Have you got a favourite poem?

I can remember all the children's poems.
The jumblies, the spider and the fly, a the fairy who went a-marketing.

And Maverick Prowells and his rumbling bowels that thundered in the night.
They shook the bedrooms all around, and gave the folks a fright!

When You Are Old W B Yeats.
Warning Jenny Joseph.

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

A great poem for middle age: "Though much is taken, much abides".

Try and erase the mawkish use of it in "Skyfall" from your mind.

I found something on a similar theme MissAdventure - Long Distance II, by Tony Harrison.

Oh thank you.
I'll go and have a read.

That's it!!!
I knew just by the tone of the first line.
Thanks so much.
I'm going to go and have a read of it now.

Aah, mystery solved.
All those years of wondering...

Oh - that’s good!!

Wishes do come true!

It's made my day.

How lovely, the power of Gransnet ?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning- Sonnet 23.

“If I lay here dead,…..”

All about the power of love.

I have two favourites:

Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice

Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth.

Aedh wishes for the cloths of heaven by Yeats. Always loved that one. Also The road not taken by Robert Frost.

Blossoming

I have several.

The Second Coming by WB Yeats

I was about to type that,Blossoming, when I saw your post!

I was swithering between that and The Wasteland by TS Eliot.

Keepsake Mill by R L Stevenson. The last verse especially.

An Arundel Tomb Philip Larkin, beautiful, as is the tomb.

My Last Duchess Robert Browning
(so sinister, read illicitly during an unusually boring English lesson many years ago.)

Mr Bleaney by Philip Larkin, and many other poems by that wonderful poet

I'm a bit of a poetry nerd/enthusiast.
I keep a database of thousands of poems that I like best and select one each day at random to read/study.

This is such a lovely thread. Love all the poems selected here. The Darkling Thrush is a favourite of mine too. A special one for me--and I can NEVER read it without tears is
Walking Away by C. Day Lewis.
I've 2 sons and this poem is so true.
The last 2 lines says it all--
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

Luckygirl3

The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry.

Its final line is on my OH's gravestone:
"I rest in the grace of the world and am free."

Absolutely beautiful, this poem.
How lovely to put that on your DH's gravestone.

Edwin Morgan - LOVE

Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love
is the wolf that guards the gate.
Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It
fills us and fuels us and fires us to create.
Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed
pillow, crumpled sheet, unenviable fate.
Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing
will ever let that high ambiguity abate.
Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers
and clinks fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched
absinth to fall on it and alter its state.
With love you send a probe
So far from the globe
No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the
zones the drags the flares it signals all to
leave all and to navigate.

My love of poetry began when I was in my mid 30s when I decided to take an English literature A level. It took off like a rocket and I explored more and more but it was Ted Hughes’ poetry that really hit home with me.

I have two favourites:

Full Moon and Little Frieda. Such a tender moving poem about a young child’s amazement.
Thought Fox, which stirred me into writing poetry myself.

I love so many poems that it's hard to name a favourite.
But the one I come back to time and time again and identify with is "Quicksand Years" by Walt Whitman.
And also 'Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.
I discovered poetry in my early teens and have several exercise books filled with my favourites.