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.

Oh I adore this thread. It sings to my soul :) I love poetry.

'Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm' The Song of Soloman (an old testament poem admittedly) we had this read at our wedding.

'I laugh like i've got gold mines, digging in my own back yard; I dance like I've got diamonds at the meeting of my thighs' Maya Angelou, Still I Rise.

'I was much too far out all my life, and not waving but drowning.' Stevie Smith.

'Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep' Mary Elizabeth Frye.

'tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.' W.B. Yeats

'What is life if, full of care; we have not time to stand and stare.' David P. Brown.

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you....
When you are old by WBYeats

Tlot-tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!

Nearer he came and nearer. Her face was like a light.
Her eyes grew wide for a moment; she drew one last deep breath,

Then her finger moved in the moonlight,
Her musket shattered the moonlight,
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him—with her death.

He turned. He spurred to the west; he did not know who stood

Bowed, with her head o’er the musket, drenched with her own blood!

Not till the dawn he heard it, and his face grew grey to hear

How Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

The highwayman, Alfred noyes sob

Tons. English teacher.

But my faves are probably 'Nothing gold can stay' - Robert Frost.

And a Sylvia Plath one 'Oh love, oh embryo, how did you get here?' And from the same poem 'You are the one solid the spaces lean on'. Both from Nick and the Candlestick, I think, about her son, and in my head about both of mine.

The boy stood on the burning deck.

susurration, that last one of yours is Leisure by W.H. Davies:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

(sorry, that sounds awfully know-it-all, just happens to be a poem we did at school and it was one of my mum's favourites too).

And yes to Chimborazo, Cotopaxi.

Also 'silent, upon a peak in Darien'

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:"

Read it when I was very young and still romantically in love with the countryside and I still love it.

If we are doing Shakespeare I will be here all night. I can quote forever.

we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep..

Some strange race wrecked solitary here

Emily Dickenson

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

• From "When You are Old" by W.B. Yeats

Christina Rossetti:

Remember me when I am gone away

the last line always finishes me off...

better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad

sitting here in floods of tears, remembering DD1

"Not waving but drowning" Stevie Smith

Got all the way to pg 6 before I spotted someone else has also said this.

For me it's because I have struggled with depression for half my life. The first time I read that poem I sobbed. It's how I felt. Now I use it as marker. If I can read it without choking up I know I'm ok :-)

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die

[T]he heart that has truly loved never forgets,
And as truly loves on to the close,
As the sunflower turns on her God when she sets
The same look which she turned when he rose

• From "Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms" by Thomas Moore

Because I could not stop for death she kindly stopped for me. Emily Dickinson

'At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. '

Blackberry picking, Seamus Heaney.

Hels71, that line always comes into my head.

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

W B Yeats

Men that had seen her drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking wherever she went,
As a bell that is rung or a wonder told shyly,
And oh! she was the Sunday in every week.

• From "The Planter's Daughter" by Austin Clarke

If ever any beauty I did see
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

Donne. Others have quoted other lines from the same poem.

We have the builders in at the moment. I'm currently measuring out my life in coffee-spoons, a la Prufrock.

I'm another fan of morning's minion, kingdom-of-daylight's dauphin... And every time I see a line of trees by a river, I think "felled, felled, all are felled". Actually, Hopkins provides so many memorable and apt lines - Glory be to God for dappled things comes to mind a lot.

lots of others but so obscure they would immediately out me to my RL friends who are also MNers and almost certainly on this thread already, judging by a couple of the responses .

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

by William Blake

Not living, but rising dead.

Rising five by Nicholas Nicholson.