Lines in books that make your throat catch

[pongping]

Just been re-reading When We Were Very Young, and the lines in the last poem, Vespers, bring a tear to my eye every time:

Hush, hush, whisper who dares,
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers

I'm not sure why - I think it's the beauty of the innocence, the image of a lost world (the book is all nurses and stockings)?

In fact, just the title of the collection gives me a shiver.

[Ormally]

Patrick Gale's 'Notes from an Exhibition'.

The scene is a gathering at a Quaker funeral of a famous artist. A stranger has turned up with a tiny, impressionistic painting that was done just for her some years before, when the artist and she were in psychiatric care, and she passes it round.

A daughter in law of the deceased eventually speaks in the silent circle:

"Garfield and I have been trying to have a child for some time now"..."And I've been wondering whether one of the reasons it's taking us so long is fear that a child of ours might have the same mental health challenges as its grandmother. But - this sounds awful probably - but if a child of ours did have those challenges but could produce a painting like that, we'd have nothing to fear. We'd be blessed."

[Ormally]

Read a bit more and seen that there are some Wilde fans posting - if you don't know it, and I didn't at all, look up 'The Young King'. It isn't necessarily throat-catching but it's more than troubling, and amazing to think that it was written so far in advance of this day and age when its power has not diminished.

[BrucieTheShark]

Rocks and storms I’ll fear no more,
When on that eternal shore;
Drop the anchor!
Furl the sail!
I am safe within the vale!

A verse from a hymn found on my great-grandfather's gravestone when I finally tracked down who he was and what happened. He was a fishing skipper lost at sea during WW1 when his trawler had been requisitioned as a minesweeper. When I found the gravestone I realised it also commemorated his son who was lost at sea the previous year at the age of 16, but his body had never been recovered.

[PotOfYoghurt]

Speaking of emotional reactions to Winnie The Pooh- when the trailer came out for the recent film I burst into tears in front of the TV. I actually found the whole film very emotional, in a nostalgic way.

[NCISaddict]

'As Beth had hoped, the `tide went out easily', and in the dark hour before dawn, on the bosom where she had drawn her first breath, she quietly drew her last, with no farewell but one loving look, one little sigh.' From Good Wives Loiusa M Alcott
Never fails to make me cry.

[TheBogQueen]

The Poisonwoid Bible:

Having had three girls, this made me cry:
A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.

[TheBogQueen]

And also - in our local park there are memorial benches. And on one it just says:
'Lily's seat' love Mummy 2003


It's so simple. And so heartbreaking.

[blinkyblinky]

This poem by Michael Longely. Beautifully sad.

In Memoriam

My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind; the slow sands
Of your history delay till through your eyes
I read you like a book. Before you died,
Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.

Now I see close-up, in my mind’s eye,
The cracked and splintered dead for pity’s sake
Each dismal evening predecease the sun,
You, looking death and nightmare in the face
With your kilt, harmonica and gun,
Grow older in a flash, but none the wiser
(Who, following the wrong queue at The Palace,
Have joined the London Scottish by mistake),
Your nineteen years uncertain if and why
Belgium put the kibosh on the Kaiser.

Between the corpses and the soup canteens
You swooned away, watching your future spill.
But, as it was, your proper funeral urn
Had mercifully smashed to smithereens,
To shrapnel shards that sliced your testicle.
That instant I, your most unlikely son,
In No Man’s Land was surely left for dead,
Blotted out from your far horizon.
As your voice now is locked inside my head,
I yet was held secure, waiting my turn.

Finally, that lousy war was over.
Stranded in France and in need of proof
You hunted down experimental lovers,
Persuading chorus girls and countesses:
This, father, the last confidence you spoke.
In my twentieth year your old wounds woke
As cancer. Lodging under the same roof
Death was a visitor who hung about,
Strewing the house with pills and bandages,
Till he chose to put your spirit out.

Though they overslept the sequence of events
Which ended with the ambulance outside,
You lingering in the hall, your bowels on fire,
Tears in your eyes, and all your medals spent,
I summon girls who packed at last and went
Underground with you. Their souls again on hire,
Now those lost wives as recreated brides
Take shape before me, materialise.
On the verge of light and happy legend
They lift their skirts like blinds across your eyes.

The last page of Watership Down also breaks me.

[Leonas]

'Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'.' From To Kill a Mockingbird.
I have to steal myself for that line every time and I teach the book to teenagers!

[amigababy]

when Lyra left Pantalaimon on the shores of the Land of the Dead. I was almost furious in my sadness and didn't want to read the rest if the book.

[TheCatsFlaps]

Good old Norman Maccaig in Visiting Hour

he hospital smell
combs my nostrils
as they go bobbing along
green and yellow corridors.

What seems a corpse
is trundled into a lift and vanishes
heavenward.

I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.

Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,
here and up and down and there,
their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths, their eyes
still clear after
so many farewells.

Ward 7. She lies
in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand
trembles on its stalk. Eyes move
behind eyelids too heavy
to raise. Into an arm wasted
of colour a glass fang is fixed,
not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me
distance shrinks till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I
can cross.

She smiles a little at this
black figure in her white cave
who clumsily rises
in the round swimming waves of a bell
and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,
not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.

[tiredvommachine]

This thread has destroyed me!

[PlummyBrummy]

"A four foot box, a foot for every year."

Seamus Heaney's poem, Mid-Term Break, about his younger brother who was killed in a car accident, aged four. I'm snivelling just writing it.

[DancingCrown]

Yes yes to Wilde. "And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet. At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost." The knowingness of the narrator attributing the heartbrake to the frost rather than the death.

And if we are having songs, Cat Power.

"His name was Perry
He had a learning difficulty
His father was a very mean man
His father burned his skin
His father send him to his death
He was ten years old
He was ten years old
He was ten years old

Her name was Naomi
Beautiful round face, so ashamed
Told me how to please a man
After school in the back of a bus
She was doing it every day
She was eleven years old
She was eleven years old
She was eleven years old

Her name was Sheryl
Black hair, like an electric space
She would pretty paint my face
She was a very good friend
Her father would come to her in the night
She was twelve years old
She was twelve years old
She was twelve years old

His name was Donovan
He was a very good friend
The cards were stacked against him
He was selling cocaine
The last time I saw him
He was thirteen years old
He was thirteen years old
He was thirteen years old

His name was Charles
He said he was in love with me
We were both fourteen
Then I had to move away
Then he begin to smoke crack
Then he had to sell ass
I don't know where he is
I don't know where they are"

[AlmaMartyr]

This thread has made me sob! The worst for me is the final paragraph of The Last Battle:

"The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning."

Has been quoted before on this thread. Had to read it to DD recently and couldn't control myself.

[TinkerTailorSoldierSpy]

The entire chapter in Call The Midwife about Mrs Jenkins' life just broke me. I couldn't pick the book up again for a week after that.

[gabsdot45]

From Harry Potter and the Philosphers stone
"A love as powerful as your mothers for you leaves it's own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign...To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone. will give us some protection for ever. It is in your very skin."

My friend died of cancer last December and left behind a 12 year old daughter. She was single so the little girl is with her grandparents now. I had been reading this book to DS and the night before her funeral we read this passage. I cried and cried. I wrote it in a card for her daughter.

I bawl at "I'll love you forever" every time.

I have a book called Baboushka and the 3 kings. It's a Russian tale about a woman who lets the 3 kings stay at her house on their way to find Baby Jesus. They invite her to come but she leaves late and misses him. The book finishes with Baboushka travelling the world looking for the Christ child and saying "is he here, is the Christ child here". Sniff

[BatmanLovesRobin]

Another Harry Potter one here - when Harry, Hermione and Ron see Greyback crouched over Lavender's "feebly stirring body".

And another vote for I Am David - not just when he finds his mother, but also when the dog takes the bullet for him.

[gabsdot45]

Here's a very moving quote from Anne of Ingleside

Walter was smiling in his sleep as someone who knew a charming secret. The moon was shining on his pillow through the bars of the leaded window, casting the shadow of a clearly defined cross on the wall above his head. In long after years Anne was to remember that and wonder if it was an omen of Courcelette...of a cross marked grave "somewhere in France". But tonight it was just a shadow, nothing else.

[Mummatron3000]

This will sound daft but there's one of the Thomas and Friends books about an old tractor - Terence? - who's being sent for scrap, there's a bit where he's reminiscing about how happy he was in the past when he got to see children that makes me so teary!

[Passmethecrisps]

plummy I attended a Seamus Heaney lecture/reading very soon before he died.

Hearing him read this was beautiful

[slithytove]

The seamus Heaney poem about 70 posts in.

That took my breath away to the point of pain. I can't stop crying now.

[Passmethecrisps]

That is the one I mean slithy.

I remember being taught that at school and just being a bit confused by it.

Now, reading it through, I am sure that I was right when I though that English was not the subject I should teach. I would have been hopeless trying to read that

[aliasjoey]

Some years ago DH and I split up for a few months. I felt horribly guilty at the damage this might cause to the kids, and this Elvis song had me bawling!

Don't cry, daddy
Daddy, please don't cry
Daddy, you've still got me and little Tommy
And together we'll find a brand new mommy
Daddy, daddy, please laugh again
Daddy, ride us on your back again
Oh, daddy
Please
Don't cry

Why are children always first
To feel the pain and the hurt the worst
It's true but somehow
It just don't seem right

[Stitchintime1]

"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." Wentworth in 'Persuasion.'
"Daddy, my daddy."
"I have danced at your skitting heels, my beautiful Bathsheba..."