What is your favourite poem and why?

Answer 1

He Wishes For The Clothes Of Heaven - Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

It's short and sweet It is my favourite poem that I can remember and receit at least. It just shows how much you do for someone you love and what you would do if you could for those you love.

I also like

Harum-Scarum by Roger Mcgough because its silly

Answer 2

My favorite poem is "Sex Without Love" by Sharon Olds. The images are very memorable. It is a modern poem that really expanded my ideas on what was possible in poetry.

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Answer 3

I'm really glad you asked this question; I was going to ask it myself so I shall be keeping track of all the answers!

My favourite poem is 'The Shadow on the Stone' by Thomas Hardy. I love the bittersweet sentiment behind the poem of missing a deceased loved one and seeing them everywhere. He knows the shadow isn't really his wife but can't face the reality of turning around to prove it and would rather fool himself and keep his dream. It's beautifully written.

I went by the Druid stone
That broods in the garden white and lone,
And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows
That at some moments fall thereon
From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,
And they shaped in my imagining
To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders
Threw there when she was gardening.


I thought her behind my back,
Yea, her I long had learned to lack,
And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,
Though how do you get into this old track?’
And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf
As a sad response; and to keep down grief
I would not turn my head to discover
That there was nothing in my belief.


Yet I wanted to look and see
That nobody stood at the back of me;
But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision
A shape which, somehow, there may be.’
So I went on softly from the glade,
And left her behind me throwing her shade,
As she were indeed an apparition—
My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

Answer 4

One of my favourite poems is Yeats' Broken Dreams (but I also like The Wild Swans at Coole) for these lines, because they encapsulate what love is, loving somebody not just because that person is beautiful, but because that beauty is imperfect:

You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those that have obeyed the holy law
Paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake's sake.

Answer 5

Aww i have so many but i love this one cus it sums me up!

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Answer 6

A.E. Houseman's "The Loveliest of trees, the cherry now" because it reminds you of your mortality - Carpe Diem.

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

Answer 7

My favourite is "I Stand By the Door"--An Apologia for my life.by Samuel Moor Shoemaker,because it is beautiful and sad.Even if you're not very religious it's very moving.The writer was a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous

Answer 8

"Tonight I Can Write"
by Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin


Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Answer 9

You didn't ask to quote the poem so I won't do so here. But my favorite poem of all time has to be William Blake's "Mad Song".

Like most poems that resonate and assume an esteemed position in the mind of a reader, this one hit a chord with me during a rather emotionally down time in my life. The poem isn't necessarily uplifting, but it resonated with me during a difficult time in my life and it has never left me.

Answer 10

Ozymandias, by Shelley

It compares the impermanence of everything and humans' misguided ego.

...and on the pedestal these words appear, 'look on my works ye mighty and despair', nothing else remains of that collosal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.