What are your favourite poems?

[Arzoo]

Wallace Stevens has written too many good poems. However, permit me to link this thread with its sister thread, "Favourite Literary Quotes" with the help of John Donne.

Break of Day

Tis true ’tis day: what though it be?
Wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ’tis light?
Did we lie down because ’twas night?
Love that in despite of darkness brought us hither
Should in despite of light hold us together.

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak, as well as spy,
This is the worst that it could say:
That, being well, I fain would stay,
And that I love my heart and honour so
That I would not from him which hath them go.

Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love:
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He that hath business and makes love doth do
Such wrong as if a married man should woo.

[Arzoo]

Goodnight

Goodnight? no love, the night is ill
Which severs those it should unite;
Let us remain together still,
Then it will be—‘good night’.

How were the night without thee, good
Though thy sweet wishes wing its flight?
Be it not said, thought, understood—
Then it will be—‘good night’.

The hearts that on each other beat
From evening close to morning light
Have nights as good as they are sweet
But never say ‘good night’.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

(Love writing the guy's full name! Rounded and Orbicular, rings onto like bullion!)

[Arzoo]

Another short but sweet poem :

Wanting is – what?
Summer redundant,
Blueness abundant,
– Where is the blot?
Beamy the world, yet a blank all the same,
– Framework which waits for a picture to frame:
What of the leafage, what of the flower?
Roses embowering with naught they embower!
Come then, complete incompletion, O comer,
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!
Breathe but one breath
Rose-beauty above,
And all that was death
Grows life, grows love,
Grows love!

- Robert Browning

[Philidor]

Time methinks for something a bit lighter.

This Be the Verse -- by Philip Larkin

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!

[Arzoo]

Something by surely the oldest, living poet today :

Boy at the Window

Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a god-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to Paradise.

The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.

- Richard Wilbur

[HayBen]

The only time when I was close to poems were when I was a kid. The most favorite one was * 7 Stages of Man* by William Shakepeare.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

[Arzoo]

Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan expedition

So these are the Himalayas.
Mountains racing to the moon.
The moment of their start recorded
on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.
Holes punched in a desert of clouds.
Thrust into nothing.
Echo—a white mute.
Quiet.
 
Yeti, down there we’ve got Wednesday,
bread, and alphabets.
Two times two is four.
Roses are red there,
and violets are blue.
 
Yeti, crime is not all
we’re up to down there.
Yeti, not every sentence there
means death.
 
We’ve inherited hope—
the gift of forgetting.
You’ll see how we give
birth among the ruins.
 
Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we turn lights on, Yeti.
 
Up here it’s neither moon nor earth.
Tears freeze.
Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,
turn back, think again!
 
I called this to the Yeti
inside four walls of avalanche,
stomping my feet for warmth
on the everlasting
snow.

- Wislawa Szymborska, Calling out to Yeti  from the collection Map

[Arzoo]

Thought I'd post some lines in memoriam John Ashbery (1927-2017):

The Recent Past

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination.
As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling
The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear,
The oddest device can’t be usual. And that is where
The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars
There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee
Between the blinding rain that interviews.

You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you
Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass
Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader
Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed
How it was a rhyme for “brick” or “redder.”
The next chapter told all about a brook.

You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave
Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out “Aladdin.”
I thought about the Arab boy in his cave
But the thoughts came faster than advice.
If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space
The print could rhyme with “fallen star.”


- From Rivers and Mountains

Hope Library of America publishes a complete edition of Ashbery, soon enough (including his prose works and translations).

[Arzoo]

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper

By the Universe deserted,
she’d tell it to go to hell,
and she’d find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

- Elizabeth Bishop

[contrail]

The wren
Earns his living
Noiselessly.
- Kobayahsi Issa

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon-beholders.
- Matsuo Bashō

Over-ripe sushi,
The Master
Is full of regret.
- Yosa Buson

Consider me
As one who loved poetry
And persimmons.
- Masaoaka Shiki

In the cicada's cry
No sign can foretell
How soon it must die.
- Matsuo Bashō

Blowing from the west
Fallen leaves gather
In the east.
- Yosa Buson

Winter seclusion -
Listening, that evening,
To the rain in the mountain.
- Kobayashi Issa

Don’t weep, insects –
Lovers, stars themselves,
Must part.
- Kobayashi Issa

My life, -
How much more of it remains?
The night is brief.
- Masaoka Shiki

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
- Matsuo Bashō

I kill an ant
and realize my three children
have been watching.
- Kato Shuson

Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.
- Natsume Soseki

Sparrow's child
out of the way, out of the way!
the stallion's coming through
- Kobayashi Issa

Toward those short trees
We saw a hawk descending
On a day in spring.
- Masaoka Shiki

No one travels
Along this way but I,
This autumn evening.
- Matsuo Bashō

In the twilight rain
these brilliant-hued hibiscus -
A lovely sunset
- Matsuo Bashō

First autumn morning
the mirror I stare into
shows my father's face.
- Murakami Kijo

The lamp once out
Cool stars enter
The window frame.
- Natsume Soseki