saw the prince of darkness with his staff
standing bareheaded by the cenotaph"

is no-one going for my Two romans one????

MB it's Stevie Smith but I can't remeber name of peom, thought it was two Rmans

Not a clue MB (again)

What about:

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice
...
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

So whatever may come
I am glad that babies are dumb
I shudder to think what for entertainment they would do
Were they as bright as me or you

'To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower./To hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour'.

I'm not very good at this

Someone type up some Betjeman and then I'll get it!

Donnie, my dh is looking over my shoulder being annoying and he says that one is Blake.

Blake, Donnie
DOn't know the others...

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
It isn't fit for humans now.

(Quick Margoandjerry, I think you might just know this )

swizzler, that's auden. (I'm LOVING this btw and learning loads)

here's a chunk of one:

Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minutes to those who cry from
the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep
today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful
of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the
same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.