10 (+) Favourite poems

I always liked the Lady of Shallott too

the poem about the 3 wise men that starts:

A hard coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year .... I'm having an Alzheimers-type moment and the name of the poet has just gone! You know who i mean - wrote Cats. - TS Eliot memory just returned!

Tam O'Shanter by Robert Burns - it has some wonderful imagery from comic to poetic - 'like the snow, falls on the river, a moment there and gone forever' or describing Tam's wife sitting angrily at home waiting for him to return from the pub 'nursing her wrath to keep it warm'.

Not waving but drowning

Pro Patria Mori

there are others I'll add as i think of them

Phenomenal Woman - Maya Angelou - my #1 all time favorite

A Dream Deferred - Langston Hughes - my #2 all time favorite


I am a big harlem renaissance petry fan

but I also like Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

I'd never herard of Maya Angelou but just looked her up - interesting.

she wrote a poem and gave it at the inauguration billy boy clinton. She's a very well known poetess. has been writing poetry since the 60s. if you read phenomenal woman you'll love it im sure.

I'm not too much for lists, but I will post one favorite:

HENDECASYLLABLES
Algernon Charles Swinburne

In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
"Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever."

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Maya is a wonderful poet.

I just did!

cav what wonderful language - i love it

forgot to say Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas - especially when read by Richard Burton - what a wonderful voice!

I like the Swinburne, cavfancier. His The Forsaken Garden has a similar way with sound, and a very Victorian wistful romanticism.

Here's one on my list, by R.S.Thomas, considered by many to be Wales' finest poet, certainly a main rival to Dylan Thomas (the medieval Welsh-language poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is the other main contender). Their styles are like chalk and cheese. Perhaps R.S doesn't quite reach Dylan's few highest and richest peaks but he's much more consistent and his collected poems as a whole are magnificent.

R.S.THOMAS: A MARRIAGE
We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
`Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance, And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

One of my favorites is "Er Caffettiere Fisolofo" (The Phisolophizing Coffee Machine), written not in Italian, but in Romannaccio (Roman Dialect) by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, in 1833.


Er Caffettiere Fisolofo

L'ommini de sto monno so ll' istesso
Che vvaghi de caffè nner mascinino:
C'uno prima, uno doppo, e un antro appresso,
Tutti cuanti però vvanno a un distino.

Spesso muteno sito, e ccaccia spesso
Er vago grosso er vago piccinino,
E ss'incarzeno tutti in zu l'ingresso
Der ferro che li sfraggne in polverino.

e ll' ommini accusi vviveno ar monno
Misticati pe mmano de la sorte
Che sse li ggira tutti in tonno in tonno;

E mmovennose oggnuno, o ppiano, o forte,
Senza capillo mai caleno a ffonno
Pe ccascà nne la gola de la morte.


In this world, men are the same
As coffee beans in a grinder:
One in front, one who follows, another one behind,
But all of them move towards the same destiny.

They often change place, and often
The big coffee-bean replaces the small one,
And they all cram by the hole
Where the blade crushes them into powder.

And this is how men live in this world,
Mingled by the hand of fate,
Which turns them round and round.

And each of them moving, fast or slow,
Without ever understanding it, they sink to the bottom
To drop in the throat of death.

Phisolophizing sounds interesting. You hardly needed to translate; i'm sure we're all well up on our 1830's Romannaccio, Ho Ho! "Sinking to the bottom/ To drop in the throat of death"; the poem leaves me shaken not stirred. No, i enjoyed it- just trying to have fun in the face of mangling fate. Reminds me a bit of the classic French book Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot); i agree we're powerless at the hands of destiny and don't really have any true choices.

Where does Walt Disney fit in, in his ice cube ready for resurrection? And who's to say- what with ever-increasing life expectanacy and medical progress- that death is inevitable? Or that we won't awake tomorrow and find our whole life has been the dream of a jellyfish-like blob on the planet Zargo.

wow!

Ozymandius is my all time favorite. It puts all our visions of self-importance into the perspective of time

imet a traveler from an antique land
Who said;Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
stand in the desert. near them, on the sand.
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies,whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them,and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandius,King of Kings:
Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck,boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.