Favorite lines of poetry

[le chat serein]

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.

[the hobbit]

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."

[le chat serein]

"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.

[Skyppere]

 

Trauma by Brad Leithauser

 

You will carry this suture

Into the future.

The past never passes.

It simply amasses.

 

skyp

[Randal6393]

Rufus,

 

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

[Randal6393]

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

[le chat serein]

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!

[penburg]

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.

 

 

[feiye]

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.

[Jazzbaby]

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

[Strang]

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

 

Here's one:

 

When I died

they washed me out of the turret

with a hose.

[FieryPhoenix]

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.

Edited July 31, 2008 by FieryPhoenix

[rogerb]

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.

[jack shephard]

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 :roflmho:

 

"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."

 

[Jasper]

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...

 

Beyond a wholesome discipline,

be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

 

Therefore be at peace with God,

whatever you conceive Him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations,

in the noisy confusion of life,

keep peace in your soul.

~Jas

[Jasper]

And these are a couple favorites...

 

A Nice Place

 

Outside the rest home

resting in his wheelchair in the shade,

my father said:

 

"This is a nice place"

 

and i couldn't tell if he meant

the rest home in general,

 

the shadey space with the birds chirping,

fountain flowing,

spring breezes blowing,

 

or the world.

 

~Lawson Fusao Inada

 

__ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

 

When our habitual patterns

begin to soften

then we'll begin to see the faces

and hear the words

of those

who are talking to us.

 

~Pema Chodron

 

~Jas

[artdeg]

"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.

[Jazzbaby]

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

[cfyoung]

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.

[mwpannell]

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