What is your favourite poem?

Answer 1

"If."
by, Rudyard Kipling.

Answer 2

Too many and not enough space given here to say all of them...


Daddy. Plath
Ballad of The lonely Masterbator. Sexton
The Panther & All of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke
Helouise and Abelard & To A Lady. Pope
Shakespeare sonnets
Sonnets from the Portugese. Browning
Severed Selves. Dante
No Use. Snodgrass
Never Such love. Graves
Somewhere I have never travelled... E.E. Cummings
My True love hath my heart and I have his... Sir Philip Sidney
I loved you, even now I may confess... Alexander Pushkin

Here is another favorite of mine since everyone else included an actual poem.

It is called...

Spring Thaw

When childhood was here
days were paper snowflakes
folded and un folded
slowly but quite carelessly
cut out piece by piece, into unique
and individual fascination
by small and intense hands.

Until the tedious dissatisfaction of the fool
in a teenage days impatience
came along and cast the snowflakes down
all in a winters eve.

Now, approaching middle aging
the snow has melted
the details and accidental intricacies
are exchanged for a cold breeze
void of snow and youths folly.

Adulthood is a spool of lace ribbon
where convoluted, delicate patterns
are manufactured for decoration
by someone else’s hands
because we no longer own that sort of time.

We pinch the ribbon between two fingers
drop the spool and let it fall
for all our attempts at catching it
it goes too fast for snowflakes
it descends like a blizzard,
back down into the earth’s reaching,
selling individuality for the greater global cause
and then its gone…
empty spool
empty heart
and a mind that wishes for childhood
in a body caught unaware of it’s own limitations.



I could go on for days... There is not enough time in an hour and not enough space in a line to tell you how much and which pieces of Poetry move me...

Answer 3

'I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings', Maya Angleou
http://www.geocities.com/infinitum_poetry/iknowwhythecagedbirdsings.html

and
'Nothing Gold Can Stay', Robert Frost
http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/226

Answer 4

I'm a big fan of the epic poem, particularly The Illiad by Homer. The Odyssey was great too, but Illiad struck me for some reason and it's remained as one of my favorites, must've read it 4 or 5 times.

Answer 5

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

Answer 6

I've a few...

'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by William Butlet Yeats
'Ill-Starred' by Charles Baudelaire
'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold


You can read all three at http://plagiarist.com/

Answer 7

The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe. I love his poems and stories.

Answer 8

Hmm, favorite poem is hard to answer, but my favorite poet is Wislawa Szymborska from Poland.
(She won the Nobelprize for literature in 1996).
Here is a link: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-bio.html

Answer 9

[somewhere i have never travelled]
by ee 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

Answer 10

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep.

I am not there.....I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamonds glint on snow
I am the sunshine on ripen grain
I am the autumn rain.
When you waken in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of gentle birds in circling flight
I am the soft star that shines at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there.....I did not die.

Just one of many......

Answer 11

When I was a kid, I liked "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and "The Cremation of Sam McGee". Nowadays I dig anything by Billy Collins.