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.

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad ...

(Larkin, apologies if someone else already quoted this I have not RTFT)

They fuck you up your Mum & Dad

Stop all the clocks

Both already mentioned, both make me stop and catch my breath...

One from an old boy of my primary school....

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old

Laurence Binyon

Not my favourite line by I find myself muttering how I should 'set my lands in order' from TS Eliot's The Wasteland a lot

I love the words "unintelligible syllables" from Arrival of the Bee Box by Plath. They just sound like goobledygook (ie like unintelligible syllables). Very onomatopoeic.

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should

Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.

There are two for me

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
(William Henry Davies)

A tiny flower, lent not given, to bud on earth, and bloom in heaven.

Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years—
To remember with tears!

William Allingham - the beauty of small things

"...Chimborazo, Cotopaxi..."

• "Romance", by W.J. Turner.

So much wonder, so much longing, wrapped up in two exotic words.

"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over"

old Toilets (as we used to call T.S. Eliot at A-level), Waste Land

A quotation I've muttered numerous times over the years.

"But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near"

To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell

Tennyson

"Wed whom thou wilt, but I am sick of Time,
"And I desire to rest."

It's a really sulky teenage angst poem for all that it was written by an adult

" oh, how I love you, let me count the ways" Elizabeth Barrett Browning

" Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill" Rupert Brooke

But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!" Henry john Newbolt

THERE is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing; Yeats

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; John Magee

"Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye" Yeats ( again!)

" Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime" Andrew Marvel, - and he has a lot to answer for, I was seduced by someone quoting this at me:)

What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters, life's too strong for you,
It takes life to love life!

Some of these are lovely, in different ways.

"Her hair was long
Her foot was light
And her eyes were wild"

Le Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats

Self-Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D.H.Lawrence

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

Browning Andrea del Sarto

Awake! For morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the starts to flight
And lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan's turret in a noose of light

Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Oh, I love la belle dame:) " what ails thee knight, alone and palely loitering"

I meant to put that in and forgot. I love poetry, and used to have a like minded friend who would come round and we would drink wine and read each other outloud our favourite poems ( before Internet, so lots of books with stickers)

Amazing fun. I miss it. I don't know anyone now who likes it and actively reads it. Everyone's too busy:( including me.

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I won't ever rust
If you like your coffee hot
Let me be your coffee pot
You call the shots babe
I just wanna be yours

Secrets I have held in my heart
Are harder to hide than I thought
Maybe I just wanna be yours

Let me be your 'leccy meter and I'll never run out
And let me be the portable heater that you'll get cold without
I wanna be your setting lotion (I wanna be)
Hold your hair in deep devotion (How deep?)
At least as deep as the Pacific Ocean
I wanna be yours

Secrets I have held in my heart
Are harder to hide than I thought
Maybe I just wanna be yours

I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I won't ever rust
I just wanna be yours

The Peoples' Poet. Not Rik, John Cooper Clarke.

, which is rather lovely I think.

And thus among these rocks he lived, through summer's heat and winter's snow, the eagle, he was lord above, and Rob was lord below. - "Rob roy's Grave" by Wordsworth.

Or,

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. - The first line of "High Flight" by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941)

It runs down the hillside
And skips over streams.
Then plays on the leaves that are stirred in the breeze.

In Flanders' fields - McCrae

'In Flanders' fields where poppies blow, between the crosses, row on row.'

Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe'

Four lines, one sentence - the last verse of Am Mur Gorm by Somhairle MacGill-Eain

"Agus air creachainn chein fhasmhoir
Chinn blathmhor Craobh nan Teud,
'na meangach duillich t' aodann,
mo chiall is aogas reil."

("And on a distant luxuriant summit
there blossomed the Tree of Strings
among its leafy branches your face
my reason and the likeness of a star")

and, from Memorial by Norman MacCaig

"No crocus is carved more gently
than the way her dying
shapes my mind."

It's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curve of my lips. I'm a woman. Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman.

Maya Angelou