B&A: What are your favorite poems?

“London” by William Blake.

I wander through each chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow.

A 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 appalls

And the hapless soldier’ sigh

Runs in blood down palace walls.

But most, through midnight streets

I hear how the youthful harlots curse

Blast the newborn infant’s tear

And blights with plagues, the marriage hearse.

“Renascence” by Edna St.Vincent Milay……my favorite poet.

“Maggie, Millie, Molly and May” by EE Cummings

I love the line, “As small as a world, and as big as alone.”

“Sounds of Silence” by Paul Simon………also a great song : )

“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” by John Keats

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe

Opportunity by Edward Roland Still

Love In the Asylum

A stranger has come

To share my room in the house not right in the head,

A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.

Strait in the mazed bed

She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,

At large as the dead,

Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed

Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,

Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust

Yet raves at her will

On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last

I may without fail

Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars

-Dylan Thomas

Lord Byron’s Epitaph to a Dog (written when Byron’s beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain, died)

“Near this Spot

are deposited the Remains of one

who possessed Beauty without Vanity,

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferosity,

and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.

This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery

if inscribed over human Ashes,

is but a just tribute to the Memory of

BOATSWAIN, a DOG,

who was born in Newfoundland May

and died at Newstead Nov. , .

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,

Unknown by Glory, but upheld by Birth,

The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,

And storied urns record who rests below.

When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen,

Not what he was, but what he should have been.

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,

Whose honest heart is still his Master’s own……”

Source(s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph_to_a_Dog

The Stolen Child by W.B Yeats.

“Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim gray sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Also – The Love Song Of J. Alfred. Prufrock by T.S Eliot

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.”

Source(s): http://www.online-literature.com/yeats//
http://www.bartleby.com//.html

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas

“And death shall have no dominion.

Dead mean naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan’t crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.”

And, “Masks” by Ezra Pound

“These tales of old disguisings, are they not

Strange myths of souls that found themselves among

Unwonted folk that spake an hostile tongue,

Some soul from all the rest who’d not forgot

The star-span acres of a former lot

Where boundless mid the clouds his course he swung,

Or carnate with his elder brothers sung

Ere ballad-makers lisped of Camelot?

Old singers half-forgetful of their tunes,

Old painters color-blind come back once more,

Old poets skill-less in the wind-heart runes,

Old wizards lacking in their wonder-lore:

All they that with strange sadness in their eyes

Ponder in silence o’er earth’s queynt devyse?”

Emily Dickinson – They Shut Me Up In Prose:

They shut me up in Prose—

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet—

Because they liked me “still”—

Still! Could themself have peeped—

And seen my Brain—go round—

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason—in the Pound—

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Abolish his Captivity—

And laugh—No more have I—

Wordsworth – She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning – The Runaway Slave:

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/ebbr…

🙂

I’m actually not really a fan of poetry, but I like this:

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away

It’s from the movie Identity (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt/)

It’s by Hughes Mearns apparently.

Source(s): the movie

Fire and ice

Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire

some say in ice

but from what ive tasted of disre

i hold with those who favor fire

but if it had to perish twice

i think.i know enough of hate

to say destrection ice

is also great

and would suffice