Favourite poems

[ipanemagirl]

Poem lyrics of 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's 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.

I LOVE this poem and the last line reminds me to go to bed!

margoand jerry - I am sitting here bawling my eyes out, I can barely see to type.

DD is just about to finish in reception, and DS is about to start at junior school, and today they get their reports. For some reason I am feeling very wobbly about hem both growing up, and that poem just touched a raw nerve.

THanks xxx

I love these, reminds me of English a level days. Also Keats "Isabella or the pot of Basil" where she grows herbs in her lover's head,(IIRC) TS Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock but especially this:

O. Goldsmith

CXXXVIII. "When lovely woman stoops to folly"

WHEN lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover, 5
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, is?to die.

Not that i think it's a good code to live by, mind......

Can I have another go? Nearly forgot Plath's Morning Song - surely a mumsnet special?

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 distils 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.

WOW dino.
That is a marvellous thing.

Since we are, at least partly, on a marinely watery theme, this is the end bit of an Elizabeth Bishop poem, "At the Fish-houses". I love the end.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

I loved the Plath, Bagsunder. And the water. I want to cheer us all up with this from Emily Bronte:

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heavens glories shine,

And lastly, just because someone wanted love poetry, what about this?

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold

If this isn't one for Mumsnet, I dunno what is. You have to guess who it is, though. No cheating.

Tis The Bard

Did you like it TN?

I'll be honest and say I'm not a lover of Shakespeare.

Do you?

You're right. Either you are passionate about the sonnets or indifferent to them. I'm in the indifferent camp as well but it just seemed appropriate. Am a bit teary about that Plath poem.

Plath and Hughes I am passionate about

Teariness - D'you think it's the fact there is a full moon? Or just sentimentality?

I shouldn't do this as I am at work and it always makes me well up ... but, re love poetry, Henry King's Exequy, to his wife who died young ("Thou scarce hadst seen so many years/As day tells hours") - is unequalled.

It's one of those poems that begs you to read it out loud, & then as you do you fall to bits.

Can't bear to copy it all in, here is link

Just read it again, oops.

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say it is sad?

In one of the tenses I am singing an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La la la la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you,

For I am in love with you and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Words, wide night - Carol Ann Duffy

For lovers parted by distance.

Need a box of tissues to read this thread.

The ones about new babies and children are the worst for me....I've always liked this one too by Larkin

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.

Yes. Love the Larkin. If we are doing poems about small children, more Yeats? Can never have too much Yeats, I feel. This time A Prayer for my Son.

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning's back.
That his mother may not lack
Her fill of sleep.
Bid the ghost have sword in fist:
Some there are, for I avow
Such devilish things exist,
Who have planned his murder, for they know
Of some most haughty deed or thought
That waits upon his future days,
And would through hatred of the bays
Bring that to nought.
Though You can fashion everything
From nothing every day, and teach
The morning stars to sing,
You have lacked articulate speech
To tell Your simplest want, and known,
Wailing upon a woman's knee,
All of that worst ignominy
Of flesh and bone;
And when through all the town there ran
The servants of Your enemy,
A woman and a man,
Unless the Holy Writings lie,
Hurried through the smooth and rough
And through the fertile and waste,
protecting, till the danger past,
With human love.

This is a Spoon River I adore but found hard to read during PG

Elizabeth Childers

Dust of my dust,
And dust with my dust,
O, child who died as you entered the world,
Dead with my death!
Not knowing breath, though you tried so hard,
With a heart that beat when you lived with me,
And stopped when you left me for Life.
It is well, my child. For you never traveled
The long, long way that begins with school days,
When little fingers blur under the tears
That fall on the crooked letters.
And the earliest wound, when a little mate
Leaves you alone for another;
And sickness, and the face of Fear by the bed;
The death of a father or mother;
Or shame for them, or poverty;
The maiden sorrow of school days ended;
And eyeless Nature that makes you drink
From the cup of Love, though you know it's poisoned;
To whom would your flower-face have been lifted?
Botanist, weakling? Cry of what blood to yours?---
Pure or fool, for it makes no matter,
It's blood that calls to our blood.
And then your children---oh, what might they be?
And what your sorrows? Child! Child!
Death is better than Life!

That's a poem that I don't understand a bit, but like anyway.