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 was much too far out all of my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Little Gidding, TS Eliot

Also, from the Waste Land:
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many.

"On and on you will hike and I know you'll hike far, and face up to your problems whatever they are"

Dr Seuss - oh the places you'll go.

I SOBBED when I read it to DS.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming, Yeates

Dead men naked,they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon.

Bugger my text dropped off.It was Death shall have no dominion by Dylan Thomas.

Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow's dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite, as if you didn’t care
You would close your term here, up and be gone

Bit more than a line but my breath catches every time I read it. Thomas Hardy's poems about the death of his wife are simply beautiful.

Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.

John Donne, Love's Growth.

Let the mind's eye take its picture,
something to hold against the heart in the long cold.

Describing the last days of Autumn. I think of this so often now as my dcs grow up and I stack away lovely memories.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Philip Larkin

"Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Arnold's Dover Beach.

For years, I'd just read the first line and skipped to the next page in every anthology. Then one day I foolishly read the whole thing.

Oh my. I sat there, gasping, like a fish that's been gutted so fast it didn't feel the knife.

From 'Not all things go wrong':

As you go through hell-keep going,
make no brave oasis there.

Far away is close at hand;
Close-joined, is far away
and

“Once in my youth I gave, poor fool
A solider apples and water
And may I die before you cool
Such drouth as his, my daughter”

Robert Graves.

...and these 2 lines just for fun:

They tuck you up, your mum and dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

You came to me this morning, and you handled me like meat.

For Those Who Greeted Me, Leonard Cohen (also used in the song A Thousand Kisses Deep)

"What would the dead want from us"

From James Fenton's For Andrew Wood. It's a question I often ask myself, not least with all the WWI centenary events at the moment.

I was going to say the same as manky

"The stars are not wanted now, put out every one.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun."

WH Auden, I don't remember the name of the poem.

'—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.'

Elizabeth Bishop, 'The Art of Losing'. Makes me howl.

'my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping
but I shall go on living.'

Pablo Neruda, 'The Dead Woman'

Really, show me any line of Neruda (or Rilke) and I'm a sobbing heap. Damn them.

[What if I fall?]
Oh, but my darling,
What if you fly?

'What but design of darkness to appall,
If design govern in a thing so small'

Robert Frost

About a moth being eaten by a spider. And about how frightening it is if God designed it or even more frightening if there's NO design.

And took their wages and are dead.

A.E. Houseman's Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, about the professional British army at the outbreak of the First World War, in response to German propaganda calling the BEF mercenaries.

is there anybody there? said the traveller knocking on the moonlit door...

To seek, to strive, to find and not to yield.

Ulysses, Tennyson

Had we but world enough and time...

and

If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know

and

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)