Favourite Poems and Why?

Am I allowed three? Well it's tough if I'm not because I can't decide Oh I'm no good at picking favourites, I could go on and on with this lol


Love Is...

Love is...

Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a funclub with only two fans
Love is walking holding paintstained hands
Love is.

Love is fish and chips on winter nights
Love is blankets full of strange delights
Love is when you don't put out the light
Love is

Love is the presents in Christmas shops
Love is when you're feeling Top of the Pops
Love is what happens when the music stops
Love is

Love is white panties lying all forlorn
Love is pink nightdresses still slightly warm
Love is when you have to leave at dawn
Love is

Love is you and love is me
Love is prison and love is free
Love's what's there when you are away from me
Love is...

- Adrian Henri

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's ******* her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

- Philip Larkin

And last, but not least

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

- Wilfred Owen

My goodness, Mersey Beat to Wilfred Owen - classics! It links beautifully to Rupert Brooke. If you have sat outside as dusk falls with your loved ones with you, and in the distance there is running water quietly bubbling up and all you can see is in silhouette and all you hear above the water is murmuring voices, this poem comes to mind:


The Soldier
Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Originally posted by Heronumber0
My goodness, Mersey Beat to Wilfred Owen - classics! It links beautifully to Rupert Brooke.

There’s something so beautiful about the raw emotion embedded in war poetry. I've studied the poetry and literature of WWI twice in my life and it never gets old, you really know where you stand in life when you read something from a solider.

Fudgestix, I agree with you. There is an intensity possibly stemming from a foreknowledge of near future tragedy that gives these poems a raw intensity and emotion.
I think this poem was pre-war by Brooke but there is one intense part which will stay with me forever (I said these words to my wife in a romantic moment) :

'Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that's I
Shall meet one atom that was you. '


Dust

by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world's delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath---
When we are dust, when we are dust!---

Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,

And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.

And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that's I
Shall meet one atom that was you.

Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset's afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow

Upon the peace; and, past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,

They'll know not if it's fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,

Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . .
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know---poor fools, they'll know!---
One moment, what it is to love.

Awareness, can you hear this?

Awareness is the key to the doors of perception, the fast track to Change, and the first step on the road to wisdom.
See, many talk while few listen... fewer still listen to their own selves As they talk caught in preset programs created by force of habit.
What to think? What to fear?
Where to go? What to wear?
But he who dares to roam the outer reaches teaches by virtue of living What most of us are missing.
I, salute you starchild and I...think I see something of me in your eyes
For I too have ties to realms beyond the senses I...sense it.
Sometimes a voice beyond intellect intercepts and says:
"Yo, go right" when common sense and even experience suggests left would Be the best, this...is beyond me. Or at least, it's beyond the limited
Image I've been led to believe is me and, far too scary for that "me" to
Fully conceive.
Could I have been deceived?
Could the name that I own and the way that I roll be just a drop in the
Ocean in comparison to the whole?
Woah!
Well then what?
Well then I guess you must make a decision....between who really talks..
And who really listens.

The Beginning.


edit to add. This is my best poem because I can read it everytime and know Im not really as lost as I think I am... and my friend Simon created it.



[edit on 11-9-2007 by Sekhemet]