Which is your favourite poem and why?

It sounds a morbid title but the words are everything to me. I first heard it at my best friend Patrick’s funeral. I worked with him when I was in my twenties until I had my son at 31. We kept in touch over twenty five years he watched my children grow up. I knew he was ill and we did see him but then I heard nothing. Another former colleague rang to tell me he died I just about got to the funeral in time. Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye.

I shall lower the tone by saying pretty much anything by Pam Ayres. 'Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth' might be appropriate for some of us

I love Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I studied it for A Level and learnt the first part by heart. It is very atmospheric and it is easy to picture this remote and slightly eerie place.

I also like Abou ben Adhem because of its message of hope for those who find belef in God difficult.

Another poem I remember is Naming of Parts by Henry Reed which illustrates the contrast between war and the beauty of nature.
www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/naming-of-parts/

Storm in the Black Forest:

Now it is almost night, from the bronzy soft sky
jugfull after jugfull of pure white liquid fire, bright white
tipples over and spills down,
and is gone
and gold-bronze flutters beat through the thick upper air.

And as electric liquid pours out, sometimes
a still brighter white snake wriggles among it, spilled
and tumbling wriggling down the sky:
and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.

And the rain won’t come, the rain refuses to come!

This is the electricity that man is supposed to have mastered
chained, subjugated to his own use!
supposed to!

D.H. Lawrence

Doodledog towards the end of the poem there was something about returning in the woman’s dreams to kiss her - that sounds corny, but it wasn’t!
I now pay 79p a month to Apple to store everything in my phone on the Cloud. Then you can recover it all if you ever need to.
Once in America we were taking to someone whose phone fell out of his pocket and into the dock. We felt terrible as he was helping us at the time. But he just said he needed a new phone anyway & everything was on the Cloud & a few hours later he had a new phone with everything ready-installed!

Viridian Thank you - that’s a wonderful poem & I shall save that one too, but it’s not it!

Moonlight
‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ another of my favourites.

Thank you for starting this thread Bakingmad

"On Eden Rock" by Charles Causley is a favourite. I suppose you'd say that it's about love, loss and the passage of time.

Plus "I Asked the Boy who cannot see what is Colour" which is I think anonymous. Just lovely descriptions.

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, the ultimate concise description of an English country station.
That always comes to my mind, Grandma70s
It was written just before WW1, I think, and Edward Thomas was killed in 1917.
It's a short poem but evocative of pre-WW1 English countryside, quiet, peaceful, gentle.

www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/adlestrop/

I remember the Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow which we read at junior school.

I wonder if our DGC are missing out on all this loveliness?

Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Lord Tennyson. I had to learn this at school and found it quite sad.

Niobe

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

It’s very sinister!?

3dognight The Highwayman is my favourite too. It might have been me who read it to you. I read it to oh so many classes and they all loved it...or so they said!

I have two favourites,
Poem In October by Dylan Thomas
Churchgoing by Philip Larkin

They are both slightly melancholic but very evocative and ultimately hopeful.

An Arundel Tomb Philip Larkin

'What will survive of us is love.'

Every time I go to Chichester I visit the Cathedral and the tomb.
Haven't been able to go for over a year now.

There's a line from a poem by Louis McNeice. "Content to be under the thunder and lightning with you. And happy with the sunlight in the garden."

I just love that.

Is it this one Jane?
High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee
An Anglo-American aviator and poet. Magee served in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States entered the war; he died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire in 1941.

Ring Out Wild Bells by Tennyson. I thought of it again this NYE for some reason.

Used to like hearing church bells ringing in the New Year. It's a pity we have fireworks now and everyone says it's tradition.
I'm sure I don't remember people setting of fireworks at NY before 2000.

Can you remember anything about it, jane? A line, or even a phrase would be a help.

How annoying to lose something that way. I also store things in the Notes app, and didn't realise there was a risk of losing them. I'll be sure to save elsewhere, too.

Quite a long time ago now, somebody posted a poem on Gransnet that had been found in the pocket of an airman who had been killed. It was to his girlfriend at home. It was anonymous.

I copied & pasted it into my phone. Then one day I’d exceeded my storage & Apple deleted all my notes & I could never recover them.

I’ve never been able to find the poem - if anyone has any ideas, I’d be really grateful.

As for my favourite - WB Yeats, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.
And A Prayer for My Daughter.

Sea Fever by John Masefield

One of the first poems I learnt as a child.

3dognight -

In my teens I knew The Highwayman from memory. I used to recite it to myself when I was very bored in lessons. It takes exactly eight minutes, if I remember correctly. Sometimes I’d have to say it, silently of course, three or four times. It got me through a few double German Literature lessons!

High Flight by John Gillespie Magee Jnr

Esspee

Mine is Song by Kath Walker an aboriginal Australian who changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

It helped me greatly when I lost my husband to cancer 16 years ago and I have never had another poem affect me in the way that one did.

I recommend you all read it.

Thank you for this recommendation. I didn't know the poem, and have googled. I agree, it is very good.

I struggle to say which is my favourite poem, as so much depends on my mood when I read them.

I do love Prayer, by Carol Ann Duffy, for the way it finds faith in the everyday things that sustain us, and the way we look for something to believe in, even if religion is not for us:

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

But if you ask me tomorrow I would give a different answer

My Last Duchess by Robert Browning

The Light at St Ives by Sylvia Kantaris. The light is so special there and this poem moves me.

The Highwayman - Alfred Noyes

Just love it. So dramatic and atmospheric, a teacher read it to our class when I was about 12 and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up!

Mine is Song by Kath Walker an aboriginal Australian who changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal.

It helped me greatly when I lost my husband to cancer 16 years ago and I have never had another poem affect me in the way that one did.

I recommend you all read it.