# Post your favorite poem



## PennGlock (Mar 14, 2006)

This should be a fun topic, to see where members' interests lie. I couldn't choose a single poem in any seriousness, but lately Hart Cranes _Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge_ speaks to me. It is a transcendent poem to one of the greatest structures man has ever built,and I have committed it to memory and have recited on location, alone and with friends.

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.


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## RJman (Nov 11, 2003)

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d'aile ivre
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n'ont pas fui !

Un cygne d'autrefois se souvient que c'est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n'avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui.

Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie
Par l'espace infligée à l'oiseau qui le nie,
Mais non l'horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.

Fantôme qu'à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,
Il s'immobilise au songe froid de mépris
Que vêt parmi l'exil inutile le Cygne.


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## rkipperman (Mar 19, 2006)

Roses are red,
violets are blue. 
Some poems rhyme, 
and some don't.


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## radix023 (May 3, 2007)

Solsbury hill

Climbing up on solsbury hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night

He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing stretching every nerve
I had to listen had no choice

I did not believe the information
Just had to trust imagination
My heart was going boom boom, boom
Son, he said, grab your things, I've come to take you home.

To keeping silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut

So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
till I thought of what I'd say
Which connection I should cut

I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart was going boom boom boom
Hey, he said, grab your things, I've come to take you home.
Yeah back home

When illusion spin her net
I'm never where I want to be
And liberty she pirouette
When I think that I am free

Watched by empty silhouettes
Who close their eyes, but still can see
No one taught them etiquette
I will show another me

Today I don't need a replacement
I'll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart was going boom boom boom
Hey, I said, you can keep my things, they've come to take me home.


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## Phinn (Apr 18, 2006)

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

The Fish by G.K. Chesterton. My screwed up computer won't let me post it legibly.


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## DukeGrad (Dec 28, 2003)

*Poems*

Gentlemen

I had too much time to read in the military, and have come to live poetry. I have enjoyed Donne lately for some crazy reason, maybe the 1960 time frame, the beer, and the pot, who knows. I am a hippie forever.
My favorite, one not many know of. It is Corine Roosevelt, "The Path before me"
I find this one, like a prayer out of your motel desk bible. Very moving, very motivating.
Has helped me to dig myself out of some low points where I thought the world was gonna die, and given me life.
God what a bunch of crap, but read it my friends.

Nice day gentlemen


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## tel star (Jul 26, 2006)

As an Englishman it'd have to be:

*"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"*
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, 
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines, 
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd; 
But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; 
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, 
When in eternal lines to time thou growest; 
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
 William Shakepeare   (1564 - 1616)​ I know, I know, a sonnet really - but who's counting? :icon_smile_wink:


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

PennGlock said:


> This should be a fun topic, to see where members' interests lie. I couldn't choose a single poem in any seriousness, but lately Hart Cranes _Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge_ speaks to me. It is a transcendent poem to one of the greatest structures man has ever built,and I have committed it to memory and have recited on location, alone and with friends.
> 
> How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
> The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
> ...


+1... I love this poem.


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

This is, perhaps, my all-time favorite poem, and as age moves inexorably upon me, the last verse becomes more and more meaningful.

*FERN HILL*

_Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea._

Dylan Thomas.


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

Dick Cavett once quoted this as an almost perfect poem. I do not recall the author nor can I track him/her down.

_Forgive me not, my love, but Oh, my love, forget me not._


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## Karl89 (Feb 20, 2005)

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last. 

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares. 

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express. 

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places. 

Robert Frost


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

And yet another; this belongs to a particular woman I knew and loved so many years ago (which should be the source for all the poems we hold most dear)

_ 
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

_ee cummings


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

_So was I once myself a swinger of birches;_
_And so I dream of going back to be._
_It's when I'm weary of considerations,_
_And life is too much like a pathless wood_
_Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs_
_Broken across it, and one eye is weeping_
_From a twig's having lashed across it open._
_I'd like to get away from earth awhile_
_And then come back to it and begin over._
_May no fate wilfully misunderstand me_
_And half grant what I wish and snatch me away_
_Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:_
_I don't know where it's likely to go better._
_I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,_
_And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk_
_Toward heaven,__till the tree could bear no more,_
_But dipped its top and set me down again._
_That would be good both going and coming back._
_One could do worse than be a swinger of birches._

_-Robert Frost_


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## TMMKC (Aug 2, 2007)

Laxplayer said:


> _So was I once myself a swinger of birches;_
> _And so I dream of going back to be._
> _It's when I'm weary of considerations,_
> _And life is too much like a pathless wood_
> ...


Wow...love it. Who is the author?


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## TMMKC (Aug 2, 2007)

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

-- ee cummings


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## gnatty8 (Nov 7, 2006)

*The Stolen Child..*

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.

_Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand._

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.

_Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand._ 
 
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.

_Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand._ 

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

_For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can
understand._


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## Wayfarer (Mar 19, 2006)

*Ozymandias*

One of my favorites:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

TMMKC said:


> Wow...love it. Who is the author?


Oops, I forgot to add that on. It is a portion of_ Birches_, and Robert Frost is the author. I also like this one from him:

_Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;_
_Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the passing there
had worn them really about the same,_
_And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no feet had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back._
_I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference_


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

Keep them coming, this is the best thread the Interchange has had in some time.


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## TMMKC (Aug 2, 2007)

Laxplayer said:


> Oops, I forgot to add that on. It is a portion of_ Birches_, and Robert Frost is the author.


I thought so. I was afraid to ask and be wrong, as my college American Lit professor would be doing backflips in her grave!

Big fan of Frost...his poems always remind me of autumn.


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## huysmans (Nov 5, 2007)

This hangs on my office wall - a passage, not a poem, but I have to post it.

Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands adnd to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for sure, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built. Peter Lake knew this even as he stood on the Bowery in his homespun, shell crown, and feather necklace, at five o'clock in the evening, on a Friday in May.

From Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale.

If I must post a poem, I would have to go with Longfellow's The Skeleton in Armour.

https://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/hwlongfellow/bl-hwl-skeleton.htm

Far too long to post in here.

I might have to dig up some Blake as well.


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## Congresspark (Jun 13, 2007)

*Two by Wallace Stevens*

Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night's moonlight lake was neither water nor air.

------------------------------------------------

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter 
To regard the frost and the boughs 
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time 
To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think 
Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land 
Full of the same wind 
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 
And, nothing himself, beholds 
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

- Wallace Stevens

Great thread. (Hart Crane!)


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## Cool Cal (Jan 19, 2007)

*The Cremation of Sam McGee*

(I'm also a fan of "Charge of the light Brigade)

*The Cremation of Sam McGee* _ There are strange things done in the midnight sun 
By the men who moil for gold; 
The Arctic trails have their secret tales 
That would make your blood run cold; 
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, 
But the queerest they ever did see 
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge 
I cremated Sam McGee._

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows. 
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows. 
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell; 
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell." 
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail. 
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail. 
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;

It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee. 
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow, 
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe, 
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess; 
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request." 
Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan: 
"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold, till I'm chilled clean through to the bone. 
Yet 'tain't being dead - it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains; 
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail; 
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale. 
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee; 
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee. 
There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven, 
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;

It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains, 
But you promised true, and it's up to you, to cremate those last remains." 
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.

In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load. 
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring, 
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows - Oh God! how I loathed the thing. 
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow; 
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;

The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in; 
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin. 
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay; 
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."

And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum; 
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum." 
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire; 
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher; 
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared - such a blaze you seldom see; 
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee. 
Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so; 
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.

It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why; 
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky. 
I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear; 
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near; 
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside. 
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide. 
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; 
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and said: "Please close that door.

It's fine in here, but I greatly fear, you'll let in the cold and storm - 
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

_There are strange things done in the midnight sun 
By the men who moil for gold; 
The Arctic trails have their secret tales 
That would make your blood run cold; 
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, 
But the queerest they ever did see 
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge 
I cremated Sam McGee. _


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## TMMKC (Aug 2, 2007)

Another favorite of mine: _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ by T.S. Eliot

A little too long to post here. Here's a link: https://www.bartleby.com/198/1.html


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## Rich (Jul 10, 2005)

When first we faced, and touching showed
How well we knew the early moves,
Behind the moonlight and the frost,
The excitement and the gratitude,
There stood how much our meeting owed
To other meetings, other loves.

The decades of a different life
That opened past your inch-close eyes
Belonged to others, lavished, lost;
Nor could I hold you hard enough 
To call my years of hunger-strife
Back for you mouth to colonise.

Admitted: and the pain is real.
But when did love not try to change 
The world back to itself - no cost,
No past, no people else at all -
Only what meeting made us feel,
So new, and gentle-sharp, and strange?

Philip Larkin


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

*Shel Silverstein*

Shel Silverstein is one of my wife's favorite poets. She often reads his poems to her third graders.

_*Where the Sidewalk Ends*_

_There is a place where the sidewalk ends_
_And before the street begins,_
_And there the grass grows soft and white,_
_And there the sun burns crimson bright,_
_And there the moon-bird rests from his flight_
_To cool in the peppermint wind._

_Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black_
_And the dark street winds and bends._
_Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow_
_We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,_
_And watch where the chalk-white arrows go_
_To the place where the sidewalk ends._

_Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,_
_And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,_
_For the children, they mark, and the children, they know_
_The place where the sidewalk ends._

_*Woulda-Coulda-Shoulda*_

_All the Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas _
_Layin' in the sun, _
_Talkin' 'bout the things _
_They woulda coulda shoulda done... _
_But those Woulda-Coulda-Shouldas _
_All ran away and hid _
_From one little Did. _

_*Reflection*_

_Each time I see the Upside-Down Man_
_Standing in the water,_
_I look at him and start to laugh,_
_Although I shouldn't oughtter._
_For maybe in another world_
_Another time_
_Another town,_
_Maybe HE is right side up_
_And I am upside down._


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

gnatty8 said:


> Where dips the rocky highland
> Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
> There lies a leafy island
> Where flapping herons wake
> ...


Who is the author of this, please?


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

rip said:


> Who is the author of this, please?


William Butler Yeats


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## AddisonBelmont (Feb 2, 2006)

*Reference Back by Philip Larkin*

*Reference Back*

_That was a pretty one_ I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.

_Oliver's Riverside Blues_, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique ******* blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
To my unsatisfactory prime.

Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.


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## Wayfarer (Mar 19, 2006)

*A Fragment*

Not the whole poem, but enough to capture the essence:

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, 
Great chieftain o' the pudding-race! 
Aboon them a' ye tak your place, 
Painch, tripe, or thairm: 
Weel are ye wordy o'a grace 
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill, 
Your hurdies like a distant hill, 
Your pin wad help to mend a mill 
In time o'need, 
While thro' your pores the dews distil 
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight, 
Trenching your gushing entrails bright, 
Like onie ditch; 
And then, O what a glorious sight, 
Warm-reekin', rich!


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## jbmcb (Sep 7, 2005)

I really enjoy Lewis Carroll, because it's all basically boolean logic 


'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought -- So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! and through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

jbmcb said:


> *I really enjoy Lewis Carroll, because it's all basically boolean logic *
> 
> 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!" He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought -- So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood awhile in thought And as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came! One, two! One, two! and through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with its head He went galumphing back. "And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" He chortled in his joy. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.


I've always enjoyed _Jabberwocky._ I still have it memorized. 
A good example of Carroll's use of logic is What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.


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## PennGlock (Mar 14, 2006)

Maybe the other great 'New York' poem, Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," here is a section that always makes me feel better:

6
It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seemed to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabbed, blushed, resented, lied, stole, grudged,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was called by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me
approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh
against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never
told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Played the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.


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## radix023 (May 3, 2007)

AddisonBelmont said:


> *Reference Back*
> 
> _That was a pretty one_ I heard you call
> From the unsatisfactory hall
> ...


+1 reminds me of Kundera


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## Howard (Dec 7, 2004)

I'm the pen your lover writes with" 
by Bernadette Mayer 


I'm the pen your lover writes with 
You say I went ahead without you 
But without you I would've recorded nothing about you 
And so your lover's words


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## jcusey (Apr 19, 2003)

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem,
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi.
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.


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## AddisonBelmont (Feb 2, 2006)

*What happens when one has too much time on his hands...*

[On His Blindness, by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, 
And that one talent which is death to hide, 
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent 
To serve therewith my Maker, and present 
My true account, lest He returning chide, 
'Doth God exact day labor, light denied?' 
I fondly ask. But Patience to prevent 
That murmur soon replies, 'God doth not need 
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best 
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state 
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed, 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest; 
They also serve who only stand and wait.'] 
&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.
* 
On His Shortsightedness, By Addison Belmont , 1973

When I consider how my money's spent
Ere half the month is past, and all I've got
To show for it is silly crap I bought
With money set aside for next month's rent,
And how I blew the fifty I was lent
By my best pal, who must have really thought
I meant it when I said I'd sooner rot
Than ask my dad again for one red cent, 
Just thinking on it really gets me pissed.
And it don't help to hear it from my wife
'bout how 'We gotta change our way of life!"
Just when I think an answer don't exist, 
Why then Bob Adams' friendly voice intones 
"Why not let us consolidate your loans?"

*Back when I was in college 30 years ago, this is how I used to occupy the long hours standing along dusty state roads in the heat & the dust with my thumb out, waiting for people to give me a lift. The rule was that the whole thing had to be done completely in my head, and I couldn't write it down until the whole thing was finished, with the result that I can still recite dozens of pointless pastiches of other people's poems, not, of course, that anyone ever asks me to. There's not much point when none of the people you pal around with has ever heard of any of the originals in the first place.


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## NewYorkBuck (May 6, 2004)

I like eels
except for meals
and the way they feels

Ogden Nash


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## red96 (Jun 26, 2007)

I'd like to second rip's commendation of Dylan Thomas with another of his poems, one of the few poems that has stuck with me since the first time I ever heard it...

Do not go gentle into that good night, 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 
Because their words had forked no lightning they 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 
Do not go gentle into that good night. 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. ​


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

NewYorkBuck said:


> I like eels
> except for meals
> and the way they feels
> 
> Ogden Nash


Nash's short poems always make me smile.

*Just Keep Quiet and Nobody Will Notice*


_ There is one thing that ought to be taught in all the colleges,
Which is that people ought to be taught not to go around always making apologies.
I don't mean the kind of apologies people make when they run over you or borrow five dollars or step on your feet,
Because I think that is sort of sweet;
No, I object to one kind of apology alone,
Which is when people spend their time and yours apologizing for everything they own.
You go to their house for a meal,
And they apologize because the anchovies aren't caviar or the partridge is veal;
They apologize privately for the crudeness of the other guests,
And they apologzie publicly for their wife's housekeeping or their husband's jests;
If they give you a book by Dickens they apologize because it isn't by Scott,
And if they take you to the theater, they apologize for the acting and the dialogue and the plot;
They contain more milk of human kindness than the most capacious diary can,
But if you are from out of town they apologize for everything local and if you are a foreigner they apologize for everything American.
I dread these apologizers even as I am depicting them,
I shudder as I think of the hours that must be spend in contradicting them,
Because you are very rude if you let them emerge from an argument victorious,
And when they say something of theirs is awful, it is your duty to convince them politely that it is magnificent and glorious,
And what particularly bores me with them,
Is that half the time you have to politely contradict them when you rudely agree with them,
So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.-Ogden Nash_


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## Howard (Dec 7, 2004)

Vanishing Red, The 
by Robert Lee Frost 

He is said to have been the last Red man 
In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed-- 
If you like to call such a sound a laugh. 
But he gave no one else a laugher's license. 
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, 
'Whose business,--if I take it on myself, 
Whose business--but why talk round the barn?-- 
When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.' 
You can't get back and see it as he saw it. 
It's too long a story to go into now. 
You'd have to have been there and lived it. 
They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter 
Of who began it between the two races. 

Some guttural exclamation of surprise 
The Red man gave in poking about the mill 
Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone 
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming 
From one who had no right to be heard from. 
'Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheel-pint?' 

He took him down below a cramping rafter, 
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, 
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, 
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. 
The he shut down the trap door with a ring in it 
That jangled even above the general noise, 
And came upstairs alone--and gave that laugh, 
And said something to a man with a meal-sack 
That the man with the meal-sack didn't catch--then. 
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.


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## fenway (May 2, 2006)

*The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner*

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

 --


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## Mike Petrik (Jul 5, 2005)

*Kipling probably knew how to dress, too.*

Gunga Din

YOU may talk o' gin an' beer 
When you're quartered safe out 'ere, 
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; 
But if it comes to slaughter 
You will do your work on water, 5 
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it. 
Now in Injia's sunny clime, 
Where I used to spend my time 
A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen, 
Of all them black-faced crew 10 
The finest man I knew 
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.

It was "Din! Din! Din! 
You limping lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din! 
Hi! slippy hitherao! 15 
Water, get it! Panee lao! 
You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din!"

The uniform 'e wore 
Was nothin' much before, 
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind, 20 
For a twisty piece o' rag 
An' a goatskin water-bag 
Was all the field-equipment 'e could find. 
When the sweatin' troop-train lay 
In a sidin' through the day, 25 
Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl, 
We shouted "Harry By!" 
Till our throats were bricky-dry, 
Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve us all.

It was "Din! Din! Din! 30 
You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? 
You put some juldee in it, 
Or I'll marrow you this minute, 
If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!"

'E would dot an' carry one 35 
Till the longest day was done, 
An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear. 
If we charged or broke or cut, 
You could bet your bloomin' nut, 
'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear. 40 
With 'is mussick on 'is back, 
'E would skip with our attack, 
An' watch us till the bugles made "Retire." 
An' for all 'is dirty 'ide, 
'E was white, clear white, inside 45 
When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire!

It was "Din! Din! Din!" 
With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green. 
When the cartridges ran out, 
You could 'ear the front-files shout: 50 
"Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!"

I sha'n't forgit the night 
When I dropped be'ind the fight 
With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been. 
I was chokin' mad with thirst, 55 
An' the man that spied me first 
Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din.

'E lifted up my 'ead, 
An' 'e plugged me where I bled, 
An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water-green; 60 
It was crawlin' an' it stunk, 
But of all the drinks I've drunk, 
I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din.

It was "Din! Din! Din! 
'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen; 65 
'E's chawin' up the ground an' 'e's kickin' all around: 
For Gawd's sake, git the water, Gunga Din!"

'E carried me away 
To where a dooli lay, 
An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean. 70 
'E put me safe inside, 
An' just before 'e died: 
"I 'ope you liked your drink," sez Gunga Din. 
So I'll meet 'im later on 
In the place where 'e is gone- 75 
Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 
'E'll be squattin' on the coals 
Givin' drink to pore damned souls, 
An' I'll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din!

Din! Din! Din! 80 
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! 
Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you, 
By the livin' Gawd that made you, 
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!


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## gregp (Aug 11, 2005)

*Hymn to Proserpine*

Vicisti, Galilaee

I have lived long enough, having seen one thing, that love hath an end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.
Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;
But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.
Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,
A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?
I am sick of singing: the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain
To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.
For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,
We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death.
O Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day
From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your chains, men say.
New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken your rods;
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate Gods.
But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare;
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.
Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace,
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean ? but these thou shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the nymphs in the brake;
Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer breath;
And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death;
All the feet of the hours that sound as a single lyre,
Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like fire.
More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these things ?
Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings.
A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may?
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years ?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May.
Sleep, shall we sleep after all ? for the world is not sweet in the end;
For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend.
Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides;
But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the foam of the tides.
O lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and rods !
O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods !
Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees bend,
I kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end.
All delicate days and pleasant, all spirits and sorrows are cast
Far out with the foam of the present that sweeps to the surf of the past:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.
The depths stand naked in sunder behind it, the storms flee away;
In the hollow before it the thunder is taken and snared as a prey;
In its sides is the north-wind bound; and its salt is of all men's tears;
With light of ruin, and sound of changes, and pulse of years:
With travail of day after day, and with trouble of hour upon hour;
And bitter as blood is the spray; and the crests are as fangs that devour:
And its vapour and storm of its steam as the sighing of spirits to be;
And its noise as the noise in a dream; and its depth as the roots of the sea:
And the height of its heads as the height of the utmost stars of the air:
And the ends of the earth at the might thereof tremble, and time is made bare.
Will ye bridle the deep sea with reins, will ye chasten the high sea with rods ?
Will ye take her to chain her with chains, who is older than all ye Gods ?
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;
Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords and our forefathers trod,
Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead art a God,
Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head,
Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead.
Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace clad around;
Thou art throned where another was king; where another was queen she is crowned.
Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say these.
Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,
Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam,
And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome.
For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but ours,
Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers,
White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame,
Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name.
For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she
Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea.
And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the viewless ways,
And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of the bays.
Ye are fallen, our lords, by what token? we wist that ye should not fall.
Ye were all so fair that are broken; and one more fair than ye all.
But I turn to her still, having seen she shall surely abide in the end;
Goddess and maiden and queen, be near me now and befriend.
O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art,
Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart,
Where the poppies are sweet as the rose in our world, and the red rose is white,
And the wind falls faint as it blows with the fume of the flowers of the night,
And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of Gods from afar
Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star,
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.l
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep.


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## Clovis (Jan 11, 2005)

*My favorite poem as a child*

AA Milne

The Three Foxes
Once upon a time there were three little foxes
Who didn't wear stockings, and they didn't wear sockses,
But they all had handkerchiefs to blow their noses,
And they kept their handkerchiefs in cardboard boxes.

And they lived in forest in three little houses,
And they didn't wear coats, and they didn't wear trousies.
They ran through the woods on theirlittle bare tootsies,
And they played "Touch Last" with a family of mouses.

They didn't go shopping in the High Street shopses,
But caught what they wanted in the woods and copses.
They all went fishing, and they caught three wormses,
They went out hunting, and they caught three wopses.

They wen to a Fair, and they all won prizes -
Tree plum-puddingses and three mince-pieses.
They rode on elephants and swang on swingses,
And hirt three coco-nuts at coco-nut shieses.

That's all I know of three little foxes
Who kept their handkerchiefs in three little boxes.
They lived in the forest in three little houses,
But they didn't wear coats and they didn't wear trousies,
And they didn't wear stockings and they didn't wear sockses.


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## eg1 (Jan 17, 2007)

Earl Birney's _What's So Big About Green? _Sorry, cannot find a link.

In keeping with one of the parodies posted earlier, a riff off Matthew Arnold's _Dover Beach_: Anthony Hecht's _The Dover *****_

https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16424

Ted Hughes' _Hawk Roosting_

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hawk-roosting/

XJ Kennedy's _Ars Poetica_

https://www.poemtree.com/poems/ArsPoetica2.htm


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## eg1 (Jan 17, 2007)

Sorry, how could I forget? ee cumming's _I sing of Olaf glad and big:_

i sing of Olaf glad and big by E. E. Cummings

XXX

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand; 
but--though an host of overjoyed 
noncoms(first knocking on the head 
him)do through icy waters roll 
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed 
anent this muddy toiletbowl, 
while kindred intellects evoke 
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag 
upon what God unto him gave) 
responds,without getting annoyed 
"I will not kiss your ******* flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers 
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride) 
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion 
voices and boots were much the worse, 
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease 
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some **** I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified 
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

*To read it without the silly asterisks, use this link:*

https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15408


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## Gong Tao Jai (Jul 7, 2005)

This is not my real favorite, but a very nice piece of doggerel:

CLANCY OF THE OVERFLOW by Banjo Paterson

I HAD written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just on spec, addressed as follows, “Clancy, of The Overflow”.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
’Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”

. . . . .

In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the Western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

. . . . .

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cash-book and the journal—
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of The Overflow.


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## going grey (May 22, 2006)

*It is Not Growing Like a Tree by Ben Jonson*

It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make Man better be ;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last ,dry , bald and sere
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night-
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures life may perfect be.

brings a lump to my throat every time


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## jpeirpont (Mar 16, 2004)

My favorite for more emotional reasons than intellectual.


The Black Woman

Black queen of beauty, thou hast given color to the world!
Among other women thou art royal and the fairest!
Like the brightest of jewels in the regal diadem,
Shin'st thou, Goddess of Africa, Nature's purest emblem!

Black men worship at thy virginal shrine of truest love,
Because in thine eyes are virtue's steady and holy mark,
As we see in no other, clothed in silk or fine linen,
From ancient Venus, the Goddess, to mythical Helen.

When Africa stood at the head of the elder nations,
The Gods used to travel from foreign lands to look at thee:
On couch of costly Eastern materials, all perfumed,
Reclined thee, as in thy path flow'rs were strewn-
sweetest that bloomed.

Thy transcendent marvelous beauty made the whole world mad,
Bringing Solomon to tears as he viewed thy comeliness;
Anthony and the elder Caesars wept at thy royal feet,
Preferring death than to leave thy presence, their foes to meet.

You, in all ages, have attracted the adoring world,
And caused many a bloody banner to be unfurled:
You have sat upon exalted and lofty eminence,
To see a world fight in your ancient African defense.

Today you have been dethroned, through the weakness of your men,
While, in frenzy, those who of yore craved your smiles and your hand-
Those who were all monsters and could not with love approach you-
Have insulted your pride and now attack your good virtue.

Because of disunion you became mother of the world,
Giving tinge of robust color to five continents,
Making a greater world of millions of colored races,
Whose claim to beauty is reflected through our black faces.

From the handsome Indian to European brunette,
There is a claim for that credit of their sunny beauty
That no one can e'er to take from thee, 0 Queen of all
women

Who have borne trials and troubles and racial burden.
Once more we shall, in Africa, fight and conquer for you,
Restoring the pearly crown that proud Queen Sheba did wear:
Yea, it may mean blood, it may mean death; but still we shall fight,

Bearing our banners to Vict'ry, men of Afric's might.
Superior Angels look like you in Heaven above,
For thou art fairest, queen of the seasons, queen of our love:
No condition shall make us ever in life desert thee,
Sweet Goddess of the ever green land and placid blue sea.

-Garvey


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## Dreadful Hillbilly (Nov 14, 2007)

Somewhat fitting considering my user ID. Incidentally, the forum software replaced a Latin
word with ****. The dictionary definition of the word is:



> Any of a genus (****) of hominids that includes modern humans (H. sapiens) and several extinct related species (as H. erectus and H. habilis)


*Carmen Possum*


```
THE NOX was lit by lux of Luna,
    And 'twas a nox most opportuna
    To catch a possum or a coona;
    For nix was scattered o'er this mundus,
    A shallow nix, et non profundus.
    On sic a nox with canis unus,
    Two boys went out to hunt for coonus.
    The corpus of this bonus canis
    Was full as long as octo span is,
    But brevior legs had canis never
    Quam had hic dog; et bonus clever.
    Some used to say, in stultum jocum
    Quod a field was too small locum
    For sic a dog to make a turnus
    Circum self from stem to sternus.
    Unis canis, duo puer,
    Nunquam braver, nunquam truer,
    Quam hoc trio nunquam fuit,
    If there was I never knew it.
    This bonus dog had one bad habit,
    Amabat much to tree a rabbit,
    Amabat plus to chase a rattus,
    Amabat bene tree a cattus.
    But on this nixy moonlight night
    This old canis did just right.
    Nunquam treed a starving rattus,
    Nunquam chased a starving cattus,
    But sucurrit on, intentus
    On the track and on the scentus,
    Till he trees a possum strongum,
    In a hollow trunkum longum.
    Loud he barked in horrid bellum,
    Seemed on terra vehit pellum.
    Quickly ran the duo puer
    Mors of possum to secure.
    Quam venerit, one began
    To chop away like quisque man.
    Soon the axe went through the truncum
    Soon he hit it all kerchunkum;
    Combat deepens, on ye braves!
    Canis, pueri et staves
    As his powers non longius carry,
    Possum potest non pugnare.
    On the nix his corpus lieth.
    Down to Hades spirit flieth,
    Joyful pueri, canis bonus,
    Think him dead as any stonus.
    Now they seek their pater's domo,
    Feeling proud as any ****,
    Knowing, certe, they will blossom
    Into heroes, when with possum
    They arrive, narrabunt story,
    Plenus blood et plenior glory.
    Pompey, David, Samson, Caesar,
    Cyrus, Black Hawk, Shalmanezer!
    Tell me where est now the gloria,
    Where the honors of victoria?
    Nunc a domum narrent story,
    Plenus sanguine, tragic, gory.
    Pater praiseth, likewise mater,
    Wonders greatly younger frater.
    Possum leave they on the mundus,
    Go themselves to sleep profundus,
    Somniunt possums slain in battle,
    Strong as ursae, large as cattle.
    When nox gives way to lux of morning,
    Albam terram much adorning,
    Up they jump to see the varmin,
    Of the which this is the carmen.
    Lo! possum est resurrectum!
    Ecce pueri dejectum,
    Ne relinquit back behind him,
    Et the pueri never find him.
    Cruel possum! bestia vilest,
    How the pueros thou beguilest!
    Pueri think non plus of Caesar,
    Go ad Orcum, Shalmanezer,
    Take your laurels, cum the honor,
    Since ista possum is a goner!
```


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