Asymmetrical Information

Worn well? It's worn out. It should be renamed Groan.

"If--" by Rudyard Kipling.

I can't pick just one favorite; here are two, both Kipling.

The Sea and the Hills

The Supports

And a great children's poem, for Kipling as well.
Smuggler's Song

I'm glad you like Howl, I think it is wonderful also. Also 'America' is great.

I think this might not be the best known Yeats poem, but it is very beautiful.

IN MEMORY OF EVA GORE-BOOTH AND CON MARKIEWICZ

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams -
Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

What a great request and yet I'm having trouble thinking of a favorite. Do English degrees expire?

While not necessarily my favorite, I remember still Anne Sexton's "The Starry Night" but that is likely because of a comp lit paper I had to write on ekphrasis.

The Starry Night
Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of -- shall I say the word -- religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.

--Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

Hmm. Ok, now on to the limericks I'm certain will be posted in response to your request.

Most things by Kipling although every so often his views on race become so jarring that they get in the way of his genius.

But all time favourite is "Clancy of the Overflow" by Banjo Patterson.

"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"

"On Breaking the Ice", by Ogden Nash

Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker

Not really a fan of poetry, guess I'm just ill bred.

The May Magnificat

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

May is Mary’s month, and I
Muse at that and wonder why :
Her feasts follow reason,
Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day ;
But the Lady Month, May,
Why fasten that upon her,
With a feasting in her honour ?

Is it only its being brighter
Than the most are must delight her ?
Is it opportunist
And flowers finds soonest ?

Ask of her, the mighty mother :
Her reply puts this other
Question : What is Spring?—
Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together ;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within ;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good
Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind
With delight calls to mind
How she did in her stored
Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this :
Spring’s universal bliss
Much, had much to say
To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
And magic cuckoocall
Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.

At the risk of losing my 'man card':

A Woman's Shortcomings~by EBB

The line, "Unless you can die when the dream is past---" strikes me. Wow.

Robert Browning was the luckiest man on earth.

Tolbert:

There's something for just about everyone:

http://www.animecapsule.net/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t1363.html

Enjoy!

But yes, Kipling works.

In English?
Probably "To Marcus Aurelius" by Zbigniew Herbert, but I can't find a translation. This one is up there though:

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

For other nonEnglish stuff basically Rilke.
For stuff that was actually first written in English, Larkin is good as is Kipling, Ginsberg, e.e., and Keats as above. I actually memorized the first part of the Howl back in high school, now I can just get to the "who ate fire in paint hotels and drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death....uh....uh..." part.

Herbert's Report from Paradise is also very good:
http://www.durham21.co.uk/archive/archive.asp?ID=1312
(scroll down to the bottom)

For lymerics/silliness Edward Lear.

Ah, poetry.

Ozymandius

O Captain, My Captain

Cargoes

All good.

After five years in a graduate math program, being re-educated to interpret all statements in terms of their logical content, I found I couldn't read poetry any more. So all I have to offer are the bits and pieces that lodged in my brain before that. One that remains a favorite is about the evacuation of Dunkirk, in which two children take their little sailboat across the Channel to rescue British soldiers. It ends, "and there at his side sat Francis Drake, and held him true, and steered him home."

It may be saccharine, but I can't read it without crying.

A local librarian found it for me in a book of WWII poems that hadn't been checked out in decades.

And The Highwayman. And oh yes, Kipling.

An old favorite which has perhaps taken on a new (or not?) meaning in these troubled times...

You, Andrew Marvell
by Archibald MacLeish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth’s noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under the the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on…

Roses are red
Violets are blue
All of our base
Are belong to you

Megan, one day late for Valentine's Day,

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!
All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

Shakespeare at his most convoluted, but I can't resist it, especially the last couplet. (And Benjamin Britten made a heartbreaking musical setting in his Nocturne.)

Not poetry, but Auden's description of what he would have been doing on the day Christ was crucified is bracing:

"In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenised Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all-too- familiar sight – three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say “It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?” Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful."

But if you insist on poetry, Yeats' "Second Coming" is my favorite, and describes blogging pretty well: "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"

My favorite has to be Milton's Lycidas.

But, since that is a little too long to post here, I offer you two love poems I stumbled across last summer when I had to spend it apart from my now-fiancee. They are indeed dear to my heart.

Frost's Flower Gathering:

I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know?

All for me? And not a question
For the faded flowers gay
That could take me from beside you
For the ages of a day?
They are yours, and be the measure
Of their worth for you to treasure,
The measure of the little while
That I've been long away.

And Coventry Patmore's The Revelation:

An idle poet, here and there,
Looks round him, but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling's jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids, and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach,
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And give some thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget, but, either way,
That and the child's unheeded dream
Is all the light of all their day.

I like Auden's elegy to Yeats very much, especially the second and third sections:

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
The snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

* * *

As for love poetry, I recommend The Ink Dark Moon, a translation of poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu of the ancient court of Japan. This is Shikibu:

In this world
love has no color --
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

For sheer fun, John Updike's Recital is hard to beat:

ROGER BOBO GIVES
RECITAL ON TUBA

-Headline in the Times

Eskimos in Manitoba
Barracuda off Aruba
Cock an ear when Roger Bobo
Starts to solo on the tuba.

Men of every station- Pooh-Bah,
Nabob, bozo, toff, and hobo-
Cry in unison, "Indubi-
Tably, there is simply nobo-

Dy who oompahs on the tubo
Solo, quite like Roger Bubo!"

Two poems by Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us, late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Little we see in nature that is ours,
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea the bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
Are upgathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimses that would make me less forlorn,
Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Earth has not anything to shew more fair.
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty.
The city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning. Silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open to the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and brilliant in the smokeless air.
Never did the sun more beautifully steep
In his first slendor valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

My favorites have been mentioned. Kipling in particular.

I like Jeffery McDaniel's
The Quiet World

I sent it to a girl I was dating, when most of our communication consisted of text messages.

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Also, Natural History by E.B. White. If it ever happens that I have to take a long trip away from someone I'm close to, I plan to give them silver spider ring and a copy of this poem.

The spider, dropping down from twig,
Unwinds a thread of his devising;
A thin, premeditated rig
To use in rising.

And all the journey down through space
In cool descent, and loyal-hearted,
He builds a ladder to the place
From which he started.

Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do,
In spider's web a truth discerning,
Attach one silken strand to you
For my returning. (Poems and Sketches 72)

Elizabeth Bishop's
Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships are signalling cordially with multitudes of flags rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing countless little pellucid jellies in cut-glass espergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons, please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

Here's a few that come to mind:

Poe, "The Bells"

http://www.bartleby.com/42/758.html

Tennyson, "The Lotos-Eaters"

http://www.bartleby.com/42/638.html

Larkin, "Next, Please"

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=4632

(almost too depressing to contemplate, isn't it?)

Flecker, "The Bridge of Fire" (couldn't find a link for this one):

Between the Pedestals of Night and Morning
Between red death and radiant desire
With not one sound of triumph or of warning
Stands a great sentry on the Bridge of Fire.
O transient soul, thy thought with dreams adorning,
Cast down the laurel, and unstring the lyre:
the wheels of Time are turning, turning, turning,
The slow stream channel’s deep and doth not tire.
Gods on their bridge above
Whispering lies and love
Shall mock your passage down the sunless river
Which, rolling all it streams,
shall take you, king of dreams,
-Unthroned and unapproachable for ever-
To where the kings who dreamed of old
Whiten in habitations monumental cold.

I've always loved the Romantics: Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron - too many to single out among that bunch...

The Raven by Poe.

And... The Simpson's version of the Raven.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ1tf6GO4-c

Were Aaron Haspel here, he would be none too happy about the choice of a Keats poem.

Anyway, my choice would have to be Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'My own heart let me have more have pity on; let'.

MY own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.

Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposed dead;
And there reigns love, and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things remov'd that hidden in thee lie!
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give:
That due of many now is thine alone.

Their images I lov'd I view in thee,
And thou (all they) hast all the all of me.

Perhaps it's because I'm sat at home contemplating the ethics of gene patenting, partly wondering if Don Boudreaux really got what I said when I spoke of the beauty of nature, including mud pools, and wondering whether to switch jobs. Or maybe it's just that I'm subconcsiously affected by the fact that it's the 250th anniversary of his birth. Whatever the reasons, I love Blake's "Auguries of Innocence". Not that I agree with all its sentiments.

Oh, and being taught in England means I have a curious fondness for the war poets.

I can't help but counter the "Ode to Melancholy" with one of my favorites: Schiller's "Ode to Joy," as altered for Beethoven's 9th.

Joy, thou glorious spark of heaven,
Daughter of Elysium,
We approach fire-drunk,
Heavenly One, your shrine.
Your magic reunites
What custom's sword separates;
Beggars become princes' brothers
Where your gentle wing alights.

Whoever succeeds in the great attempt
To be a friend of a friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Let him add his jubilation!
Yes, whoever calls even one soul
His own on the earth's globe!
And who never has, let him steal,
Weeping, away from this group.

All creatures drink joy
At the breasts of nature;
All the good, all the evil
Follow her roses' trail.
Kisses gave she us, and wine,
A friend, proven unto death;
Pleasure was to the worm granted,
And the cherub stands before God.

Glad, as his suns fly
Through the Heavens' glorious plan,
Run, brothers, your race,
Joyful, as a hero to victory.

Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Do you bow down, you millions?
Do you sense the Creator, world?
Seek Him beyond the star-canopy!
Beyond the stars must He dwell.

Be embraced, ye millions!
This kiss for the whole world!
Brothers, beyond the star-canopy
Must a loving Father dwell.
Be embraced,
This kiss for the whole world!
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,
Daughter of Elysium,
Joy, beautiful spark of the gods

The German version is better, of course (anyone can Wiki "Ode to Joy" and find it easily enough), and I think the music is actually what really makes this one for me. And being a true old fashioned atheist, too, I tend to gloss over the likening of "joy" to "God" ... uh, OK, so have I totally undercut my appreciation for the poem now?

Oops.

"Comment," by Dorothy Parker:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Roumania.

The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Poe "The Bells"

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/medny/venturi-poebells.html

Tennyson "The Lotos-Eaters"

http://www.bartleby.com/42/638.html

I've always loved the English Romantics - Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron. Too many great poems to list.

I am very happily married but, in my 20s, "Mock Orange" by Louise Gluck got stuck in my craw...

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man's mouth
sealing my mouth, the man's
paralyzing body--

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union--

In my mind tonight
I hear the question and pursuing answer
fused in one sound
that mounts and mounts and then
is split into the old selves,
the tired antagonisms. Do you see?
We were made fools of.
And the scent of mock orange
drifts through the window.

How can I rest?
How can I be content
while there is still
that odor in the world?

I have been a fan of Shel Silverstein's poetry since I could read, and that influence has left me chronically bored with more serious work. My favorite all-time poet in fact is actually the older brother of one of my best friends. He wrote silly poetry for himself, friends, and family, and I happened to get an autographed dot-matrix printout of his collection. Then I made the mistake of loaning it to a poetry snob and never saw it again. But I still remember some of the shorter ones.

"Pome" by Kevin Neidlinger

I'm combing my hair
Nevermind that I'm bald
That's not the hair I'm combing.
Haaaaaaaa!

I second JDM's vote for Ozymandias by Shelley.
What a great poem that reflects the timelessness of nature and the frailty of man. I read it nearly everyday to remind me of humility.

I met a traveler 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 upon 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.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

THEY flee from me, that sometime did me
seek,
With naked foot stalking within my
chamber :
Once have I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember,
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand ; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better ; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, ' Dear heart, how like you this ?'
It was no dream ; for I lay broad awaking :
But all is turn'd now through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking ;
And I have leave to go of her goodness ;
And she also to use new fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served :
How like you this, what hath she now deserved ?

Audio Excerpt from "Popular Poetry, Popular Verse" - CD.

Source:
Yeowell, James, Ed. The Poetical Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt.
London: George Bell and Sons, 1904. 32.

Well if no one else will give some love to Wallace Stevens...

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15749

My favorite poem is "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, almost from the first time I read it in college.

Interestingly, in the same literature class, we extensively studied and wrote about "The Wasteland" by the same poet. I hated that poem with a passion! It was so incredibly dense and convoluted that I simply detested it. This was in the fall of 1984.

Twenty years later I was rereading a hyperlinked version of "Prufrock" when I found, on the same site, a hyperlinked version of "The Wasteland" that gave links to all sorts of information on Eliot's allusions, links to Eliot's sources, and links to the comments of other readers from around the world. With such information at hand, I spent nearly a week reading and rereading that poem while reading all the links provided. It was a wonderful experience and turned a poem I hated into one I like and respect a great deal.

Today's favorite:

The Beautiful Changes
Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides
The Queen Anne's Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Another vote for Ozymandias. The last two sentences.

You Want a Social Life, with Friends
By Kenneth Koch

You want a social life, with friends.

A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What's true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn't time enough, my friends--
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends--
To find the time to have love, work, and friends. Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day's end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

Shout out here for Wallace Steven's "Sunday Morning"

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

The rest is just as good...

I also really like Auden's "Funeral Blues". It gets at the essential rawness of grief.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I think of Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen every time I see a headline about the Iraq War. The poem describes the aftermath of a gas attack in World War I. The last verse runs as follows:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This poem is a little depressing, but I like the way the last line gives me goose bumps:

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

-- Archibald MacLeish

Catullus 75

My mind is so reduced by your faults, Lesbia,
and has ruined itself so in your service,
that now it couldn’t wish you well were you to become what’s best or stop loving you if you do what’s worst.

"Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman

Best observance of America, by far.

A little less known than _Patterns_ is Amy Lowell's _Red Slippers_

Red slippers in a shop-window; and outside in the street, flaws of gray, windy sleet!

Behind the polished glass the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas.

The row of white, sparkling shop-fronts is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain-and freeze again to red slippers, myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window.

They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer; they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets.

Snap, snap, they are cracker sparks of scarlet in the white, monotonous block of shops.

They plunge the clangor of billions of vermilion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement.

People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window farther down is a big lotus bud of cardboard, whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.

One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before?

The flaws of gray, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are only red slippers.

Neruda's Sonnet #18:

"Así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,
sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño"

In my translation:
Thus I love you, as I know not to love in another way,
for in this way there is neither you nor I,
So close that your hand on my chest is mine;
So close that your eyes close with my dream.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Has anyone ever crafted anything better than:

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.

You ask for one, but like others I can't help but mention more. I give you two.

Dryden translating Horace, Odes, Book 3, no. 29:

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Second, A.E. Housman:

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

With apologies to Anonymous, I'd render the Neruda a little differently:

This is how I love you, because I don't know how else to love
But this way, in which I am not and you are not,
So close that your hand on my chest is mine
So close that your eyes close as I tire

I already answered this one. Good thing it won't involve any new blogging!

Aside to Averroes: you could do worse than Keats. Shelley, say.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

Love Without Hope

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher
Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter,
So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly
Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken.

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 step 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 traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Having read the selections, it occurs to me that asking for a favorite poem is constricting. Why not divide it into classes of subjects and ask for the favorite in each of the classes. For example, a favorite poem on loss, or a favorite poem on love, or a favorite poem about war. etc.

Jabberwocky. Hands down.

Two very different ones, loved for equally different reasons:

Dover Beach
by Matthew Arnold:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

---

somewhere i have never travelled
by e.e. cummings

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

Hear, hear for Kipling and A.E. Houseman, but remember this little gem from Frost.
What great sounds.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire
Some say in ice
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice

Charles Baudelaire
Le Mauvais Vitrier

Il y a des natures proprement contemplatives et tout à fait impropres à l'action, qui cependant, sous une impulsion mystérieuse et inconnue, agissent quelquefois avec une rapidité dont elles se seraient crues elles-mêmes incapables.

Tel qui, craignant de trouver chez son concierge une nouvelle chagrinante, rôde lâchement une heure devant sa porte sans oser rentrer, tel qui garde quinze jours une lettre sans la décacheter, ou ne se résigne qu'au bout de six mois à opérer une démarche nécessaire depuis un an, se sentent quelquefois brusquement précipités vers l'action par une force irrésistible, comme la flèche d'un arc. Le moraliste et le médecin, qui prétendent tout savoir, ne peuvent pas expliquer d'où vient si subitement une si folle énergie à ces âmes paresseuses et voluptueuses, et comment, incapables d'accomplir les choses les plus simples et les plus nécessaires, elles trouvent à une certaine minute un courage de luxe pour exécuter les actes les plus absurdes et souvent même les plus dangereux.

Un de mes amis, le plus inoffensif rêveur qui ait existé, a mis une fois le feu à une forêt pour voir, disait-il, si le feu prenait avec autant de facilité qu'on l'affirme généralement. Dix fois de suite, l'expérience manqua; mais, à la onzième, elle réussit beaucoup trop bien.

Un autre allumera un cigare à côté d'un tonneau de poudre, pour voir, pour savoir, pour tenter la destinée, pour se contraindre lui-même à faire preuve d'énergie, pour faire le joueur, pour connaître les plaisirs de l'anxiété, pour rien, par caprice, par dés�uvrement.

C'est une espèce d'énergie qui jaillit de l'ennui et de la rêverie; et ceux en qui elle se manifeste si opinément sont, en général, comme je l'ai dit, les plus indolents et les plus rêveurs des êtres.

Un autre, timide à ce point qu'il lui faut rassembler toute sa pauvre volonté pour entrer dans un café ou passer devant le bureau d'un théâtre, où les contrôleurs lui paressent investis de la majesté de Minos, d'Eaque et de Rhadamante, sautera brusquement au cou d'un vieillard qui passe à côté de lui et l'embrassera avec enthousiasme devant la foule étonnée.

Pourquoi? Parce que ... parce que cette physionomie lui était irrésistiblement sympathique? Peut-être; mais il est plus légitime de supposer que lui-même il ne sait pas pourquoi.

J'ai été plus d'une fois victime de ces crises et de ces élans, qui nous autorisent à croire que des Démons se glissent en nous et nous font accomplir, à notre insu, leurs plus absurdes volontés.

Un matin je m'étais levé maussade, triste, fatigué d'oisiveté, et poussé, me semblait-il, à faire quelque chose de grand, une action d'éclat; et j'ouvris la fenêtre, hélas!

(Observez, je vous prie, que l'esprit de mystification qui, chez quelques personnes, n'est pas le résultat d'un travail ou d'une combinaison, mais d'une inspiration fortuite, participe beaucoup, ne fût-ce que par l'ardeur du désir, de cette humeur, hystérique selon les médecins, satanique selon ceux qui pensent un peu mieux que les médecins, qui nous pousse sans résistance vers une foule d'actions dangereuses ou inconvenantes).

La première personne que j'aperçus dans la rue, ce fut un vitrier dont le cri perçant, discordant, monta jusqu'à moi à travers la lourde et sale atmosphère parisienne. Il me serait d'ailleurs impossible de dire pourquoi je fus pris à l'égard de ce pauvre homme d'une haine aussi soudaine que despotique.

«-- Hé! Hé!» et je lui criai de monter. Cependant je réfléchissais, non sans quelque gaieté, que, la chambre étant au sixième étage et l'escalier fort étroit, l'homme devait éprouver quelque peine à opérer son ascension et accrocher en maint endroit les angles de sa fragile marchandise.

Enfin il parut: j'examinai curieusement toutes ses vitres, et je lui dis: «-- Comment? vous n'avez pas de verres de couleur? des verres roses, rouges, bleus, des vitres magiques, des vitres de paradis? Impudent que vous êtes! vous osez vous promener dans des quartiers pauvres, et vous n'avez pas même de vitres qui fassent voir la vie en beau!» Et je le poussai vivement dans l'escalier, où il trébucha en grognant.

Je m'approchai du balcon et je me saisis d'un petit pot de fleurs, et quand l'homme reparut au débouché de la porte, je laissai tomber perpendiculairement mon engin de guerre sur le rebord postérieur de ses crochets; et le choc le renversant, il acheva de briser sous son dos toute sa pauvre fortune ambulatoire qui rendit le bruit éclatant d'un palais de cristal crevé par la foudre.

Et, ivre de ma folie, je lui criai furieusement: «La vie en beau! la vie en beau!»

Ces plaisanteries nerveuses ne sont pas sans péril, et on peut souvent les payer cher. Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance?

George Seferis

1 - NOW THAT YOU ARE LEAVING

Now that you are leaving, take the boy with you also,
the boy who saw the light under that plane-tree,
one day when trumpets resounded and weapons shone
and the sweating horses, nostrils wet,
bent to the trough to touch
the green surface of the water.
The olive trees with the wrinkles of our fathers
the rocks with the wisdom of our fathers
and our brother's blood alive on the earth
were a vital joy, a rich pattern
for the souls who knew how to pray.
Now that you are leaving, now that the day of payment
dawns, now that no one knows
whom he will kill and how he will die, take with you
the boy who saw the light under the leaves of that plane-tree
and teach him to study the trees.
I am sorry for having let a broad river pass through my fingers
without drinking a single drop.
Now I'm sinking into the stone.
A small pine-tree in the red soil
is all the company I have.
Whatever I loved vanished with the houses
that were new last summer
and collapsed in the autumn wind.

John Ashbery, Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Favorite short poem: "High Flight", John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

No need to repeat it, you've all seen it before, but the last lines always speak to me more strongly this time of year.

Favorite long poem: "Lay of Horatius", Thomas Babbington Macaulay.

This is one I always return to on Memorial Day and Veterans' Day:

XXI.

But the Consul's brow was sad, and the Consul's speech was low,
And darkly looked he at the wall, and darkly at the foe.
"Their van will be upon us before the bridge goes down;
And if they once might win the bridge, what hope to save the town?"

XXVII.

Then out spoke brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods,

XXVIII.

And for the tender mother who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses his baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus, that wrought the deed of shame?

XXIX.

Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may!
I, with two more to help me, will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path, a thousand may well be stopped by three:
Now, who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?'

It is well to remember those who kept the bridge for us, in their time.

A VOICE on the winds, A voice by the waters, Wanders and cries: Oh! what are the winds? And what are the waters? Mine are your eyes! Western the winds are, And western the waters, Where the light lies: Oh! what are the winds? And what are the waters? Mine are your eyes! Cold, cold grow the winds, And wild grow the waters, Where the sun dies: Oh! what are the winds? And what are the waters? Mine are your eyes! And down the night winds, And down the night waters, The music flies: Oh! what are the winds? And what are the waters? Cold be the winds, And wild be the waters, So mine be your eyes!

Lionel Johnson, "To Morfydd"

There are a lot of great one. This one is a perennial near the top of the list:

Boats in a Fog
Robinson Jeffers

Sports and gallantries, the stage, the arts, the antics
of dancers, the exuberant voices of music,
Have charm for children but lack nobility; it is bitter
earnestness
That makes beauty; the mind
Knows, grown adult.
A sudden fog-drift muffled the ocean,
A throbbing of engines moved in it,
At length, a stone's throw out, between the rocks and
the vapor,
One by one moved shadows
Out of the mystery, shadows, fishing-boats, trailing
each other,
Following the cliffs for guidance,
Holding a difficult path between the peril of the sea-
fog
And the foam on the shore granite.
One by one, trailing their leader, six crept by me,
Out of the vapor and into it,
The throb of their engines subdued by the fog, patient
and cautious,
Coasting all round the peninsula
Back to the buoys in Monterey Harbor. A flight of
pelicans
Is nothing lovelier to look at;
The flight of the planets is nothing nobler;
all the arts lose virtue
Against the essential reality
Of creatures going about their business among the
equally
Earnest elements of nature.

Oh, one more. This, especially the second stanza:

Vitae Lampada

Vitae Lampada
("They Pass On The Torch of Life")

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
'Play up! play up! and play the game!'

Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)

Not a V-Day poem, but great nonetheless:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter-bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

-- Stephen Crane

Of course, Kipling. In particular

Tomlinson
http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/l_tomlin.htm

"Go back to Earth with lip unsealed—go back with open eye,
"And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
"That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one,
"And . . . the God you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!"

and the best war poem ever, Dirge of Dead Sisters
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p1/deadsisters.html

(When the days were torment and the nights were clouded terror,
When the Powers of Darkness had dominion on our soul—
When we fled consuming through the Seven Hells of Fever,
These put out their hands to us and healed and made us whole.)

Apropos of the season, nothing surpasses Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".

Simple. Complicated. And chills up my spine whenever I read it.

Dodd,

The Arnold poem is also one of my favorites, but I thought you might enjoy one poet's reply to it:

The Dover Bitch
by Anthony Hecht

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d' Amour.

A Few Words on the Soul
by Wislawa Szymborska

We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

I've always liked it, but, probably because I'm getting a glimpse of the old GR now and then, it resonates a little more for me - Robert Louis Stevenson's personally written epitaph:

Requim:
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

I'm not the only person who likes it; there's a couple of book titles in there.

Megan

I must say that I'm impressed with the seriousness of the responders. I was certain there would be rabble rousers posting limericks. There were too many love poems for my taste, but it was still nice to have seen the overall variety. (I admit I still have to go back and read a few.)

Now, why not take it to the next level -- A poetry contest. Wouldn't you like to see what your readers are capable of? You could get a guest judge if you didn't want to take on the job yourself.

Tomorrow, 2/23/07, is Auden's 100th birthday. It is my understanding that it is best commemorated by drinking a martini at six o'clock as was his daily custom.

In Praise of Limestone
W.H. Auden

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. 'Come!' cried the granite wastes,
"How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death." (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) "Come!" purred the clays and gravels,
"On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered." (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
"I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad."

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

May 1948

LOL. Wonderful idea AJ (and I don't mean it sarcastically).

Oh God, this could be hilarious....

I'm already thinking of all sorts of horrible poems I could post for the contest.

Opps. Re Auden's birthday and martinis. It's the better case scenario. His centenary is today.

Housman:

The Oracles

'Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain
When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,
And mute's the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain,
And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.

I took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking,
The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain;
And from the cave of oracles I heard the priestess shrieking
That she and I should surely die and never live again.

Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;
But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.
'Tis true there's better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;
And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

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