The Easter 1916 thread got me thinking about my favourite poetry. Being an English teacher paradoxically has meant my reading less and less poetry for pleasure, since it has come to feel a little like work. Nonetheless there are poems that mean a great deal to me. When this was put into the GCSE syllabus a few years back it nearly killed it for me - nearly, but not quite. It has been my favourite poem since I was nineteen and not really ready for it, and it remain so to this day because, primarily, of the huge force that Marvell gets into the beginning of the second stanza - lines I still cannot hear read aloud without a shudder. Anyway, not wishing this to be a lesson, I just thought it might be interesting to have a thread in which we share our favourite stuff.

To his Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell


Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

As a gloomy and nerdy teenager I preferred this one :

The Definition of Love

MY Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing
Where feeble Hope could ne'r have flown
But vainly flapt its tinsel wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended soul is fixt
But Fate does iron wedges drive,
And always crowds it self betwixt.

For Fate with jealous eye does see
Two perfect Loves; nor lets them close:
Their union would her ruin be,
And her Tyrannic pow'r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac'd,
(Though Love's whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac'd.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear;
And, us to join, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere.

As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet:
But ours so truly Parallel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.

Other than Coy Mistress, Marvell is not really my cup of tea, great though he undoubtedly is...I am however very fond of John Donne and particularly...

THE FLEA.
by John Donne


MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Imagine how desperate he was for a shag, if he was resorting to using a flea as an analogy...

Such an old letch he was LOL

Simpler times eh?

They didn't have the internet or texting - they had to make their own amusements.

So only me and Jo interested in contributing to this, then...is that because your American poets all suck? Walt Whitman, my arse...

Is it sacreligious to mention Sheb Shilverstein? His poetry is a lot of fun and got lots of kids like me interested. (I'd post some poetry except that unlike blokes like Yeats, his stuff is NOT in the public domain...)

Great thread, Ian! Admittedly, I teach intermediate elementary grades (I taught 6th grade for 11 and 5th for 2), I find the more I teach, the less time I find myself reading just for my own enjoyment.

And when I do read, I seem to go toward less intense reading material.

Shame you can't post some because I have never heard of him, I'm afraid.

Here is a cheery little number from Philip Larkin (probably the best English poet of the last half of the Twentieth Century) whose preoccupation with death and general poetic sensitivity speak to me very clearly...who could have thought what an awful human being lay behind those poems before the publication of his Letters?

Aubade


I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip Larkin

There once was a man named Enos...

...said the man with a Robert Frost line in his signature....

This is the web site run by his estate. I apologize for screwing up his name...

http://www.shelsilverstein.com/indexSite.html

A bit overquoted now on account of Four Weddings and a Funeral but still:

"Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good."

And from way back in the day...

"O Western wind when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain
Christ but my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again"

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! (presses back of hand to forehead). I suppose I should be contributing to this out of professional gusto and all that. So, as lyrics from hardcore east coast rap may alter the tone of the page somewhat, how about the magnificent William Blake?

London
.
I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

I am a bit of a numpty when it comes to poetry. I just don't get a lot of it It's a shame really as my great X 4 Grandads Nephew ( by Blood) was Thomas Hardy and I find his stuff especially boring. A few favourites spring to mind though and they are as follows.

Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
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.

A gulty pleasure is this one that was used by spy Violette Szabo as a code during the war (as made famous by the film carve her name with pride)

The Life That I Have

Leo Marks, 1920 -

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours.

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours


This poem has helped me get my end away on more than one occasion so has to be included

How Do I Love Thee?
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, -- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! -- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And lastly:

Philip Larkin

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Yeah Larkin was a miserable old bastard, wasn't he? I like that poem despite its shock attack, for the elegance of 'By fools in old-style hats and coats'. 'Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori, by the way, for those who don't know, which Owen call s 'The old lie' is a Latin saying which translates as 'it is glorious and fitting to die for one's country.' Never (unfortunately) loses its topicality and importance, that one.
London is a less straight forward poem than it at first appears, too (like a lot of Blake) What, for example, does Blake mean here:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,

Answers on a postcard to...

or simple beauty, this one is hard to beat:

Remember - Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day.
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

I did Wilf for GCSE and was a big fan -didn't he get shot and killed the day before the armistice or something suitably ironic - and Dulce et Decorum est was my favourite poem of his.

For the Americans a bit by Emily Dickinson I always liked

BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

Oooh! Oooh! Sir! Can I have a go at this one? (waits to see if Mr Evans is in receptive mood)
Blake was at the vanguard of the movement to prevent boys being physically sent up chimneys and removing the soot from them internally. This was not only claustrophobic and unpleasant for them, but because they were also sent up naked (it was that hot in there, and clothes weren't easily cleaned) they also suffered extremely high mortality rates from scrotal cancer. Most didn't live past 12.
The 'blackening church' is, as far as I'm concerned, Blake applying his spiritual form of Christianity to what he sees as the scabrous complacency and hypocrisy of the established Church, in not supporting and loving their most vulnerable parishioners.
Blake's concern for these boys is reflected in several of the other poems from 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'. 'London' just seems the most 'modern' to me, in that there is so much 'chartered' for the poor, the human, the whatever.

And from my least favourite play by Shakespeare a beautiful piece to speak aloud:

"now, my honey love,
Will we return unto thy father's house
And revel it as bravely as the best,
With silken coats and caps and golden rings,
With ruffs and cuffs and fardingales and things;
With scarfs and fans and double change of bravery,
With amber bracelets, beads and all this knavery. "

I thought you were in favour of shrews being tamed?