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Since it's Poetry Day, what are your favourite lines of poetry?
Impossible choice. Wavering between Yeats, Coleridge, Eliot and Manley Hopkins. Going for the latter from Pied Beauty:
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches' wings
Comments
But suddenly it snapped the chain
Unbarred, flung wide the door
Which will not shut again;
And so we cannot sit here any more.
From The Call by Charlotte Mew.
Though very difficult to pick and on another day I would have picked something else!
The last verse of 'A Lover's Complaint'
'Butt Love is a durable fyre
In the mynde ever burnynge:
Never sycke never ould never dead
from itt selfe never turnynge.'
Penguin Book of Verse, Ed. Hayward,J.1956, p.37
I also like;
;As ...fire sweeps on in fury through the deep angles
of a drywood mountain and sets ablaze the depth of the timber
and the blustering wind lashes the flame along, so Achilleus
swept everywhere with his spear like something more than mortal
harrying them as they died, and the black earth ran blood.'
Chicago Press, Trans. Lattimore, R. The Iliad of Homer, Book Twenty
"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Wonderful.
“I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading – treading – till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through –
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum –
Kept beating – beating – till I thought
My Mind was going numb –
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space – began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here –
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down –
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing – then –”
These two very short poems amazed me and I always remember them
I'll not quote them here as it would be contravening copyright
"Some time before the dawn I rose
and walked softly along the dim way to your room
I found you sleeping in the quiet gloom
and holiness about you as you slept.
I knelt there till your waking fingers crept
about my head and held it - I had rest
unhoped this side of heaven beneath your breast.
Child, you know how easily Love leaps out to dreams like these
who has seen them true, and love that's wakend so
takes all too long to lay to sleep again.
In my 30s I discovered Rod McKuen, whose words spoke to my soul. Just three words echo in my head right now, and they're the title of one of his books' 'Listen to the Warm'
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Et cetera, et cetera
I've kind of cheated though, because the first lines are all in Italian - think it's a quote from Dante or somebody...
Now this is the Law of the Jungle–
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
But the Wolf that shall break it will die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
The Law runneth forward and back–
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Many verses but the one that sticks in my mind is -
He holds him with his skinny hand
"There was a ship," quoth he.
"Hold off! unhand me, grey bearded loon!"
Eftsoons his hand drops he.
I find the vision these words cast in my mind amusing.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-xvii/
There are some poor translations of this Pablo Neruda poem, but this is the one I like.
I will never feel like this - I've never been in love and doubt I ever will be (more than a little along the autistic spectrum) but I love this description.
(A little startled by your final paragraph - I had no idea.)