Favourite Poem?

[eternitygoddess]

Preface to Seven Pillars of Wisdom - Lawrence of Arabia

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.

Death seemed my servant on the road, till we were near and saw you waiting:
When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me and took you apart:
Into his quietness.

Love, the way-weary, groped to your body, our brief wage ours for the moment
Before earth’s soft hand explored your shape, and the blind worms grew fat upon
Your substance.

Men prayed me that I set our work, the inviolate house, as a menory of you.
But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow
Of your gift.
​

 

[StellaMare]

A classic, and one of my favorites that I recently 'rediscovered'..

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

 

[classicalbang]

^ That has always been one of my favorites, too.

 

[eternitygoddess]

I don't get that poem. Can someone explain what she means by "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head)"?

Is the guy a figment of her imagination?

 

[classicalbang]

“I think I made you up inside my head”, especially because it’s reiterated, demonstrates Mad Girl’s Love Song is a solipsistic poem. She is having illusions so powerful she is unable to tell if they are real or figments of her imagination. When she closes her eyes, the world does not exist; when she opens them, the world exists once again.

This is, of course, my humble interpretation. What’s most important is what it means to you.

 

[ms-nietzsche]

That's one of my favorites from Sylvia. It reminds me a bit of Keat's The Eve of St. Agnes, which is one of my all time favorites (I didn't want to post it because it's long...)

 

[ms-nietzsche]

The Second Coming, by John Yates

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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?

 

[innocent]

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

[rox_yr_sox]

[FONT=&quot]Probably best known for being read in the movie The Lives of Others (although this translation is slightly different)[/FONT][FONT=&quot]:
[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]Remembrances of Marie A.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]by Bertolt Brecht
[/FONT]
[FONT=&quot](Scott Horton translation)[/FONT]


[FONT=&quot]1[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]2[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what’s happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can’t remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can’t recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.[/FONT]

[FONT=&quot]3[/FONT][FONT=&quot]
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.[/FONT]

 

[rox_yr_sox]

GLOOMY SUNDAY

From wiki:

"Gloomy Sunday" is a song composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress in 1933 to a Hungarian poem written by László Jávor (original Hungarian title of both song and poem "Szomorú vasárnap" (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈsomoruː ˈvɒʃaːrnɒp]), in which the singer mourns the untimely death of a lover and contemplates suicide.
Though recorded and performed by many singers, "Gloomy Sunday" is closely associated with Billie Holiday, who scored a hit version of the song in 1941. Due to unsubstantiated urban legends about its inspiring hundreds of suicides, "Gloomy Sunday" was dubbed the "Hungarian suicide song" in the United States. Seress did commit suicide in 1968, but most other rumors of the song being banned from radio, or sparking suicides, are unsubstantiated, and were partly propagated as a deliberate marketing campaign.

It has also been covered by Sinead O'Connor, Bjork and Marianne Faithfull. My fave version is by Diamanda Galas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzWVWY5QUzg


The two English translations:

Sam Lewis Lyrics

[FONT=&quot]Sunday is gloomy, my hours are slumberless
Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all
My heart and I have decided to end it all
Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know
Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you
With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you

Gloomy Sunday

Dreaming, I was only dreaming
I wake and I find you asleep in the deep of my heart, here
Darling, I hope that my dream never haunted you
My heart is telling you how much I wanted you
[/FONT]

Desmond Carter Lyrics

Sadly one Sunday I waited and waited
With flowers in my arms for the dream I'd created
I waited 'til dreams, like my heart, were all broken
The flowers were all dead and the words were unspoken
The grief that I knew was beyond all consoling
The beat of my heart was a bell that was tolling

Saddest of Sundays

Then came a Sunday when you came to find me
They bore me to church and I left you behind me
My eyes could not see one I wanted to love me
The earth and the flowers are forever above me
The bell tolled for me and the wind whispered, "Never!"
But you I have loved and I bless you forever

Last of all Sundays

 

[kito09]

Betrothal by Carol Ann Duffy.

I will be yours, be yours.
I'll walk on the moors,
with my spade.
Make me your bride.

I will be Brave, be brave.
I'll dig my own grave
and lie down.
Make me your own.

I will be good, be good.
I'll sleep in my blankets of mud
till you kneel above.
Make me your love.

I'll stay forever, forever.
I'll wade in the river,
wearing my gown of stone.
make me the one.

I will obey, obey.
I'll float far away,
gargling my vows.
Make me your spouse.

I will say yes, say yes.
I'll sprawl in my dress
on my watery bed.
make me be wed.

I'll wear your ring, your ring.
I'll dance and I'll sing
in the flames.
make me your name.

I'll feel desire, desire.
I'll bloom in the fire.
I'll blush like a baby.
Make me your lady.

Ill say I do, I do.
I'll be ash in a jar, for you
to scatter my life.
Make me your wife.

​

 

[kito09]

Rain by Carol Ann Duffy

Not so hot as this for a hundred years.
You were where I was going. I was in tears.
I surrendered my heart to the judgement of my peers.

A century's heat in the garden, fierce as love.
You returned the day I had to leave.
I mimed the full, rich, busy life I had to live.

Hotter then hell. I burned for you day and night;
got bits of your body wrong, bits of it right,
in the huge mouth of the dark, in the bite of the light.

I planted a rose, burnt orange, the colour of flame,
gave it the last of the water, gave it your name.
It flared back at the sun in a perfect rhyme.

Then the rain came, like a stammered kisses at first
on the back of my neck, I unfurled my fist
for the rain to caress with its lips. I turned my face,

and water flooded my mouth, baptised my head,
and the rainclouds gathered like midnight overhead,
and the rain came down like a lover comes to a bed.​

 

[ediewho]

Hard to choose just one... but I like this classic...
how imperfection means perfection in terms of feelings

Sonnet 130
William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

 

[LUXXX]

THE STARRY NIGHT

BY: ANNE SEXTON



The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

 

[kito09]

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe


From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me fyling by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view. ​

 

[innocent]

Broken Dreams by W. B. Yeats

There is grey in your hair.
Young men no longer suddenly catch their breath
When you are passing;
But maybe some old gaffer mutters a blessing
Because it was your prayer
Recovered him upon the bed of death.
For your sole sake - that all heart's ache have known,
And given to others all heart's ache,
From meagre girlhood's putting on
Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
Your beauty can but leave among us
Vague memories, nothing but memories.
A young man when the old men are done talking
Will say to an old man, "Tell me of that lady
The poet stubborn with his passion sang us
When age might well have chilled his blood.'
Vague memories, nothing but memories,
But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
You are more beautiful than any one,
And yet your body had a flaw:
Your small hands were not beautiful,
And I am afraid that you will run
And paddle to the wrist
In that mysterious, always brimming lake
Where those What have obeyed the holy law
paddle and are perfect. Leave unchanged
The hands that I have kissed,
For old sake's sake.
The last stroke of midnight dies.
All day in the one chair
From dream to dream and rhyme to rhyme I have
ranged
In rambling talk with an image of air:
Vague memories, nothing but memories.

 

[MissMagAddict]

But I Can't by W.H. Auden

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose all the lions get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away;
Will Time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

[MissMagAddict]

There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.
Seawater begs the pearl
to break its shell.
And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild Darling!
At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face into mine.
Breathe into me.
Close the language-door,
and open the love-window.
The moon won't use the door,
only the window.
~ Rumi

 

[aycotqone]

To a Stranger
by Walt*Whitman** * *

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

 

[aycotqone]

AIR AND ANGELS.
by John Donne


TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
* * Before I knew thy face or name ;
* * So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
* * Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
* * But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
* * More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
* * And therefore what thou wert, and who,
* * * * I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
* * And so more steadily to have gone,
* * With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
* * Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
* * For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
* * Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
* * So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
* * * * Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.