National Poetry Day

[Barmaid]

Apparently today is National Poetry Day.  

I'm not massively into poetry but have loved "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noye since I was a child.  I won't post it here because it does go one quite a bit, but was the inspiration for Fleetwood Mac's video to "Everywhere".

Do you have a favourite poem?

[ladybirder]

I remember loving this one as well.  

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by DylanThomas.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

 

[jourdain2]

Too many to chose just one!  A particular fondness for 'Futility' (Wilfrid Owen)  and 'The Night Mail (Auden was it?) which I can still recite....  just a bit different. 

I just did my 1st ever performance reading my own poems at a Lit. Festival - shaking with nerves!  

 

[Canary42]

Ultra-conventional I know, but I love this one from Wordsworth, and I could recire it off at one time (no longer, sadly).

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

 

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

 

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

 

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

[jourdain2]

Canary, Daffodils was 'done to death' when I was a kid - but when I re-read it many, many years later (using it as an inspiration for a class art project on the subject of 'Daffodils') I rediscovered it as a lovely poem.  The last verse is integral to understanding the whole.

[ladybirder]

I remember it all Canary, as I read down your last post.  Thank you.

[Tilly2]

I've put this on AB before.

I just love it.

 

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

from The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems (Penguin, 2018)

[Canary42]

////The last verse is integral to understanding the whole.////

Yes, and I just love "They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude"  Wow!

[Barmaid]

There are lots of fantastic answers here, but LB gets BA because it reminded me of a recent conversation I had with my mother and we both laughed at it (despite it being a horrid situation at the time).

[Khandro]

When the Barocco.

came over the hill with its cerulean vaults and golden exhortations
Otto in the tower took leave of his fleisch,
attending to the rumble in the near beyond.

Up the staircase of the Dolomites
and along the length of the turquoise river,
streaming in channels of differing hue,
it bounded like a beach ball across the great passes,

the summer pastures,
flattening all that came before it,
down the slopes,
through woodland and paddock,

coming to rest
but a furlong from the thorned hedge
of Otto and his forbears’ village,
and there, sweating dew,

matted with pine needles, grape mash,
insects, rodents, all manner of grasses,
like a vast, lopsided globe,
opalescent, trembling,

a planet unto itself,
very like a planet, there it sat,
a colossus, a visitation,
blocking what remained of the afternoon light

and emitting a kind of tuneful bleating,
two parts piccolo, one, perhaps, trombone.
A most remarkable phenomenon to behold.
The villagers trembled from behind mud walls.

Otto thence convened the Elders.
The alphorn was taken up and blown,
first a necklace of quarter notes, then one long,
and from the forests all around,

like fleas off a hound,
came the Woodwoses from their rustic nests,
a swarm of hairy Calibans,
waving pointed sticks,

chisels, flints, hatchets and cudgels,
and fell upon it,
poking and flailing. You’d have thought
it was just a big piñata.

While from inside came an ominous strange music:
first, a silvery harmonic fuzz,
then some spectral pedal tones
that suggested the tolling of bells,

then an agitated chromaticism, then . . .
then . . . o, dear, then . . . . . .
Like lava from deep in a seething volcano
out burst a geyser of foam,

a foam of stucco and plaster,
covering butcher-yard and meadow, orchard and cow path,
pigs at their acorns,
hares, bears and Hans,

dozing behind the refectory,
churrigueresque, like whipped cream,
suddenly dripping off half-timbered houses,
the town hall and chapel,

their corpses stacked high like cordwood
dead Styrians and Savoyards,
and that doyen among rivers, the Enns,
for no good reason o’erflowing its banks,

and Otto, Otto the pious, spellbound:
ovals, porticos, diagonals, whorls,
staircases, credenzas, putti galore.
Wine ran like squirrels in the forest.

And down from the sky above
fell ribands of damask, of silk, then a fine rain,
more a mist,
coloured purple in patches, or ochre, indigo or gold,

inlaying plain gardens with mother-of-pearl.
Pageants sprouted like mushrooms.
Trompe l’oeil windows opened room upon room,
and in the trees passacaglias

of birdsong. Not a birch
nor gable left unfestooned, the valley
awash in high colour
and upon itself enfolding, trebly enfolding,

until what had been there, there,
and there, earthbound, fixed in repose,
all in now concert reaching heavenward
moved.

August Kleinzahler

[Canary42]

When it comes to Shakespeare, one of my favourites is Romeo with :-

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

.....

See how she leans her cheek upon her hand!

O, that I were a glove upon that hand,

That I might touch that cheek!

[ladybirder]

Wow BM, thank you so much for BA.  That was so unexpected.

[Barmaid]

LB - my pleasure.  You never know whether something you say might touch someone in whatever way.  Your post did - so thank you.

[Atheist]

jourdain. I hope you did well with your poem.