Do you ever read poetry?

Question

Tell me a poem you love please.

Hey Everybody - lovely answers and thank you - I'll be voting soon. Meanwhile, would you like to go along and answer my question about favourite journeys (this section). I'd like to hear from some poetry lovers (and poets) about that topic too. Thanks

Answer 1

Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs; they took so little space,
The covers pleased her.
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended when a tidy fit had seized her
And colored by her daughter;
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them - looking for something else - and stood

Re-learning how each frank, submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word ...
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a Sprin-woken tree wherein
That hidden freshness sprung;
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But even more

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance 'Love'
Broke out to show
Its bright incipience sailing above;
Still promising to solve and satisfy
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then. And could not now.

[Philip Larkin]

Answer 2

W. H. Auden

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 crepe 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.



It is possibly the best poem I have ever read, or heard! I also love byron and shelley. And william blake.

Poetry is the voice of the soul.

Answer 3

Of course, poetry is an extremely strong form of self expression, that's why a lot of people read it if not write it, I wrtie my own stuff, but when it comes to my favourite poet I have to side with Pablo Naruda, just make sure you ge this work in spanish and english/whatever language you usaully read in, the meanign is great, but the rhythm is somehting you can't get out of a version in any language besides spanish, even if you don't speak spanish, Edgar Allen Poe is up ther eon my list too.

Answer 4

Frequently. I draw a lot of inspiration from the words of Yeats, Byron, T S Eliot and a host of others.

My favourite is W E Helney's Invictus:-


Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

Answer 5

Lovesong


He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

Ted Hughes

Answer 6

Life's Brief Candle by William Shakespeare.

to-morrow, and to-morrow and to-morrow
creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time
and all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. out, out brief candle
life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
that struts and frets his hour upon the stage
and then is heard no more; it is a tale
told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing.

if you read this poem once, you are most probably not going to understand it. it is about life. our life is like a candle. one day, we are all going to die, going to live this earth and that might happen anytime, maybe this very second. we would leave everything in this world here and would just take our soul to where it is supposed to go. that's a scary thought, right?

Answer 7

I wrote this myself....

Softly and silently the moon in her silver gown
Didst dance amongst the clouds
Throwing her arms towards the ocean
Embraced him, and left him in a shimmering glow
And then, moved on, and taught the waves the rhythm of her dance
He sat and watched, whilst in a trance
How the mermaids on sea horses did prance
And Neptune thundered like a drum
At the outrageous courtship of his favourite son
With this flighty person........
the sister of the glorious sun.

but...of all the poems....I love Ulysses by Lord Tennyson.Its very long and I am sleepy. I also liked Hiawatha but I don't know who wrote it.

Answer 8

I love reading poems, i also write them too! I had 1 published when i was a kid! If i tell you one i wrote you can't steal it as I'm trying to get it published at the mo!
"Travelling to the moon!"
"Have you ever had that feeling where your travelling to the moon,
where everything stands real still and your stood their all alone,
well i have had this feeling and it made me feel quite sad,
that some i know and trusted,
could make me feel just this bad!"
And this is only part of another one am working on...
"Some say she wished to hard, some say she wished to long, but we awoke one winter day to find that she was gone,
The trees they say stood witness, the sky refused to tell, but some one who had seen it said the story played out well,
She opened her arms out wide, breathed in the break of dawn, she just let go of all she held.... and she was gone!"

Answer 9

I read poetry more than most people I know, but less than I would like to.
I'd recommend anything and everything by Wallace Stevens - pretty fly for a stiff old white guy.

Answer 10

Harmonie du Soir by Charles Baudelaire

Haunted by Robert Graves