Which is your favourite poem and why?

I have always loved poetry so it is hard to choose. Daffodils by Wordsworth might be the one "fluttering and dancing in the breeze." I also love Adlestrop. I still have a very soft spot for The Owl and the Pussycat and The King's Breakfast by A A Milne.

As a child, my parents gave me a wonderful book which I still have, "Arthur Mee's Book of One Thousand Beautiful Things" full of beautiful literature and poems, many of which have been mentioned here. It's rather battered now but it's so good to leaf through it now and again. Before Victoria Wood's time - how I love her uplifting work.

Remember
Christina Rossetti - 1830-1894

This poem helped me a lot after my husband died.

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 planned:
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 find poetry such a pleasure, and enjoy so many poems, but a few lines by Hilaire Belloc, beloved of my Father, come to me often - and are so meaningful.

'From quiet homes and first beginning,
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter, and the love of friends'.

Unlike many of you I've never been a great fan of poetry. I remember when my daughter was at school her homework was to learn a poem by heart. She rejected everything I suggested as too long but found this one:

'Thanks for laying the carpet, Dad,
Thanks for showing us how,
But what's that bump in the middle, Dad?
And why is it saying Meow?'

I don't know the title or author but it still makes me chuckle.

Mine is "Stop All The Clocks" as it reminds me of my dad's passing.

Currently: Beautiful Isle of Somewhere by Jessie Pounds (1897). Just heard a lovely musical arrangement of it at a funeral. Very touching.

Desiderata

Larkin,not Larking, though I think he'd enjoy the joke - and all the jokes predictive text plays on us.

'Aubade'by Phip Larking is a reminder of what waits for us all. Here's a short excerpt:-

'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. '

Ooooh - those curtain edges.

Just love Pam Ayers, the humour and joy she brings just reminding us of every day life.

My absolute favourite. It really resonates with me and the first time I read it I made a conscious decision to be aware of the beauty all around me and to make time to just be.

The Listeners by Walter de la Mare. I just love the imagery. But there are so many other poems that I love too - Cargoes is another favourite - again because of the imagery.

'How Do I Love Thee' Elizabeth Barrett-Browning. I'm such a romantic and this one sings to me.

Loveliest of trees the cherry now A E Houseman so beautiful and so sad

The smuggler's song by Rudyard Kipling. Also any poem by FW Harvey

I love poetry ...and have a copy of a book of favourite poems by my bed. I particularly love IF by Rudyard Kipling ...my late husband kept a little print of this in his wallet, which I now keep in my purse...I had it read at his funeral. He also liked the Road to Samarkand.one day (it was actually going to be in 2020) I would like to visit Samarkand which it is possible to do by train through Russia ....sadly, although my deposit is still on the trip, it is not looking likely anytime soon, and next year I will probably be too old and infirm (if I am still here at all !) My dad always quoted The Charge of the Light Brigade as well ....which memory, when I hear it, always makes me smile !

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Thankyou Whitewavemark, a beautiful new favourite.

Clown in the Moon (Dylan Thomas aged 14)

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose,
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think that if I touched the earth
it would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful, So tremulously like a dream.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Read it at school many moons ago and has been my favourite ever since.

^Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:^

The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods ...
But there is no road through the woods.

Gagajo I have long been drawn to Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper”, though it’s the saddest poem I’ve ever read.

Here’s is one that makes me smile. I used to read it to my GS.

Me and Him by Richard Edwards

“What did you do when you were young?”
I asked of the elderly man.
“I travelled the lanes with a tortoiseshell cat
And a stick and a rickety van.
I travelled the paths with the sun on a thread,
I travelled the roads with a bucket of bread,
I travelled the world with a hen on my head
And my tea in a watering can.”
Said the elderly, elderly man.

“And what do you do now that you’re old?”
I asked of the elderly man.
“I sit on my bed and I twiddle my thumbs
And I snooze,” he replied, “and I plan
To make my escape from this nursing home place
Whose matron is strict with a pale pasty face….”
“Then come with me now and away we shall race!”
I said to the elderly man;
And he jumped out of bed and we ran.

And now we wander wherever we want,
Myself and the elderly man.
With a couple of sticks and a tortoiseshell cat
And a rickety-rackety van.
We travel the paths with the sun on a thread,
We travel the roads with two buckets of bread,
We travel the world with a hen on each head
And our tea in a watering can,
Young me and the elderly man.

Oh my goodness Lupin! What an amazing poem.

I think one of my favourite poems is Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy.

The bed we loved in was a spinning world
of forests, castles, torchlight, cliff-tops, seas
where he would dive for pearls. My lover’s words
were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses
on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme
to his, now echo, assonance; his touch
a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.
Some nights I dreamed he’d written me, the bed
a page beneath his writer’s hands. Romance
and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.
In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,
dribbling their prose. My living laughing love –
I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head
as he held me upon that next best bed.

So romantic and lovely to teach. Although I have to admit, at times I avoid the pearl diving metaphor. Particularly with a large class of 15 year olds!

I also like teaching London by William Blake, but with older students because it is a very dark poem. Not a poem to be enjoyed maybe, but as a protest poem it is great.

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter by John Crowe Ransom is a favourite of mine.

I’m not sure why - I find it very affecting and I can see the little girl, full of life, rounding up her geese.

Sorry I can't limit myself to one!:

High Flight by John Gillespie Magee - learned while doing war poetry for 'O' level - the only one that was uplifting;

Hamlet's soliloquy - (not a poem, I know) - learned by heart for 'A' level;

Hyawatha by Longfellow - a whole epic story and book in poetic form with great rhythm (and best read aloud).