One single line of poetry....

[Clawdy]

that stays with you? Not necessarily your favourite poem but sometimes just one line....for me it's " What will survive of us is love " from the Philip Larkin poem.

I learnt all these poems at school and usually only remember the opening lines:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:Robert Louis Stevenson

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies; Lord Byron

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, Shakespeare

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving? Gerald Manley Hopkins

ah, hadn't clocked that was in the opening post

Death is nothing at all,
I have only slipped into the next room,

Henry Scott Holland

I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again

Dame Edna St Vincent Millay

Who also wrote the infamous

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah my foes - and ah my friends - it gives a lovely light

It's not that she's my favourite poet but the lunes just stick in your head -and the first one is striking for being written by a woman born in the 19th century!

Because I couldn't stop for death
He kindly stopped for me

Also sticks in the head for some reason, as do a lot of slightly melodramatic Stevie Smith lines, like Not waving but Drowning.

Too many to write them all but...

There was poison in the cup
Let me not ask
From whose hand it came

Don't know who wrote it

Was it for this the clay grew tall?
Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Wilfred Owen

And the last one

Gone is the brother I loved like no other
Who once did share my pillow,

Lots of T'S Elliott sticks in my head too - I think it's mainly down to when you read it (late teen stuff is what still rolls round my head 20+ years later)

April is the cruelest month..

Let us go now you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table

I read much of the night, and fly south for the winter

I have heard them singing, each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me

The Seed Shop

Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry -
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.

In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century's streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.

Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep

Muriel Stuart

I've had an earworm of "Had I the Heavens' embroidered cloths" - my memory does know the rest of the poem, so why my brain is going round and round the first line only, like a broken record, I don't know.

'There's a certain slant of light on winter afternoons'

Emily Dickinson

Anutteridiot has that been rollingaround my head slightly inaccurately all these years,? should have looked it up I suppose

"But they were fucked up in their turn,
by fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats."

This be the verse, Larkin.

Amid all the sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it's still a beautiful world. The desiderata of happiness

The despairing Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, calling out to his God for the divine inspiration which he felt eluded him:

'Birds build- but not I build; no, but strain,
Times eneuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou Lord of Life,
Send my roots rain!'

If only he knew.

I balanced all, brought all to mind
The years to come seemed waste of breath
A waste of breath, the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death (my favourite poem).

The beautiful and under-recognised Rosemary Tonks:
Story Of A Hotel Room
Thinking we were safe-insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With all the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests-just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit…
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
-If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
Oh, I’ll remember! but … each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
Into the waste we know not, into the night?

Rupert Brooke

Losing love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everyone feels the wind blow

(Paul Simon)

marshmallowpies, there's a series on at the moment about foster kids and one of the teenage boys, who had been placed happily with foster parents several years ago, wrote a story about being with them. It had to be based around a line of poetry and he wrote it about moving in with his foster family and and it being a clean slate, with your own face on. I was absolutely sobbing. Such a beautiful and brave boy.

Edge by Plath has always stuck with me:

She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Also WS Merwin:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color

He stumbled Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked
On a manhole under the hollyhocks

Yes, and thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried

Well, all of Cohen's Famous Blue Raincoat actually.

'If you can dream- and not make dreams your master; If you can think- and not make thoughts your aim.' If by Rudyard Kipling. Love the whole poem.

I think grease is having an affair with me - from a poem in the Lazy Thoughts for a lazy woman collection by Grace Nicholls