Favorite Poems?

What are your favorite poems? And why do you like them?

(It doesn’t have to be famous. It could even be one you wrote.)

I’ll go first (The italicized parts are the parts that I like the most):


Garden Of Prosperine
By Algernon Charles Swinburne

Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep;
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Here life has death for neighbour,
And far from eye or ear
Wan waves and wet winds labour,
Weak ships and spirits steer;
They drive adrift, and whither
They wot not who make thither;
But no such winds blow hither,
And no such things grow here.

No growth of moor or coppice,
No heather-flower or vine,
But bloomless buds of poppies,
Green grapes of Prosperine,
Pale beds of blowing rushes,
Where no leaf blooms or blushes
Save this whereout she crushes
For dead men deadly wine.

Pale, without name or number,
In fruitless fields of corn,
They bow themselves and slumber
All night till light is born;
And like a soul belated,
In hell and heaven unmated,
By cloud and mist abated
Comes out of darkness morn.

Though one were strong as seven,
He too with death shall dwell,
Nor wake with wings in heaven,
Nor weep for pains in hell;
Though one were fair as roses,
His beauty clouds and closes;
And well though love reposes,
In the end it is not well.

Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.

There go the loves that wither,
The old loves with wearier wings;
And all dead years draw thither,
And all disastrous things;
Dead dreams of days forsaken,
Blind buds that snows have shaken,
Wild leaves that winds have taken,
Red strays of ruined springs.

We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure;
Today will die tomorrow;
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love, grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful
Weeps that no loves endure.

[i]From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.[/i]


I love this poem because it conveys so beautifully what I always believed; how death isn’t all that bad - that we should be thankful it exists. When we grow tired of life, then we usually realize how good it is for there to be an end. I have always been afraid of immortality and the fact that there is death to end it all is comforting.

I love the last 2 stanzas especially because it really brings home the entire poem. The second stanza is nice too because it is there that the idea of getting tired of life is introduced and thus really set the the poem’s theme.

I also love the personification of death as it allows th writer to describe her/death in ways more enchanting than simply describing death itself. I especially like the lines that state: “Her languid lips are sweeter, Than love’s who fears to greet her”

As a whole, this is truly one of my favorite poems. :happy:

I always liked this poem by Proudfoot over at sX

This pen is red
by Proudfoot

This pen is red, that’s what it is
Embodied by its adjectives
Not blue or black, those would be fine
Oh no, it’s red, it crossed the line
From normalcy to other things
Pink elephants and cows with wings
And all that unaccepted stuff
If Red Pen doesn’t like it, tough

Says Black to Red, “I’m sorry, friend,
You’re just unlucky, in the end.
You see, genetics dictate thus;
It’s very complicated stuff.
I’d change things if I could, no doubt
But Science hasn’t figured out
A way, and even if it did
I’d warn you not to pop your lid
For even if the choice was free
I don’t think Blue Pen would agree
He’s very stubborn, as you know
Old-fashioned, mean, and selfish, so
The best advice that I could give
Would be for you to simply Live.”

Does this make sense? Can it be true?
Is Red less good than Black and Blue?
Can it be wise to always give
Out labels based on adjectives?
It seems to me this doesn’t gel
It never works out very well
Let’s disagree with what Black said
And call them all by verbs instead.

Very hard to choose… But I’ll give it a try :smile:

Auguries of Innocence (William Blake)

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour…

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright…

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine;
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine…

Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in Eternity…

The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on Heaven’s shore…

He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out…

God appears, and God is Light,
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

“The moon’s appearance, a river of stars,
Snow-clad pines, clouds hovering on mountain peaks.
In darkness, they glow with brightness.
In shadows, they shine with a splendid light.
Like the dreaming of a crane flying in empty space,
Like the clear, still water of an autumn pool,
Endless eons dissolve into nothingness,
Each distinguishable from the other.
In this illumination all striving is forgotten.”

  • Hongzhi Zhengjue

“The world? Moonlit
Drops shaken
From the crane’s bill”

  • Eihei Dogen

And finally, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”.
The spoken version can be found here for example.

Oh, I should have just said poems you loved. I know that there’s usually no real favorite poem…

So feel free to just post poems you really, really like.

Mine is,

      [u]The Road Not Taken[/u] 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

by Robert Frost.

I don’t really like poetry very much, to be honest. Never have. Although that poem about the Red Pen was pretty good - it had a decent sense of humour. Most poems are so flowery, serious and dull, which is the whole reason I dislike them.

We need more poems like Red Pen, I think! :content:

Edit: Oh, AND the fact that poems never seem to say anything directly - they’re so full of metaphors and imagery that they never get straight to the point like I feel they should, which is REALLY annoying, lol!

TOADS - Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison –
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts –
They don’t end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines –
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets – and yet
No one actually starves .

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension !
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you love both.

Heres my fav:

I wish I was never born
By Defiance

Before our own beginning.
Before our life’s daybreak.
We all were merely sleeping,
Not knowing joy or ache.
But those who have awoken,
Stir us from sleep unbidden.
Our fate they then have chosen,
Thinking that we should wake.

Though choice cannot be given
To those in darkness sleep,
Who are these people wakened,
To stop the slumber deep?
What gave them the right to do this?
To take our oblivion’s bliss.
Unthinking it could be missed.
Sowing what they’ll not reap.

One never did have a choice,
One could just only take.
For asleep one had no voice,
That choice… they cannot make.
Some are glad they’re not asleep,
While others don’t laugh or weep
But some want for dark to keep,
Never wanting to wake.

I too asked not conception,
I did not ask for birth.
Nor did I want ascension,
From darkness and its dearth.
The choice was made by father
And also by dear mother;
Not to let be but rather
On me force life and mirth.

I know them I cannot blame,
Its just reality.
But it pains me all the same;
This cruel finality.
The only time I could choose,
Was after that choice was used,
After that, I only muse,
For it mattered much to me.

But now I have awakened.
I now know what’s at stake.
If then I could have chosen,
Then this is for my sake;
From sleeping sleep unknowing,
From dreaming simply nothing,
From darkness everlasting,
I DID NOT WANT TO WAKE!

I did not want to wake.

I never wanted to awake…

This is really the only poem that I have read that has really made a serious impression on me. Not that I read poetry much, but whatever…
Good job Def.

:cool_laugh: ,that’s was great Deperc! Now it’s posted in a spot where it won’t be deleted either! I can’t post my very favorite because it may be taken the wrong way if I do…But one that always comes to mind especially the last line since I read it like 12 years ago is this one

The Abortion
Ann Sexton

Someone who should have been born is gone

Just as the earth puckered it’s mouth,
each bud puffing out from it’s knot,
I changed my shoes, and then drove south

Up past the Blue Mountains, where
Pennsylvania humps on endlessly
wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard
where in truth the ground cracks evilly,
A dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Someone who should have been born is gone

the grass as bristly and stout as chives
and me wondering when the ground will break
and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Up in Pennsylvania I met a little man
not Rumplestilskin, at all, at all
he took the fullness that love began

Returning north even the sky grew thin
like a high window looking nowhere
The road was as flat as a sheet of tin

Somebody who should have been born is gone

Yes woman, such logic will lead
To loss without death, Or say what you meant
you coward…This baby that I bleed

OMG. I was checking this thread again and scrolling down, looking for new posts. I read from bottom to up when in forums, so when I blazed down to the bottom, I glimpse my username and the title of my poem, which I say to myself, couldn’t be. Then as I go up, I realize it is.

Thanks DePerc! :content: That really made my day. :smile: You’ve felt that way too huh?

Oh, Ellen, you should post your fave. How can a poem be taken the wrong way, anyway?

Here’s a golden oldie of mine. The flow is based entirely on internal rhyme and alliteration. This is not for the weak of heart.

Unsightful Parasites
by VeryGnawty

for Erin
Profligate parasites delight in the absence of light.
Smother mother earth with morbid egotism;
Halting the radiance of prism,
Nullifying magnetism,
All for the sake of pride.

Set aside heart apart from acceptance
For the chance of their own superiority.
Seniority undermines knowledge,
Authority deteriorates wisdom
In the Kingdom of the Dead.

Shed a tear in fear of losing that which you hold dear.
I hear a gasp as it slips through your grasp.
Reach out in vain through the pain with a bloodstained hand
For the sliver of light as you shiver in darkness,
Never to be seen again.

Now the corrupt have ruptured your construction.
Introduction to destruction: a degradation of escalation
To a fall of all that we know. The clouds contravene the pristine light,
Leaving a grieving shroud.

Oh Alvin, its a long story but its a poem that was written about me and I don’t want anything said about it anyway so I’ll just keep it as my own.

I was reading this topic and I saw the poem from Defiance that Deperc posted. In the first place I didn’t read him and didn’t saw it Defiance wrote it. I just had the feeling that it had something to do with Defiance. So I checked who posted it but it wasn’t Defiance, it was Deperc. I didn’t read the poem (I was gonna do after I read all the other things) and I red that it was from Defiance. I found it a little bit funny, I was right after all.
I read the poem, and it’s a nice poem :smile: I like it :smile:

I don’t have a favourite poem actually, there are some many great poems and I haven’t read that much poems.

Not every poem is like that. I have a book with poetry that’s kind of funny. Most of them get straigt to the point or don’t have a real point :tongue: but they’re good. Not my favorite because I like it when they have something mysterie and are sad. And that book is full of happy poems.

Gees I must have missed that post from ST…I love poetry for it’s imagery. I think a poem can make a point better than just saying it point blank…Like the one I posted…If you said “I just had an abortion and I’m sad” it doesn’t even come close to what the feeling is… like “you coward…this baby that I bleed”

Ah ok…

I have quite a few but I’ll write one that alot of you may already know. Like anamcara, sometimes personal especially the one’s closest to your heart just can’t be done justice when you write it for someone else to read. That’s why I chose this one instead of the others I have stashed away.

Dream-Land Edgar Allen Poe

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne regns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule-
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE-out of TIME

Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And charms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms that no man can discover
For the dew that drip all over,
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore;
Seas that restlessly aspire,
Surging, unto skies of fire;
Lakes that endlessly outspread
Their lone waters-lone and dead,-
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,-
By the mountains-near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,-

By the gray woods,-by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,-
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,-
By each spot the most unholy-
In each nook most melancholy,-
There the traveller meets aghast
Sheeted Memories of the Past-
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by-
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth-and Heaven.

For the heart whose woes are legion
'Tis a peaceful, soothing region-
For the spirit that walks in shadow
'Tis-oh, -tis an Eldorado!
But the traveller, travelling through it,
May not-dare not openly view it;
Never its mysteries are exposed
To the weak human eye unclosed;
So wills its King, who hath forbid
The uplifting of the fringed lid;
And thus the sad Soul that here passes
Beholds it but through darkened glasses.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, name NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have wandered home but newly
From this ultimate dim Thule.

It’s long but I like Edgar Allen Poe.

Big huge edit

(I was rereading some of the poems here then I look for yours then I realize it isn’t here anymore…Why’d you edit it out?)

Thought it wasn’t such a good idea to have it here after all, the author would probably get mad, although it is a great poem and I will always love it

/me thinks to himself. Understanding finally dawns on him.

Ah. I think I get it now.