what is your favorite poem?

Answer 1

An elegy in the country church yard.

Answer 2

To A Child.

Childhood

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold
Of being only four years old.
Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature's great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee -

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build,
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life's queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange Divinity still kept….

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
May make you poet, too, in time -
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were poetry itself!


Christopher Morley

Answer 3

A Sleeper in the Valley by Rimbaud


It’s a green hollow where a river sings
Wildly tangling on the grass in silver
Tatters; where the sun, above a proud mountain
Shines: it’s a tiny valley foaming with light.

A young soldier, mouth open, head bare,
And nape bathing in the blue watercress
Sleeps; outstretched on the grass, under the sky,
Pale in his green bed where daylight rains.

Feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling
Like a sick child would, he’s having a nap:
Nature, lull him warmly: he is cold.

Sweet smells never quiver his nostrils;
He sleeps in the sun, hand on his chest,
Calm. There’re two red holes in his right side.

Answer 4

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Answer 5

Nothin Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Answer 6

Jabberwocky by Luis Carroll?

Answer 7

It's a toss up....If by Rudyard Kipling....or How Do I Love Thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning....

Answer 8

"Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden.
They read it in Four Weddings and a Funeral. It got me interested in Mr. Auden and all of his works. Today I recorded a message to be read over BBC radio to clebrate W H Auden's 100th birthday.

Answer 9

"I'm Nobody"--Emily Dickinson (for all that, I don't know if I spelled her name right)

the opening lines of "Xanadu"--Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

Answer 10

"The Eve Of St. Agnes" by Keats. It's too long to post it here though. But it's beautiful.