Post the first line of your favorite poem

[JitterbugPerfume]

mine-- Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked.

Alan Ginsberg

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. See Jack Run. Run, Jack, Run!

it was the start of a science fiction thriller. Tongue in cheek, with lots of oddball humor. I wish I could recall the author.

[mysuzuki2]

33. When you are old and gray and full of sleep ...

or the winter in Wisconsin version (sorry W.B.) - when it is cold and gray and full of sleet, take down your boots and think of the cold look you had, and of the snows so deep...

[Atman]

2. pity the poor little pelican

:)

[xchrom]

3. When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,...ol' william. nt

[JitterbugPerfume]

44. Ole Will is in a category all his own

[Divernan]

61. When to the sessions of sweet, silent thought

The older I get, the more I love this Shakespearean sonnet to a dear friend.

SONNET 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

[kanrok]

4. There was a young man from Nantucket

n/t

[closeupready]

5. I can only recall it has the name "Nantucket" in it.

:evilgrin:

[Botany]

6. A rabbi, a dog, a lawyer, and an insurance salesman walk ..

.... into a bar.


There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

R. Service

[mimitabby]

53. yeah, mine too

my husband has this one memorized.

[FreakinDJ]

7. Open the Door you Dirty Hoar - Its John Boner and the GOP

[Ptah]

8. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

[protect our future]

31. Yo! Me too!

I heard it first in 6th or 7th grade and had to memorize it then. My whole life has been an unfolding of this poem ... and how great my days are because of that.

[JitterbugPerfume]

45. I remember Robert Frost at Kennedys inaguration

he was just amazing

[Ptah]

56. I remember how cold it looked.

[Richardo]

9. "Twas brillig, and the slythy toves..."

...Did gyre and gimbal in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."


Probably the only poem of any length I know by heart :D


(...and yes, it's the first stanza, but I couldn't NOT include the rest.)

[JitterbugPerfume]

46. you memorized the Jabberwoky?

I am impressed!

Did I spell it right?

fixed it

[Richardo]

50. ...wocky.

Thanks Jitterbug!

I'm missing the poetry-appreciation gene in general, so it IS amazing that I could memorize one. I didn't even have to try, so it must have resonated with me somehow.

:hi: :pals:

[liberal N proud]

[snagglepuss]

10. Rarely rarely comest thou Spirit of Delight.

PB Shelley

[On the Road]

11. "Complacencies of the peignoir, and late"

(well, you said just the first line)

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/wallace-stevens/sunday-morning/

[JuniperLea]

12. Everyone grumbled, the sky was grey...

[Vinnie From Indy]

13. It's easy to grin

when your ship has come in...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGpQej3o9eo

[Amerigo Vespucci]

14. "Love's not the way to treat a friend"

...from the poem of the same name, by Richard Brautigan.

:toast:

[Poll_Blind]

15. Below the thunders of the upper deep;

PB

[Bok_Tukalo]

16. The boys i mean are not refined

The boys i mean are not refined
They go with girls who buck and bite
They do not give a fuck for luck
They hump them thirteen times a night
One hangs a hat upon her tit
One carves a cross on her behind
They do not give a shit for wit
The boys i mean are not refined

They come with girls who bite and buck
Who cannot read and cannot write
Who laugh like they would fall apart
And masturbate with dynamite

The boys i mean are not refined
They cannot chat of that and this
They do not give a fart for art
They kill like you would take a piss

They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance

e.e. cummings

[PDJane]

17. If this uncertain age in which we dwell....

The Lesson for Today, Robert Frost.

If this uncertain age in which we dwell
Were really as dark as I hear sages tell,
And I convinced that they were really sages,
I should not curse myself with it to hell,
But leaving not the chair I long have sat in,
I should betake me back ten thousand pages
To the world’s undebatably dark ages,
And getting up my medieval Latin.
Seek converse common cause and brotherhood
(By all that’s liberal–I should, I should)
With the poets who could calmly take the fate
Of being born at once too early and late,
And for those reasons kept from being great,


That poem vies with Arna Bontemps, A Black Man Talks of Reaping....

I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
that wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.

[bananas]

18. The wind was blowing very hard

it blew my head across the yard.

[MilesColtrane]

19. It would either be:

"God, Jack of all trades"

or

"each man must realize"



(From "Praying to Big Jack" and "pull a string, a puppet moves")

[yankeepants]

20. For I will consider my cat Geoffrey

For he is a servant of the living god duly and daily serving him.

By Christopher Smart a 17th century monk

[1620rock]

23. The Wreck of the Hesperus

The Wreck of the Hesperus
a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow



The Wreck of the Hesperus


It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,
To bear him company.

Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?"
"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"
And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
Oh say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That savèd she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave
On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

The Wreck of the Hesperus
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[Divernan]

21. "But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you"

That's not the first line, but my favorite line, since I see myself as having a pilgrim soul.

Here's the poem, by Yeats,


When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.


Hi, Jitterbug Perfume - great to see your old familiar handle! Stay well.

[JitterbugPerfume]

47. I love that poem

and it is good to see you too:hi:

[JuniperLea]

22. Greedy here... must have another go with a full stanza of something completely different...

“What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden-gray, an’ a’ that;
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man’s a man for a’ that.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;
The honest man, though e’er sae poor,
Is king o’ men for a’ that.”

[JackintheGreen]

24. I heard the old, old men say

'everything alters, and one by one we drop away.'

[enlightenment]

25. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" - Wm. B. Yeats

followed closely (perhaps too close to call) by:

A simple Child . . .

That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

"We Are Seven" - Wm. Wordsworth

[OHdem10]

26. not the first line, "Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest

are these, IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN."

[PDJane]

67. The remainder of the Frost poem I posted says:

We all are doomed to broken-off careers,
And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
The earth itself is liable to the fate
Of meaninglessly being broken off.
(And hence so many literary tears
At which my inclination is to scoff.)
I may have wept that any should have died
Or missed their chance, or not have been their best,
Or been their riches, fame, or love denied;
On me as much as any is the jest.
I take my incompleteness with the rest.
God bless himself can no one else be blessed.

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

[LiberalEsto]

27. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

William Butler Yeats, "The Lake isle of Innisfree". His "song of Wandering Aengus" is a close second. Denise Levertov's "The Goddess" is another one I love.

I heard Allen Ginsberg read his poetry many times when I was a student at Rutgers University in the early 1970s. He was a performance artist.

Here's one of my most recent poems:

Haiku for Japan

Babies curled in wombs.
Cherry blossoms almost open.
Invisible clouds.

[nykym]

28. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

I like this line too. but my real favorite line from this poem is:
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'

The whole poem at link.
http://www.heise.de/ix/raven/Literature/Lore/TheRaven.html

[JitterbugPerfume]

48. I learned to love poetry reading Poe

Annabelle Lee, The Bells, The Raven are all favorites.

I especially love The tintinabulation of the bells!

[protect our future]

29. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

[getting old in mke]

30. One step into ecstasy, I lost my watch.

One step in
=== ==== ==

One step into ecstasy, I lost my watch.
Two steps in, my wallet and all my identification slipped away.
Three steps in, I started to dance.
I lost count after three.

Stephen Frank Smith (Shemshuddin)

[damntexdem]

32. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

I guess I'm just a Poe boy. ;-)

[PDJane]

64. oh, grooooooooaaaannnnnn

[demigoddess]

34. Breathe there a man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said
this is my own, my native land
whose heart has ne'er burned
when homeward his steps he hath turned
from wandering on a foreign strand
if such there breathe, go mark him well
for him no minstrel raptures swell
high though his titles, proud his name
boundless his wealth as wish can claim
despite these titles, power, and pelf,
the wretch, concentred all in self
living shall forfeit fair renown,
and doubly dying shall go down
to the vile dust, from whence he sprung
unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

[chaplainM]

35. Oh freddled gruntbuggly

by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

[JitterbugPerfume]

41. Vogon Poetry is

the third worst poetry in the galaxy! It has made strong men cry and less strong men implode.

[Rowdyboy]

36. WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol.....

WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv’d with plaudits in the capitol,
still it was not a happy night for me that follow’d;
And else, when I carous’d, or when my plans were accomplish’d, still I was not happy;
But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect health, refresh’d, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of autumn,
When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and disappear in the morning light,
When I wander’d alone over the beach, and undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters, and saw the sun rise,
And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was on his way coming, O then I was happy;
O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my food nourish’d me more—and the beautiful day pass’d well,
And the next came with equal joy—and with the next, at evening, came my friend;
And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores,
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,
For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night,
In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was inclined toward me,
And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.


Walt Whitman

[JitterbugPerfume]

42. no one can compare to Whitman

:loveya: Rowdyboy

[Divernan]

37. Last Sentence of Kipling's Gunga Din

Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

[JitterbugPerfume]

43. I used to read that to my kids

[Divernan]

38. I am the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton - homeward bound!

Not from a poem, but the last line from Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain's farewell speech in England, in part:

. . Home is dear to us all, and now I am departing to my own home beyond the ocean. Oxford has conferred upon me the highest honor that has ever fallen to my share of this life’s prizes. It is the very one I would have chosen, as outranking all and any others, the one more precious to me than any and all others within the gift of man or state.

During my four weeks’ sojourn in England I have had another lofty honor, a continuous honor, an honor which has flowed serenely along, without halt or obstruction, through all these twenty-six days, a most moving and pulse-stirring honor — the heartfelt grip of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale-gray matter of the brain, but rushes up with the red blood from the heart. It makes me proud and sometimes it makes me humble, too.

Many and many a year ago I gathered an incident from Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. It was like this: There was a presumptuous little self-important skipper in a coasting sloop engaged in the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade, and he was always hailing every ship that came in sight. He did it just to hear himself talk and to air his small grandeur.

One day a majestic Indiaman came plowing by with course on course of canvas towering into the sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, her hull burdened to the Plimsoll line with a rich freightage of precious spices, lading the breezes with gracious and mysterious odors of the Orient. It was a noble spectacle, a sublime spectacle! Of course the little skipper popped into the shrouds and squeaked out a hail, “Ship ahoy! What ship is that? And whence and whither?” In a deep and thunderous bass the answer came back through the speaking-trumpet, “The Begum, of Bengal — 142 days out from Canton — homeward bound! What ship is that?”

Well, it just crushed that poor little creature’s vanity flat, and he squeaked back most humbly, “Only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point — with nothing to speak of!” Oh, what an eloquent word that “only,” to express the depths of his humbleness!

That is just my case. During just one hour in the twenty-four — not more — I pause and reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble. Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware; but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton — homeward bound!

[JitterbugPerfume]

49. I recently read vol.one of his autobiography

I rediscovered Mark Twain and I am in awe of him.

[no_hypocrisy]

39. The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes

[Sabriel]

40. "Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)"

From "Abou Ben Adhem" by James Henry Leigh Hunt

[Recursion]

51. April is the cruellest month, breeding

[PDJane]

57. lilacs from the dead land...........

T.S. Elliot, The Wasteland......and I love that,too.

[Jim__]

52. One must have a mind of winter

The Snow Man - Wallace Stevens


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

...

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

[Hun Joro]

54. Humanity i love you

because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you're flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shops and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you


e.e. cummings

[KitSileya]

55. "It is spring in the mountains, I come alone seeking you"

by Tu Fu

Do I have to pick just one? Aghh!

"Here's to the men who lose!"

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see; saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be" from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Locksley Hall appeals to the sci-fi fan in me.

"If there be anyone can take my place and make you happy whom I grieve to grieve" by Christina Rossetti.

"I've been scarred and battered, My hopes the wind done scattered" by Langston Hughes.

"My boat is on the shore, And my bark is on the sea, But, before I go, Tom Moore, Here's a double health to thee!" By George Gordon,, Lord Byron.

"Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings" by John G. Magee, Jr.

(yes, I am an English major. why do you ask?)

[PDJane]

59. LOL........yeah, me too.......

but I have to admit that two of my favourite poets writes in spanish.....and another two in Russian.

They are Victor Jara, Pablo Neruda, Osip Mandelstam (Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope) and Anna Akhmatova. Two of the four died in violent upheavals in their lands, Jara in Chilé and Madelstam in Russia. Akhmatova lost her husband to the Russian upheavals and Neruda survived by being smuggled out of Chilé by friends.

[SheilaT]

58. I went out to the hazel wood

Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing, 5
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame, 10
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran 15
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands; 20
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W B Yeats


I often memorize poems just because I like them.

[SwissTony]

98. Donovan sets Yeats' words to music in the 70s

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQUT6mS0eY8>

One of my favourite songs basd on one of my favourite poems.

[Divernan]

60. Thanks for this lovely thread in these terrible times - we all needed it!

[JitterbugPerfume]

62. you are welcome

reading has saved my sanity (such as it is) many times.

[Mister Ed]

63. i sing of Olaf glad and big...

whose warmest heart recoiled at war
a conscientious object-or

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/11930

[eppur_se_muova]

65. I met a traveler from an antique land ... nt

[PDJane]

66. Ah, yes..........

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias. The poem purportedly about Ramses III. If so, he took several liberties with the facts.

[eppur_se_muova]

70. It seems to be more about the futility of aggrandizement, in general.

Could apply as well to some recent leaders ... Saddam Hussein, Mubarak ... Bu**sh** was the weird exception, too little upstairs to even care about the judgement of history.

[PDJane]

72. Indeed....and I agree.

But the Kings of Egypt always seemed to look serene and rather benevolent to me.

The eye of the beholder, I suppose. It is a wonderful piece,regardless.

[raccoon]

68. Sunset and evening star.... nt

[PDJane]

69. Crossing the Bar...Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Lovely piece.

Sigh. It must be obvious by now that I love poetry....and words.

[PDJane]

71. There is no Alice Walker or John Donne..........

Looking down into my fathers
dead face
for the last time
my mother said without
tears, without smiles
but with civility
"Good night, Willie Lee, Ill see you
in the morning."


And Donne is seminal......amazing.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;


And there is that lovely thing, Meditation XVII:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

And then there is the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:


Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.


“How sweet is mortal Sovranty!” — think some:
Others — “How blest the Paradise to come!”
Ah, take the Cash in hand and wave the Rest;
Oh, the brave Music of a distant Drum!

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie;
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and — sans End!

[pscot]

73. The Rubaiyat

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes
The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light.

[Lionel Mandrake]

74. I saw a chapel all of gold

William Blake

[mzteris]

75. Full of her long white arms

and milky skin. He had a thousand times remembered sin.

The Equilibrists by John Crowe Ransom

[WaitingforKarlRove]

76. I met a traveler from an antique land

Ozymandias by Shelley

[fadedrose]

77. I think that I shall never see....

Alfred Joyce Kilmer


It's the only poem I recite to myself a hundred times over spring and summer, every year, since I heard it....

[BlueIris]

78. When I came to sex in full, not sex

"Coming of Age, 1966," by Sharon Olds. You can Google if you want to find it.

[elehhhhna]

79. If I were a cinnamon peeler

Ondaatje

[Onceuponalife]

80. Nature's first green is gold

Her hardest hue to hold
her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Eden sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost

[mak3cats]

81. "Not in a silver casket cool with pearls..."

...by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The entire sonnet here:

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/ednamillay/7318

[classof56]

82. This the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlock...

Just found this thread and felt compelled to weigh in. Lots of wonderful first lines here, but when I was in junior high I wrote a report about Evangeline and still gives me a shiver of joy when I hear those words by Longfellow. What wonderful images they evoke!

Peace.

[primavera]

83. Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill.

[sea_dream]

84. I must go down to the sea again

[LWolf]

85. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

John Keats


I found this poem in my English Lit book when I was a junior in high school, in 1976. We didn't study it, but I was entranced. I love poetry of all kinds, but no poem, before or since, has ever resonated with me like his "To Autumn."

[dmallind]

86. Should I post just the first line or the whole thing?

Well since it goes:


Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit


I think I will just stick to the first line................

[Fornit_Some_Fornus]

87. "Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else,...

...in such a way do the days pass, a blend of stock-car racing and the never-ending building of a gothic cathedral; from the window of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away..."

And it just gets better from there.

It's called "Pursuit" from a stellar collection ("Cemetery Nights") by Stephen Dobyns.

It's difficult to pick out a top favorite, however this poem is definitely up there.

[Little Star]

88. There are strange things done in the midnight sun

The Cremation of Sam McGee
by Robert W. Service

I have never read a poem that I liked as much as this one.

In fact, I am not really a poetry fan at all. To be honest I abhore most poems.

The Cremation of Sam McGee is the only poem I have ever read that I have actually liked!



:shrug:

[petronius]

89. "At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain,"

Continent's End, Robinson Jeffers

Or perhaps it's:

"On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble", A. E. Housman

[Mist]

90. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre" nt

[Bonobo]

92. +1

Same here.

[Rabblevox]

93. +2, possibly the most important poem, by the best English poet, EVAR! /nt

[D-Fens]

91. One of my favorites of late:

Oh my beloved! After witnessing your Infinite Beauty I become entangled.
Seeing, the manifestation of Your Glory, I become saturated with joy and ecstasy.

-penned by the Imam Khomeini as the opening to a mystical poem; it suggests a deeper side to him than what was portrayed in the media.

The rest is here (along with an explanation): http://www.najaf.org/english/book/16/29.htm

[ellie]

94. My heart aches and a drowsy numbness

pains my sense ...


John Keats "Ode to a Nightingale"

God, I love that poem!

[demoblemocratic]

95. We are the hollow men

[bemildred]

96. This Poem

is for the quiet, uncelebrated

things of the world--

the road to no familiar place,

love's skill on a troubled night,

the unpublished poem and lost song,

the way of the wild drake,

and night's festival of sound;

for body's silent defeat of disease,

and mysteries that hold their secrets.

For multitudes of creatures and created

things clothed in the graceful sanctity

of their rightful natures.



Joseph Harris

[drokhole]

97. To see a world in a grain of sand...

[SwissTony]

99. Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

"It seemed that out of battle I escaped"

A decent enough first line, but does little to suggest the direction of the rest of the poem. This poem had a profound effect on me when I first read it at the age of 15 (thank you, Peter Lang, my High School English teacher) and still does 45 years later.

...............

It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then ,as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, -
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
'Strange friend,' I said, 'here is no cause to mourn.'
'None,' said that other, 'save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now...'

[DearHeart]

100. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone-W.H. Auden

[MountainMama]

101. Wordsworth....

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


William Wordsworth


It makes me happy.

[Sabriel]

102. When I heard the learn'd astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

(Walt Whitman)

For those of you with children, there's a great picture book (for all ages) based on the poem:

http://www.amazon.com/Heard-Learnd-Astronomer-Golden-Honors/dp/0689863977/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320504072&sr=8-1

[Moe Shinola]

103. My candle burns at both ends...

First Fig, by Edna St Vincet Millay