What is your favourite poem. Mine is Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The poem goes like this:

The question O, me!so sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O Life?

Answer

That you are here - that life exists and identity, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

A Definition by Bukowski - I wont post the whole thing.

"love is the phone ringing,
the same voice or another
voice but never the right
voice"

Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
Mull of Kintyre
(repeat 8 times)

Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'.

I remember that from the film 'Dead Poets Society' with Robin Williams. Who is that poem by?

It's by Walt Whitman (the 'sweaty-toothed madman').

I can't pick a single favourite, so here are five contenders:

Seamus Heaney, 'Bogland'.
Clive James, 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered'.
Philip Larkin, 'Aubade'.
Simon Armitage 'Great Sporting Moments: The Treble'.
John Betjeman, 'Devonshire Street W.1'.

Will you allow this as poetry?
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now. (The opening of "Under Milk Wood" by Dylan Thomas.)

Another favourite:
"The Mountain Lion" by D.H. Lawrence
Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon
Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water sounds
still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Men!
Two men!
Men! The only animal in the world to fear!

They hesitate.
We hesitate.
They have a gun.
We have no gun.

Then we all advance, to meet.

Two Mexicans, strangers, emerging out of tile dark and snow
and inwardness of the Lobo valley.
What are you doing here on this vanishing trail'?

What is he carrying?
Something yellow.
A deer?

Que tiene, amigo?
Leon -
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn't know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.

It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.

Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine eyes in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Hermoso es!

They go out towards the open;
We go on into the gloom of Lobo.
And above the trees I found her lair,
A hole in the blood-orange brilliant rocks that stick up, a little cave,
And bones, and twigs, and a perilous ascent.

So, she will never leap up that way again, with the yellow
flash of a mountain lion's long shoot!
And her bright striped frost-face will never watch any more,
out of the shadow of the cave in the blood-orange rock,
Above the trees of the Lobo dark valley-mouth!

Instead, I look out.
And out to the dim of the desert, like a dream, never real;
To the snow of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the ice of
the mountains of Picoris,
And near across at the opposite steep of snow, green trees
motionless standing in snow, like a Christmas toy.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and
a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare
a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of
that slim yellow mountain lion!

Try reading Kipling's "Last Of The Light Brigade". Remind's me of this Government's attitude to our soldiers returning from today's foreign wars. It was ecveer thus, save under the Roman Imperial system, where at least you got a plot of land, a gratuity and aplace to drink with the locals.
Biker

Leaves of Grass is not a poem V. Bowe, but a poetry collection :) also the poem is in fact much longer than the few lines you quote.

Alfred Lord Tennyson "The Lady of Shalott" I love the whole poem, and the last stanza is very emotional.

Also, "On the Ning Nang Nong" by Spike Milligan - very silly and always raises a smile.

It certainly resonated with the class of 11 and 12 year old girls I was once a member of, R ODriscoll, unfortunately not with the emotion Tennyson had intended.

R. ODriscoll, I also love 'The Lady of Shalott', I went through a phase of using a stanza from the poem as my email signature. The other poem that really resonates with me is 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' by W.B. Yeats - quoted below.

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

My favourites are:
Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats
Song of the open road by Walt Whitman
and my new discovery, a poem called Long Distance 11 by Tony Harrison, which is an unbearably touching poem about the loss of one's parents. I can't read it without crying and I'm not usually a cryer!

i remember reading a poem at school, one of the only ones that left an impression on me. It's about a man who sees a young woman in a wood and basically asks to have sex with her. He's a 'gentleman' and she's just a poor woman. She agrees but on the condition that the baby she is carrying is tied to his back (so it doesn't get hurt) as soon as the woman is rid of the baby she takes off and says something like 'before you bed another woman, think of this'.

it was written 100- 200 years ago i think. Perhaps even older. If anyone knows the poem i'd love to read it again.

My favourite poem is Poe's The Raven. It is full of brilliantly dark, romantic imagery. Fantastic.

Jenny, I don't know that poem but both the theme and the woman's words make it sound as if it might be a folk ballad. Just a guess, though.

The Light That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower, by Dylan Thomas

"The light that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age
That blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same, wintry fever...."

Magical, lyrical.

My favourite is 'The Winter Trees', by little-known Welsh poet Clifford Dyment. Composed in 1944, I encountered it at secondary school in the mid-80s and have loved it ever since:

The Winter Trees

Against the evening sky the trees are black,
Iron themselves against the iron rails;
The hurrying crowds seek cinemas or homes,
A cosy hour where warmth will mock the wind.
They do not look at trees now summer's gone,
For fallen with their leaves are those glad days
Of sand and sea and ships, of swallows, lambs,
Of cricket teams, and walking long in woods.

Standing among the trees a shadow bends
And picks a cigarette end from the ground;
It lifts the collar of an overcoat,
And blows upon its hands and stamps its feet-
For this is winter, chastiser of the free,
This is the winter, kind only to the bound.

It always evokes for me freezing twilight coming to one of those little terrace-surrounded parks in London; Berkeley Square, or similar.

Jenny I agree with Monica this sounds more like a folk ballad, it doesn't ring any bells with me. Ms V.C. Butler-finn, I accept your opening as poetry, after all it is very lyrical prose, plus I am a fan of Dylan Thomas.

Another poem that I love and always has me in stitches is 'The Ballad of Eskimo Nell', it is hilarious albeit rude. What about limericks? I absolutely love them, and so do other members of my family.

i struggle with poetry as well as shakespeare and feel really envious of people who read and enjoy it, its like a secret world i'm not allowed in. the wee bit i do understand i find amazing and the only poem that springs to mind that i truly understood and 'felt' was the one that was read in Four Weddings and a Funeral, it always gets me teary and i dont know its name or author?

WH Auden - Funeral Blues

i really haven't read enough poetry to say 'this is the best ever' but i do love shakespeare's sonnet 116,

Let me not to tha marriage of true minds admit impediments,
Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
etc etc...

There are lots of poems where i only like a couple of lines, i sometimes think it would be fun to string them together and make a super-poem!

I love 'If' by Rudyard Kipling the words are so meaningful also for velvety smoothness love the audio CD version read by John Nettles. It was voted No. 1 BBC The Nations Favourite Poems.

If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything thats in it, And which is more you'll be a man my son!

oh love that one too debbie, i dont know many poems and thats probably the only one along with wh auden-funeral blues, thanks sass, that i know. i like ones you dont have to decipher and analyse too much.

Ms M P Murphy, I cant believe Im a poetry lover now as I cant remember much from school just Tyger (and maybe endless versions of the Boy Stood on the burning deck in the playgound!) my parents only had The Owl and the Pussycat. But watching the BBC Nations Favourite and hearing other people with passion read them makes them all come alive, thats why I got the CD and Im so glad I did. John Nettles makes everything sound wonderful but some are ruined by other celebrity readers who just dont get it. I like poems that rhyme and also prefer reading my toddler rhyming stories aswell.