Your favorite lines from poems

Tennyson's Ulysses urges his aging sailors to go on one last mission together :

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

When you work from your home, and Johns call on the phone, you're a call girl.

When you walk 'til you limp, and give a cut to a pimp, you're a street whore.

When they're beggin' you please to get down on your knees, near their groinage, Excusa me, but you see, don't you touch, where they pee, without coinage.

When I straddle and squat, to show you my...

We are the dead.

You might as well live

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

I THOUGHT no more was needed Youth to prolong Than dumb-bell and foil To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

This is a cautionary rhyme: no matter how young you look or how healthy you are when you are middle-aged, can you experience love like when you were twenty? Aren't the illusions, the ardor gone by then?

sorry

I THOUGHT no more was needed

Youth to prolong

Than dumb-bell and foil

To keep the body young. O who could have foretold That the heart grows old?

-- William Butler Yeats

This is a cautionary rhyme: no matter how young you look or how healthy you are when you are middle-aged, can you experience love like when you were twenty? Aren't the illusions, the ardor gone by then?

And down in lovely muck I've lain,

Happy till I woke again.

The Gods of irony supplied us with names like Innocent and Pious.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

Half of my fuckin arm

I'm a bitch

I'm a lover

I'm a child

I'm a mother

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

There once was a man from Nantucket . . .

Do not go gentle into that good night

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

"To a Mouse", by by Robert Burns:

Original: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley”

Translation: “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.

I use this often at work, though I tend to see and use it as "The best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley"

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too?

Two all beef patties…

O Death, all-eloquent! You only prove

What dust we dote on when 't is man we love.

I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

The last line of Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" never fails to get me:

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

— Lines 29–37 of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”

Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,

bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

--Anne Sexton, "All My Pretty Ones" (her elegy for her dead father)

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended

except by my permission

--Nikki Giovanni, "Ego Tripping"

Not a poem, but:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Margaret, are you grieving/Over goldengrove unleaving?

Across the wires the electric message came:

"He is no better, he is much the same."

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

I dreamed I held

A sword against my flesh.

What does it mean?

It means I shall see you soon.

—Lady Kasa, Japan, 8th century

Shake and shake the ketchup bottle, first none will come and then a lottle.

- Ogden Nash

And now, from the ridiculous to the sublime:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach...

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

Blah blah blah poetry schmoetry

> "The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer, This head is more than churches or bibles or creeds."

Here, Whitman elevates the human body, even its often-overlooked parts, to a sacred and spiritual level. By doing so, he challenges societal norms that might consider such things taboo or unworthy of poetic focus, embracing the raw, physical essence of human experience.

This approach aligns with Whitman's broader themes of celebrating individuality, interconnectedness, and the beauty of all aspects of life.

by

Poor superior poetry never seems to make it to such threads.

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

To and fro we leap, and chase the frothy bubbles/ While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in its sleep/ Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild/ With a fairy, hand in hand/ For the world’s more full of weeping, then you can understand..

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

"Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present."

Burnt Norton from TS Eliot's Four Quartets, which I once read at the cremation service for my mother.

The greater the love, the more false to its object, Not to be born is the best for man; After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle, Break the embraces, dance while you can.

Lucifer, do your duty

Slam your head and shake your booty

What though the radiance

Which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

Of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind

-William Wordsworth

Secret secrets are no fun;

Secret secrets hurt someone.

In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day.

"I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside."

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

"Margaret, are you grieving/ Over Goldengrove unleaving?"(G.M. Hopkins, "Spring and Fall")

"Stone walls do not a prison make/ Nor iron bars a cage." (R. Lovelace, "To Althea, From Prison")

"The grave's a fine and private place/But none, I think, do there embrace." (A. Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

"Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me." (E. Dickinson)

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure-dome decree:/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea..... /Five miles meandering with a mazy motion." (S.T. Coleridge)

"Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw." (Tennyson, "In Memoriam, A.H.H.")

"O, full of scorpions is my mind...!"

"Light thickens; and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood."

"Look like the innocent flower/But be the serpent under it." (Shakespeare, all "Macbeth")

And many more, considering I taught British and American Literature for a career!

R47, I wrote that quote to myself in my college yearbook.

R39, But apparently oxymorons do.

R20, One of my favorites!

"How dreary to be somebody!"

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice

Damn it - I forgot to embed the line break!

"I cannot go to school today," Said little Peggy Ann McKay.

Alas, r25! Was ever a poem more relevant?

No way, R30 and r32! Because I (r52) posted before reading, I too chose this, and as my initial thought! That first line contains so much!

He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In!

How. sweet I roam'd from field to field,

and tasted all the summer's pride,

'till I the prince of love beheld,

who in the sunny beams did glide,

(William Blake) The entire poem is just so lovely

all five fingers and half my fuckin arm

[quote] I have been half in love with easeful Death

The fog comes in on little cat feet.

r40 ..... poems are made by fools I fear, but only Schlitz can make a beer.

- MAD Magazine, late 1950's-ish.

Your life is your life Know it while you have it You are marvelous The gods wait to delight In you.

"Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even 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."

I find it so moving that a young 20 year old pilot wrote this to his parents in WW2 only to be killed a couple of months later.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard / And they're like, it's better than yours / Damn right it's better than yours / I can teach you, but I have to charge

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Perhaps a clichéd choice, but I often find myself reflecting on that line.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter..."

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

"The Wild Swans at Coole" W. B. Yeats

Two roads diverged in the woods and I, I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.

Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and one another;

‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.’ The Masque of Anarchy - Shelley