Thinking about what I read in school set me off wondering what everybody's favourite poem is. I have dozens that I absolutely adore and several favourite poets, and finding more each year, but if I had to choose I would have to pick W B Yeats' "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" as my all time favourite - with Carol Ann Duffy's "Valentine" and Jenny Joseph's "Warning" (which all my close friends say is me!!!).

I would love to hear what poems everyone else has a special place in their heart for.

He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

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.

Awwwwww, Nenya, god bless you ;-). That's my father's favourite. It's used in a film, called "84 Charing Cross Road".

The Carol Ann Duffy one is fantastic too, I only discovered her a couple of years ago.

Very hard to choose an all time favourite, maybe STC's "Kubla Khan" or "Frost at Midnight" or e.e.cummings' "Somewhere I have Never Travelled" (the most sensual love poem I've ever read.) But this one is a favourite, and very apt for this time of year:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said,
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again,
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Thie yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still th'unresting castles thresh
In full-grown thickness every May,
"Last year is dead" they seem to say,
"Begin afresh, afresh, afresh".

Philip Larkin.

Or how about this one:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state;
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate.
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends posessed;
Desiring this man's art, another's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least.
Yet in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark, at break of day arising,
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

William Shakespeare (as if I needed to say ;-) )

This is what I love about WS, he lived 400 years before me but can express my feelings better than any other writer I've encountered, Proof positive that human nature doesn't change and that the theory that his writing is no longer relevant is absolute rubbish.

My favorite poem is 'Stay Gold' By Robert Frost.

Mine is If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

My favorite poem is "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats:
..."Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all / Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to know.

But I feel I must pay respect here to Langston Hughes, whose 100th anniversary was celebrated on February first. Hughes was a major player in the Harlem Renaissance, but first he was born right here in Joplin, Missouri. From "The Weary Blues":

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more-
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied-
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied-
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

"The Love Song of Alfed J. Prufrock", by T. S. Eliot.
"New Heaven and Earth", by D. H. Lawrence.

They are too long to print here, but Prufrock is at http://www.prufrock.org/poem/fulltext.html

Jerry

Dan the Man, I'm so glad you picked that poem - it's my dad's favourite. I once spent a million hours designing and cross stitching it for him and it is now one of his favourite possessions.

As for me, I will never ever cross stitch a poem again

Sucker for Poe here.
"I was a child and she was a child....."
Annabelle Lee

All time favorite.

I Sing the Body Electric
The armies of those I love
engirth me and I engirth them,
go with them, respond to them,
and discorrupt them, and charge
them full with the charge of the
soul.....

from, I sing the Body Electric, by Walt Whitman. Ray Bradbury took the title of his book from this poem.

I simply love this poem. To have armies of those that love you with a surrounding, engirthing love--and you return this to them so both of you are recharged by this feeling- Whitman may have been born in 1819, but his words are still powerful today.

Sometimes my favourite is "Naming of Parts "by Henry Reed
sometimes it is John Donne's "The Sun Rising" or "Go and Catch a Falling Star" or "The Good Morrow" So much depends on the frame of mind I think...
I love poetry , so this is a very hard choice to make.

I agree with Ren: a lot depends on your mood at any time.

Donne would certainly be one of my front runners. Like Ren, I admire "The Sun Rising", and also Elegy 19 ("On His Mistress Going To Bed") and the sonnet "Death, be not proud".

In some moods Gray's Elegy would be a favourite. Othet candidates would include Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Lie" and some of the shorter poems of Shakespeare, e.g. the dirge from "Cymbeline" ("Fear no more the heat of the sun") or the sonnet "Let me not to the marriage of true minds".

Here goes one for me:
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree
A tree that may in summer wear
a nest of robins in her hair...
Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree
-Joyce Kilmer (I think)

Another favourite of mine is Macavity the Mystery Cat by T.S. Eliott.

there are two poems that i really love and i can't choose between them. i don't know their names either!!

the first is a poem about children and how adults should nurture them. i wondered whether it was by Rudyard Kipling as the tone is very much that as set by the poem Dan the Man chose. it goes with the kind of theme that if you criticise a child too much, they grow up to hate themselves etc. i wonder if anyone here knows that poem i'm talking about ..?

the second is a poem that we were given to read when i was in secondary school and it makes me cry. the writer 'was unable to speak. although was seen to write from time to time. after her death her locker was emptied and this poem of her life was found.' see it makes me cry even before i read the poem!

it starts 'What do you see nurses, what do you see?
Are you thinking when you are looking at me
A crabbit old woman not very wise,
Uncertain of habit with far-away eyes..'

does anyone know this poem, or either of them for that matter..?

[ 02-07-2002: Message edited by: allynellie ]

"Prufrock" is another one that I return to again and again, I like it much better than the Waste Land, the closing stanzas are just magical.

What Do You See Nurses?

This poem appeared when an old lady died in the geriatric ward of a hospital near Dundee, Scotland. It was felt that she had left nothing of value. Then the nurses, going through her possessions, found this poem.

Its quality so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital. One nurse took her copy to Ireland. The old lady's sole bequest to posterity has since appeared in the Christmas edition of the News Magazine of the North Ireland Association for Mental Health. A slide presentation has also been made based on the poem.

A Poem...

What do you see, nurses, what do you see,

what are you thinking when you're looking at me?

A crabby old woman, not very wise,

uncertain of habit, with faraway eyes.

Who dribbles her food and makes no reply

when you say in a loud voice, "I do wish you'd try?"

Who seems not to notice the things that you do,

and forever is losing a stocking or shoe.

Who, resisting or not, lets you do as you will

with bathing and feeding, the long day to fill.

Is that what you're thinking? Is that what you see?

Then open your eyes, nurse; you're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am as I sit here so still,

as I use at your bidding, as I eat at your will.

I'm a small child of ten with a father and mother

brothers and sisters, who love one another.

A young girl of sixteen, with wings on her feet,

dreaming that soon now a lover she'll meet.

A bride soon at twenty -- my heart gives a leap,

remembering the vows that I promised to keep.

At twenty-five now, I have young of my own

who need me to guide and a secure happy home.

A woman of thirty, my young now grown fast,

bound to each other with ties that should last.

At forty my young sons have grown and are gone,

but my man's beside me to see I don't mourn.

At fifty once more babies play round my knee,

again we know children, my loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead;

I look at the future, I shudder with dread.

For my young are all rearing young of their own,

and I think of the years and the love that I've known.

I'm now an old woman and nature is cruel;

'tis jest to make old age look like a fool.

The body, it crumbles, grace and vigor depart,

there is now a stone where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass a young girl still dwells,

and now and again my battered heart swells.

I remember the joys, I remember the pain,

and I'm loving and living life over again.

I think of the years; all too few. Gone too fast,

and accept the stark fact that nothing can last.

So open your eyes, nurses, open and see,

not a crabby old woman; look closer -- see ME!!

Thanks to The Story of Encouragement PBN-on@mail-list.com

Robert Frosts "The Road Not Taken"

I know I know its mainstream and all but it speaks to me.

allynellie and ren, thank you so much for that wonderful poem. It made me cry when I read it.

It was what I was hoping for when I started this thread, that people would come up with wonderful poems that others had not heard of and share them with everyone.

That was a poem well worth sharing and will go on my list of favourites, which seems to grow longer each year.

FallAir, I completely agree with you! That's one of my favourites as well!

My 12th grade English teacher had a beautiful poster with the last two lines of "The Road Not Taken" on it. I would stare at it all the time, because it so closely coincided with my own beliefs.

It also partially inspired, along with James Michener and Aldous Huxley, one of the best short stories I've ever written. Mrs. Garvin asked if she could publish it in the school newspaper, but I declined. The undertone of it was extremely disparaging to my classmates as representatives of the emerging society that Huxley feared, and while Mrs. Garvin hadn't picked up on it, I don't think, I'm certain that the class "Alphas" would have.

I'm going to say "Amen" to Robert Frost, but chose instead "Stopping By The 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 see his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer,
to stop without a farmhouse near,
between the woods and frosty lake,
the longest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake,
to ask if there is some mistake,
the only other sounds the sweep,
of frosty 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.

PS - My apologies if that's not word-perfect. I wrote it down from memory, and my brain is a sieve!!

My favorite poem is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Psalm of Life", or something like that. I once memerized the
whole thing. Great poem.

I have several favourite poems.The one that always makes me smile is a silly poem called before the days of noah by peter dixon.

Befoe the days of noah
before he built his ark
seagulls sang like nightingales
and lions sang like larks.
The tortoise had a mighty roar
the cockeral had a moo
kittens always eeyored
and elephants just mewed
It was the way the world was
....when owls had a bark
and dogs did awful crowings
whilst running in the park.
Horses baaaed like baa lambs
ducks could all meow
and animals had voices
quite different from now!
But,came the day of flooding
and all the world was dark
the animals got weary
of living in the ark-
so they swapped around their voices
a trumpet for a mew
-a silly sort of pastime
when nothing much to do.
But when the flooding ended
and the world was nice and dry
the creatures had forgotten
how once they hissed or cried.
So they kept their brand-new voices
-forgot the days before
-when lions used to giggle
and gerbils use to roar.

I have Rudyard Kipling's 'If' pinned up in front of my desk at work. I love it . But my favourite poem has to be Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas. It is full of the most wonderful imagery imaginable.Find a copy of the poem,find a Quiet corner, and let your imagination take flight.You can also indulge in some dramatics.(Who is this Lawrence Olivier anyway?)

thanx B ridie - i was trying to work out what that poem was called in my earlier post ... 'If' - Rudyard Kipling - i love this poem

though it's somber and and even a bit dark, I can't help but love the poem "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe. "Quoth the raven."

"Nevermore!"
Nope, Maaaaaa, Spikey took my poem! No fair!
Bet she didn't have to learn it or pick it up on bullwinkle and Rocky like me!