Which is your favourite poem and why?

So many of the poems quoted on here have propelled me to dig out my poetry books and revisit them again, so thanks for the reminders. I especially enjoyed renewing my acquaintance with Cargoes by John Masefield.

Bodach I am so pleased to see Pangur Ban mentioned here! I love it.

There are so many poems that mean so much, it's hard to single out a few. From my childhood, Cargoes by Masefield, The Charge Of The Light Brigade by Tennyson and Triumphal March by Eliot. Then Donne's love poetry, the war poems of Owen and Sassoon, and anything by Dylan Thomas or another great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas. I think that George Herbert's poem Love Bade Me Welcome is very moving even if you're not religious.

But, above all, Keats. I read one critic's opinion that To Autumn is the most perfect poem in the English language and the Ode To A Nightingale is the most beautiful. I can't argue with that.

What a wonderful thread. I shall print it out, keep it and refer to it. It will add to my quality of life no end (especially under lockdown)
I is hard to choose just one - as so many of you have said. But may I suggest Dylan Thomas's 'Poem in October'. It is a celebration , not only of his birthday, but of the natural world that has helped so many of us to cope better this year

I’m with Greenfinch (Kubla Khan & Abou Ben Adam) but would add ‘When all the world is young, lad’ &To His Coy Mistress Latter is by Andrew Marvell & I’ve no idea about the former but that poem was the last thing/words I spoke to my mother as she lay dying. It was a form of valediction in my mind.

May I also add how much I have enjoyed this thread!

Emily Dickins
Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Lovely thread.
This is a poem by Chinese Poet Li Po or Li Bai - 701 AD to 762. There is more than one translation, but I love this one.

The River Captains Wife
I with my hair in its first fringe
Romped outside breaking flower-heads.
You galloped by on bamboo horses.
We juggled green plums round the well.
Living in Chang-kan village,
Two small people without guile.

At fourteen I married you sir,
So bashful I could only hide,
My frowning face turned to the wall.
Called after - never looking back.

Fifteen before I learnt to smile.
Yearned to be one with you forever.
You to be the Ever-Faithful.
I to not sit lonely, waiting.

At sixteen you sir went away,
Through White King’s Gorge, by Yen Rock’s rapids,
When the Yangtze’s at its highest,
Where the gibbons cried above you.

Here by the door your last footprints,
Slowly growing green mosses,
So deep I cannot sweep them,
Leaves so thick from winds of autumn.

September’s yellow butterflies
Twine together in our west garden.
What I feel – it hurts the heart.
Sadness makes my beauty vanish.

When you come down from far places,
Please will you write me a letter?
As far as the farthest reaches,
I’ll come out to welcome you.
Li Po

Every poem of Gerald Manley Hopkins S.J.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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:^

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.

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Thankyou Whitewavemark, a beautiful new favourite.

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 !

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

'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.

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