We live in a very prosaic world, yet Frost astutely noted that the poet's job was to lodge a few lines where they will be hard to get rid of. What lines have been most memorable to you?

ID the lines if you like, but it's more fun to let others guess.

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Poetry:
I, too, dislike it.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it,
One discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

---------------------------------------------------------------

The art of losing isn't hard to master.

---------------------------------------------------------------

One can think of no devotion
greater than being shore to the ocean,
holding the curve of one position
counting an endless repetition.

"Charge for the guns!" he said:

I use this line in speaking from time to time. It means a couple of things. To some it means just what it says; "Charge for the guns!". For those who know the poem, and the context from which it flows, it might mean something else.

Amor constante más allá de la muerte

Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera
sombra que me llevare el blanco día,
y podrá desatar esta alma mía hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;

mas no, de esotra parte, en la ribera,
dejará la memoria, en donde ardía:
nadar sabe mi llama la agua fría,
y perder el respeto a ley severa.

Alma a quien todo un dios prisión ha sido,venas que humor a tanto fuego han dado,
medulas que han gloriosamente ardido:

su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;
serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

Love constant beyond Death

Perhaps whatever final shadow that the shining day may bring could close my eyes,
and this my soul may well be set aflight
by time responding to its longing sighs;but it will not, there on the farther shore
its memory leave behind, where once it burned:
my flame the icy current yet can swim,
and so severe a law can surely spurn.

Soul by no less than a god confined,veins that such a blazing fire have fueled,
marrow to its glorious flames consigned:

The body will abandon, not its woes;
will soon be ash, but ash that is aware;
dust will be, but dust whose love still grows.

Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas. 1580-1645. Who says a satiric cynic can't fall in love?

Speaking of Frost "The Road Less Traveled":
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one lest traveled by,
And that has made all the difference!

"Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening"
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.
(Thankfully, this one is no longer so significant to me as it once was. It stood out to me for reason of the widely accepted interpretation of the imagery.)

e e cummings, "Annie Died the othe Day":
Saints and sinners, go your way.
Youths and maidens, let us pray.

Song lyrics, but they are often poetry, for my money. Pink Floyd, from The Wall:
In ones and in twos, the ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand, and some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artistes make their stand.
And when they've given their all, some stagger and fall.
After all, it's not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger's wall.

Kipling "Tree Song":
Do not tell the priest our plight
For he would call it a sin,
But we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring summer in!
And we bring you good news by word of mouth,
Good news for cattle and corn.
Now is the sun come up in the south,
By oak, and ash, and thorn!

Shakespeare's Sonnet 20:

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she (soapy mouth)'d thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.

Ray

Juventud, divino tesoro,
Ya te vas para no volver.
Cuando quiero llorar, no lloro,
Y a veces lloro sin querer.

Rubén Darío--"Canción de otoño en primavera"

Youth, divine treasure,
already you leave to not return!
When I want to cry, I do not cry. . .
and at times I cry without wanting to. . .

Rubén Darío--"Song of Autumn in Spring"

Sounds much better in the original Spanish...

Bukowski - i met a genius

I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.

it was the first time I'd
realized
that.

it's ours
...
that space
there
before they get to us
ensures
that
when they do
they won't
get it all

ever.

Eliot is played out, but I still like the closing of this one
...
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

edit.
Oh yeah, and this one. Anyone familiar with it?
...
It's the light they believe kills.

We drink and load again, let them crawl

for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.

From the Codex Burensis:

Omnia sol temperat
purus et subtilis;
novo mundo reserat
faciem Aprilis,
ad amorem properat
animus herilis,
et iocundis imperat
deus puerilis.

Rerum tanta novitas
in solemni vere
et veris auctoritas
iubet nos gaudere;
vias praebet solitas;
et in tuo vere
fides est et probitas
tuum retinere.

Ama me fideliter!
fidem meam nota;
de corde totaliter
et ex mente tota
sum praesentialiter
absens in remota.
Quisquis amat taliter,
volvitur in rota.

(Written by an unknown Goliardic poet in the 13th century)

========

The sun, pure and simple, moderates all.
Out of a new world it reveals the face of April.
The spirit of the master hastens to love,
And a boyish god rules among the pleasant folk.

So great a renewal of nature in festive spring!
And the influence of spring commands us to rejoice.
It shows us the accustomed ways, and in your spring
It is faith and honesty to keep the one who is yours.

Love me faithfully, mark my promise.
In my full heart and my whole mind
I am with you even though absent at a distance.
Whoever loves in such a way is turned on the wheel.

(My translation, with no attempt to do more than render the Latin into English. Poetical rendering is left as an exercise for the student.)

My two favourite poems are "Vitae Lampada" by Lord Tennyson and "The Donkey" by G.K. Chesterton. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is up there too. I love all three of them in their entirety.

I'd be very pleased to learn who can ID these from memory:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

and (very different source):

The people and the leaders walk hand in hand
The people and the leaders walk hand in hand
They're on the right road!
They're going the wrong direction.

My friend, you would not tell, with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: *Dulce Et Decorum Est,
Pro Patria Mori*

Latin: "It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country".

not really a poem, is it?
1984?

From Robert Frost(Fire and Ice):

Some say the world will end in fire
And some say ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

John

"Tis strange, but oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles
To betray us in deepest consequence."

Banquo to Macbeth on believing the prophecies of the 3 witches.

"Thy only love sprung from thy only hate/ too early seemed unknown, but known too late." - Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

-----

I think it's really a poem; just one that comes from a fictional prose context. And yes, 1984.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" is one of my favorites.
The first stanza kicks literary butt:


And the last line of the later stanzas is unforgettable:

Used to like this before I outgrown the macabre:

...
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
...


Now I like this:

...
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
...

One of my favorites, from David Tucker, a former US Poet laureate:


The Dancer

Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light-
a blue rose on a nail-
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.

David Tucker


And here is a link to a great poem by Billy Martin, another former US Poet Laureate

The Lanyard:

http://www.bestcigarette.us/2004/09/the_lanyard.html


Or the Youtube version, if you like to watch and listen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EjB7rB3sWc...feature=related

Dan

Mayflies,
whose cellophane wings refract
like their hundred eyes the repetitious sun,
have so little power to abstract
they taste each pleasure new, one by one,

-Robert Galloway Kirkpatrick

Lately these have been my favorite lines of poetry. The last four from Samuel T. Coleridge's Kublai Khan.

Weave a circle round him thrice
and close your eyes with holy dread
for he on honey-dew hath fed
and drunk the milk of Paradise.

Paradise Lost, John Milton
Book 3

"Hail holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born,
Or of th'eternal, co-eternal beam.
May I express thee unblam'd? Since God is light,
And never but in an unapproached light..."

It goes on for quite a while, and I don't want to burden you with the whole section, but I really like it.

The Raven also is one of my favorites.

Along with:

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken:
The crownless again shall be king."

Good call, Hobbit. That reminds me of a few from that same book:

"The road goes ever on and on
down from the door where it began.
Now far away the road has gone,
and I must follow, if I can.

Pursuing it with weary feet,
until it joins some larger way,
where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Trauma by Brad Leithauser

You will carry this suture
Into the future.
The past never passes.
It simply amasses.

skyp

Rufus,

Have you read Kipling's "The Last of the Light Brigade"?

Ah ha, another Kipling reader! Now I know why I enjoy your posts so much.

Kipling is AWESOME!

My favorite line of his isn't poetry, though:

"I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me." I love the Just So Stories!

For some reason I never forgot Robert Frost's "Deparmental"...

No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair.
It couldn't be called ungentle.
But how thoroughly departmental.

The lines I use to test all pens is from Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison air
It is only what is good in man
That wastes and withers there
Pale Anguish holds the Gate
And the Warder is Despair.

Otherwise, one of my other favourites is The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Houseman

Here's one:

When I died
they washed me out of the turret
with a hose.

Paradise Lost by Milton, Book I lines 253-255:

A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

Thank you for raising this subject; it has made me realise that the version of "The Highwayman"(Alfred Noyes) which I learned at school was heavily bowdlerised, and had the most dramatic and exciting verses omitted (too 'bloody' I suppose!).

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight across the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.

so many gems here already! tennyson's ulysses...

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!"

which leads us to neil young's my my hey hey

"My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out
Than it is to rust
My my, hey hey."

A lady came into our gallery last night and told my about this poem. Later i googled it and particularly liked these lines. I'll let you guess the title...


~Jas

And these are a couple favorites...



~Jas

"Why do men go to war? Because the women are watching" - Lord Acton

"life is what you do while your waiting to die" - ?

I used both quotes in term papers.

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.

William Butler Yeats

Love: Beginnings
by C.K. Williams

They're at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much
frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity
and unity they make—
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter
at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of
being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again,
cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in
flame into the sexual—
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that fill-
ing of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again,
stamping in its stall.

So many delightful possibilities! Honestly though runnjump, when you said "most memorable" what came to mind was:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

I mean, who can forget that!

Bananafish, it was great to recall Poe's Annabel Lee, and Strang, the same for Death of The Ball Turret Gunner. Though prose and not poetry, that one made me recall a striking short story by Roald Dahl about a WWI ace returning from a mission only to discover he was wounded (to put it mildly). Such striking language and story telling but the title escapes me now. Anyone to know it?

Michael

But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misallianace.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like a tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

That's the last line of The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. Five of the most powerful lines ever written in American poetry. Old as I am, and having seen what I have seen in my life, I can't read that poem aloud. I cry when I read it silently on the page.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

-- Randall Jarrell

Grown up by ESV Millay ( one of my all time favourite poets)

Was it for this i uttered prayers,
and sobbed and cursed,and kicked the stairs,
that now domestic as a plate
i should retire at half past eight?


Jim

Hi all,
I live in the UK and on a visit to a stately home a few years back, saw on a wall below the most gigantic oil painting of a very beautiful young women, a tatty piece of paper, framed, with the words I've copied below. The story surrounding it goes thus:
The enormous paintings above the hallway fireplace, of a young baronet and his wife, were painted shortly after their marriage took place in the late 1700's (I think it was about 1785 but can't quite remember). When the young man saw the finished portrait of his bride (which had been kept from him until completion), he was so moved, he immediately sat down to compose the poem below. This was then tacked on to the back of the canvas. The story was known in the family but thought to be legend until the poem itself was discovered 200 years later, when the paintings were taken down for cleaning/restoration.
I, in turn, was so moved by his words, that I jotted them down right there, and came home and embroidered them on to linen, embellishing them with a flowered border etc. The finished article now lives in my bedroom. I think both the poem and the story behind it are unique and beautiful. What do you think?-------


Tis done - the canvas takes each various grace,
And every mimicked feature finds its place,
Triumphant art withstands the power of time,
And beauty lives and reigns in all her prime.

Kind Heaven, indulgent to the sons of men,
Give 'em, with love, the pencil and the pen,
A boon Heaven's bounteous hand alone could give,
To make its darling works forever live.

So when the lustre leaves the faded eye,
And all the roses of thy cheek do die,
Maria, then thy other self shall charm,
Shall raise the sigh, my beating heart, alarm;

I see the form o'er which I fondly hung,
And think I hear the magick of thy tongue,
Till my 'tranced mind by sweet delusion fed,
Wakes from the dream, and all my heaven is fled.

TTFN
Tawanda

SO LONG
William Stafford

At least at night, a streetlight
is better than a star.
And better good shoes on a
long walk than a good friend.

Often in winter with my old
cap I slip away into the gloom
like a happy fish, at home
with all I touch, at the level of love.

No one can surface till far,
far on, and all that we'll have
to love may be what's near
in the cold, even then.

Here are three of my favorites:

1. My favorite simile in American letters: "Separation" by W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


2. From "When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver, in New and Selected Poems Volume One, 1992

When it's over, I want to say: All my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.


3. The entirety of "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski, in New and Selected Poems, 2002, a volume you should scoop up at once and treasure.

-Brandon

Brandon, thank you! You reminded me to read Mary Oliver again.

Oliver's a goddess and I think she knows it! If you have the chance to buy or download At Blackwater Pond, you really must. It's a CD recording of Oliver reading 40 of her best poems.

"There once was a man from Nantucket."

Since the first time I read it, this one is lodged permanently in my fabric. Just an unbelievable poem, not to mention a first line that will not be ignored...