Urgent - I need a verse from your favourite poem please!

[MirandaGoshawk]

I've go to get some work in on Tuesday & it involves looking at lots of poems and picking them to bits looking at rhyming patterns, seeing why the author has chosen particular words etc.

I've used up all my favourites, Old Possums' Cats, Beowulf, Poe, Kipling etc etc and run out of ideas, decided I needed something modern, but all I can find is blank verse & it's all miserable.

Can you help? I need a verse & authors name.

TIA

I am not yet born Louis MacNeice

all of the poem really, but last 2 lines are really powerful

'Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me
Otherwise kill me'

Faster than fairies faster than witches all of the houses the hedges and ditches

From a railway carriage poss by r l stephenson

Sorry no punctuation but first post from new phone and bfeeding at the same time

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee
No 412 squadron, RCAF
Killed 11 December 1941

oops sorry,

tite is
a Prayer Before Birth

Still I rise - Maya Angelou.

We were fashioned man and wife/by hammer strokes of daily life.

Insrtuctions To The Double by Tess Gallagher.

If anyone calls you a witch, burn for him
If anyone calls you less or more than you are
Let them burn for you.

title -

dunno wot iz wrong with i tudday

Ning Nang Nong

Love that one, and has an interesting rythym/rhyme scheme.

How about some Brian Patten or Roger McGough?

Either this one:-

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Audens As I Walked Out One Evening

Love that one.

'I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night'

• cant remember all of it, will go and have a look

soworn - I love that poem!

Or this one:-

I have a Rendezvous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air -
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath -
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous

Allan Seeger.

Poet and member of the French Foreign Legion, killed on The Somme in 1916 whilst charging a machine gun emplacement.

Is it with children? Julia Donaldson-gruffalo, room on a broom- is great for rhyming couplets. Or Giles Andreae-Commotion in the Ocean etc. Obviously I may have completely the wrong end of the stick!

Yeats again:

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

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;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

The Solitary Reaper

      BEHOLD her, single in the field,
      Yon solitary Highland Lass!
      Reaping and singing by herself;
      Stop here, or gently pass!
      Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
      And sings a melancholy strain;
      O listen! for the Vale profound
      Is overflowing with the sound.

      No Nightingale did ever chaunt
      More welcome notes to weary bands                           10
      Of travellers in some shady haunt,
      Among Arabian sands:
      A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
      In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
      Breaking the silence of the seas
      Among the farthest Hebrides.

      Will no one tell me what she sings?--
      Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
      For old, unhappy, far-off things,
      And battles long ago:                                       20
      Or is it some more humble lay,
      Familiar matter of to-day?
      Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
      That has been, and may be again?

      Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
      As if her song could have no ending;
      I saw her singing at her work,
      And o'er the sickle bending;--
      I listened, motionless and still;
      And, as I mounted up the hill                               30
      The music in my heart I bore,
      Long after it was heard no more.

guffaw I love 'I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night'. What's it from?

Vergissmeinnicht

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.
Keith Douglas

Sarah Williams The Old Astronomer to his Pupil

Oh...missed the modern bit! How about this one:-

Warning

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

Jenny Joseph

Thanks, guffaw. I shall google it!