What's your favourite piece of poetry?

Question

I've been looking at the answers here - thank you so much, some of them are brilliant. I can't possibly chose a best one and will have to leave it to the voters.

Answer 1

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

The further you read into it, the more you start to realise that the duchess is dead and that the duke had her bumped off!

Answer 2

Invictus
by William Ernest Henley

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 3

Kipling wrote some great poems. I like "The Harp Song of the Dane Women" (First Stanza):

What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with the old grey widowmaker?

(I like "If", but given that this is supposedly the nations favourite poem, I thought I'd rec something else).
I like "The Cloths of Heaven" which I think is by Yeats and anything by John Hegley.

Answer 4

I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree

Poems were made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.

By Joyce Kilmer

I also like Dylan's:
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.

Answer 5

My favorite is a tie betweet Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" and a civil war poem called "The Blue and the Grey" by Francis Miles Finch.

Answer 6

A poem called "David". I read it in a book of award winning poetry years ago, thought it was absolutely wonderful. I don't know where the book went, but I would love to get a hold of it again.

Answer 7

ONE, TWO, THREE
by: Henry Cuyler Bunner
about a crippled boy and a invalid old lady.
There was an old, old, old, old, lady
and a boy that was half past three
and the way they played together
was beautiful to see

she couldn't go running and jumping
and the boy no more could he
for he was a thin little fellow
with a thin little twisted knee

there are eight more verses. they play hide and seek together.

Answer 8

Both of my favourite poems speak of perfect love - it should be unchanging, it should not depend on material things or looks. It should be given freely and without any strings attached.

Shakespeare's sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

and Elizabteh Barrett Browning's

If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love's sake only. Do not say
'I love her for her smile---her look---her way
Of speaking gently,---for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day'---
For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,---and love, so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry,---
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!
But love me for love's sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love's eternity

Answer 9

Phenomenal woman by Maya Angelou

Answer 10

How do i respect thee? enable me count number the techniques And counting enable me modern-day techniques pick For we've techniques of gauging love at the moment That Mrs. Browning by no ability idea to apply How do i respect thee? no longer biorythmically; our plotted curves educate no affinty of heart or ideas. no longer astrologically, our stellar charts Breed celeb wars of the most explosive variety No rash on-line courting plan would dare To couple instruments so distinct as we And deep reincarnation probes dispel The dream that we were enthusiasts previously How do i respect thee? those fashionable checks Have shown previous bear in mind certainly i do no longer love thee inspite of each and every thing. And yet pleasures are like poppies spread You grab the flower, its bloom is shed Or like the snow falls contained in the river A second white then melts perpetually And Lives of serious adult men all remind us lets make our lives elegant And departing go away in the back of us Footprints on the sands of time and how am I to face the percentages Of guy's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a international I by no ability made And What ideas at heart have you ever and that i we gained't provide as a lot as tell yet useless or residing, lower than the effect of alcohol or dry Soldier, I wish you properly And And his eyes have each and every of the seeming Of a demon's it truly is dreaming And All that we see or seem Is yet a dream interior a dream and encouraging ambitious John Barleycorn What risks thou canst make us scorn And My candle burns at both ends it gained't very last the evening yet ah my foes and oh my acquaintances It supplies a outstanding mild And were you ever out contained in the entire on my own even as the moon became negative sparkling And the icy mountains hemmed you in With a silence you 'maximum might want to hear With purely the howl of a timber wolf and also you camped there contained in the chilly A 0.5 useless element in a stark useless international sparkling made for the muck referred to as gold And it isn't even as elegance and youngsters are thine personal And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear That the fervor and faith of a soul will be properly-known To which era will yet make thee extra expensive No, the midsection that has truly loved, by no ability forgets And as truly loves on to the close because the sunflower turns to her god even as he instruments a similar seem which she grew to develop into even as he rose surely, I memorized a minimum of 5000 strains of poetry. some human beings like poetry much better than others do.