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.

Ooh, Cooger, I learnt that by heart at school.

"Running round a woodstump, if you chance to find
Little barrels roped and tarred all full of brandy wine,
Don't you shout to come and look, nor take 'em for you play.
Put the brushwood back again - they'll be gone, next day."

“Save us, save us”, they seem to say,
“Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!”

from Derek Mahon's A Disused Shed in County Wexford. Probably the most complex and majestic poem written by an Irishman since Yeats.

We love the Hilaire Belloc cautionary tales and to this day when it happens that one of us makes a change or sees someone doing it and it turns out badly we say

"And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse."

(from Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion)

If you said something particularly clever my dad would always say

"and still they gazed and still their wonder grew/that one small head could carry all he knew" (the deserted village by Oliver Goldsmith)

I wouldn't want to be faster
Or greener than now if you were with me O you
Were the best of all my days.

Frank O'Hara, Animals

We should be careful of each other, we should be kind, while there is still time.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

Wordsworth

"Selfhood begins with a walking away
And love is proved in the letting go"

Cecil Day-Lewis - on his son's first day at school.

Bloody hell Sanity I came on to post just that. Thanks!

I Heard it set to music once, years ago, with just a bodhran for accompaniment, Pausing. It was slow and lilting and beautiful.

"Just living is not enough" said the Butterfly fairy, "one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."

Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?

~ Snow, Carol Ann Duffy

This is such a beautiful thread (especially your posts pausing).

The line(s, sorry!) going round in my head are 'Your love is my metal, your kisses my rivets,/ You are like the ocean beneath a slick of spillage'.

I love how unexpected it is. The whole poem is brilliant too. It's called 'Fuck the Poem':

I haven't written in ages,
'cause I'd rather stare at you than stare at pages.

But what would be great is
making a poem that could be half as courageous
as you when you're naked.
I try for a minute -

Your love is my metal, your kisses my rivets,
You are like the ocean beneath a slick of spillage

Fuck the poem.

There's a bed here
and you want me in it.

'Turn away no more, why whilt thou turn away?
The starry floor, the wat'ry shore,
Are given thee til the break of day'

Blake. I always think of this when I'm walking on the beach.

"Oh,blackbird,blackbird, it isn't any good...." John Heath-Stubbs.

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish.

You're, by Sylvia Plath

I don't know why this has stayed with me, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw this thread.

Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.....

And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.

Sharon Olds

"Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."

Catullus 85

I hate and I love. Perhaps you ask why I do this?
I do not know, but I feel it happen and I am torn apart.

Keats's Ode to Autumn is one of my favorites. I have lived most of my life in warm climates, with little change of seasons, so the loveliness of autumn is rare for me and so even more cherished.

Two lines in particular:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too

I've been thinking of this thread all day with gratitude - it's sent me back to some half-forgotten favourites and encouraged me to look up some neglected (by me) poets; I've never really got to grips with Yeats, for example.

I've thought of a couple more that I love:

"World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural." (MacNeice - Snow)

And John Donne:

"Oh, my America, my new found land."

Also, I'm never sure what I think about Ted Hughes, but I do love the first line of Full Moon and Little Frieda:

"A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -"

I've enjoyed reading all the posts, lovely thread.

sunt lacrimae rerum - there are tears in things. Half a line, from Virgil. Stayed with me for 30 years, so far. Sad and realistic and hopeful, all at once.

"They also live / Who swerve and vanish in the river."--Archibald MacLeish

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart

"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!" The Jabberwock, CS Lewis

The whole of by Hollie McNish gets stuck in my head like a song...

Reading this thread, I've realised that I have lots of bits of poetry that come to mind at one time or another. Dylan Thomas:

"Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea."

And

"Do not go gentle into that good night
But rage, rage, against the dying of the light."

I'm very fond of the Sheenagh Pugh poem "Sometimes". I was just going to quote the final two lines, which are wonderful, but you have to read the whole thing to understand the context:

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
(Philip Larkin)

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
(Tennyson)

The mams pig-sick of oilstains in the wash
wished for their sons a better class of gear,
?wear their own clothes into work? but not go posh,
Go up a rung or two but settle near.
(Tony Harrison)