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.

From sleep we wake eternally and death shall be no more.
John Donne

I LOVE this thread. Thanks op!

Mine is massively twee, and it was years before I found out the rest of it, and I wasn't impressed, but I do love the verse:

The kiss of the sun for pardon
The song of the birds for mirth
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

Makes me feel safe and happy.

"Fools! For I also had my hour, one far fierce hour and sweet;
There was a shout about my ears, and palms before my feet."

From The Donkey by GK Chesterton.

I'm an atheist, but it always makes me get dust in my eye.

"It happens that I am tired of being a man"

Pablo Neruda

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

(Yeats' "Memory")

And also

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

(Tennyson's "Eagle")

She shall be sportive as the fawn that wild with glee across the lawn,
and up mountain streams,
and hers shall be the breathing balm and hers the silence and the calm of mute insensate things.

"Three years she grew in sun and shower" Wordsworth.

Could have been written for DD

Out of the forest I came with my flowers, singing, all alone.

Little Red Cap by Carol Ann Duffy

One of my favourite poems.

Along the ridge, a moonbeam danced,shedding light on whiskers bright.

Me....

Oh, these are great - keep them coming!

reducing all that's made
to a green thought in a green shade
Marvell 'the garden'

plus both the Yeats about aging which pp's chose. bah.

"How is it one can recognise, another, in another's eyes"

PausingFlatly, isn't Dover Beach amazing? It's like he saw the whole 20th century unfolding in advance, world wars and the collapse of civilisation and all. Yikes. The Second Coming by Yeats makes me feel terrified and excited in exactly the same way.

My other favourite Yeats lines - 'A terrible beauty is born' from Easter 1916, and 'I'll lie down, where all ladders start/in the foul rag & bone shop of the heart' (The Circus Animals Desertion).

My favourite line from Sylvia Plath is from You're:
'Right, like a well-done sum/A clean slate, with your own face on'

Shakespeare I could quote forever but I love most of all 'There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow...'

Can't bear GM Hopkins...sorry!

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

Charles Bukowski - Bluebird

This was from The Eve of St Agnes (Keats) from my English O Level.

At the time my life was full of poverty and I loved the sheer richness of these words and images:

"And still she slept in azure lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from for the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd
With jellies soother than the creamy curd
And lucent syrups , tinct with cinnamon
Manna and dates, in Argosy transferred
From Fez, and spiced dainties every one
From silken Samercand, to cedered Lebanon.

I spent a lot of time in my crappy secondary modern dreaming of silken Samercand and cedered Lebanon (and the mysterious 'he' who brought all the bounty forth!)

This was in a very old poetry book my mother had - I thought it was hilarious and have never forgotten it:

When the kitchen boiler burst,
Mother simply sat and cursed,
Father with a finer feeling
Scraped the housemaid off the ceiling.

A single line which has also stayed with me:

Love conquers all. and we must yield to Love

I shall post mine before reading back.

One line "they fuck you up your mum and dad"

Or

"A four foot box. A foot for every year

Thus though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we can make him run.

^Sneak home and pray you'll never know
the hell where youth and laughter go^

'Suicide in the trenches' by S. Sassoon

Heart, we will forget him, you and I, tonight.

Emily Dickinson

Sneak home and pray you'll never know
the hell where youth and laughter go

'Suicide in the trenches' by S. Sassoon

'I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas'. From the obviously much loved Wasteland

'We are dying, Egypt, dying'. The wonderful Louis MacNeice - I also love his 'manhole among the hollyhocks.'

'Never again would birdsong be the same
And to do that to birds was why she came'. Frost

'We should be careful of each other
We should be kind, while there is still time'. That old softy Larkin

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.