Have you got a favourite poem?

‘Time does not bring relief, you all have lied’ by Edna St Vincent Millay

Home Thoughts From Abroad is my favourite - learnt it at Junior School for an inter-school contest and it still touches my heart.

Alternatives to poems for me have always been song lyrics:

The sigh of midnight trains in empty stations
Silk stockings cast aside, dance invitations
Oh how the ghost of you clings
These foolish things
Remind me of you

Now if that isn't poetry, I don't know what is.

My favourite is the Highway Man by Alfred Noyes. Love the rhythm of it that goes with the horse's hooves.

I have many that I love but I think these are my favourites:

www.poeticous.com/philip-larkin/sad-steps

This one, by Brian Patten:

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.
On the journey I thought of you.
One evening when the park was soaking
You hid beneath trees, and all around you dimmed itself
as if the earth were lit by gaslight.
We had faith that love would last forever.

I caught a train that passed the town where you lived.

And this one of Leonard Cohen's, which is hard to find online but was published in his book "Flowers for Hitler":

Two hours off the branch and burnt
the petals of the gardenia curl and deepen
in the yellow-brown of waste
Your body wandered close
I didn't raise my hand to reach
the distance was so familiar
Our house is happy with its old furniture
the black Venetian bed stands on gold claws
guarding the window
Don't take the window away
and leave a hole in the stark mountains
The clothesline and the grey clothespins
would make you think we're going to be together always
Last night I dreamed
you were Buddha's wife
and I was a historian watching you sleep
What vanity
A girl told me something beautiful
Very early in the morning
she saw an orange-painted wooden boat
come into port over the smooth sea
The cargo was hay
The boat rode low under the weight
She couldn't see the sailors
but on top of all the hay sat a monk
Because of the sun behind he seemed
to be sitting in a fire
like that famous photograph
I forget to tell you the story
She surprised me by telling it
and I wanted her for ten minutes
I really enjoyed the gardenia from Sophia's courtyard
You put it on my table two hours ago
and I can smell it everywhere in the house
Darling I attach nothing to it.

Madam Life’s a Piece in Bloom - by William Ernest Henley

“Madam Life’s a piece in bloom
Death goes dogging everywhere:
She’s the tenant of the room,
He’s the ruffian on the stair.

You shall see her as a friend,
You shall bilk him once or twice;
But he’ll trap you in the end,
And he’ll stick you for her price.

With his kneebones at your chest,
And his knuckles in your throat,
You would reason — plead — protest!
Clutching at her petticoat;

But she’s heard it all before,
Well she knows you’ve had your fun,
Gingerly she gains the door,
And your little job is done.”

After reading so many posts I'm beginning to think of others myself.
The reason why I chose St.Agnes Eve was we did it for O level anyone remember the old JMB examining Board?
It was in a collection of narrative poems .I had a test and found I had forgotten my book, my lovely father disappeared onto the loft and came down with an old copy of the same book"A Golden treasury of longer poems". It seemed he had studied the same book for his school certificate.
I love the longer narrative poems.
Coming from the land of Wordsworth I love Daffodils and from "Westminster bridge" ,though my favourite has to be 'The Rainbow".

What an education and a joy this thread is.

For me it's impossible to have one favourite as what I need and take from a poem changes every day and with every mood.

The Subaltern's Love Song by John Betjeman is another favourite of mine. It conjures up the atmosphere of the era so beautifully and feels so peaceful even though it was written in wartime.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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.

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

I have two favourites:

Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice

Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning- Sonnet 23.

“If I lay here dead,…..”

All about the power of love.

How lovely, the power of Gransnet ?

It's made my day.

Wishes do come true!

Oh - that’s good!!

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