• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Favourite Poems & Poems that moved you

Sahara

New member
Joined
Jul 14, 2007
Messages
927
MBTI Type
INFP
Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova 1889-1966

And the just man trailed God's shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
"It's not too late, you can still look back

at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed."

A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.

I always found this one to be a poignant reminder of the cruelty of the abrahamic god, written more from her perspective than from that of the man, Lot, who would happily throw his daughters to the mob.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night


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 grieved 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 that 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.

Dylan Thomas

This Dylan poem reminds me to not despair, to fight for the tiny life we are given no matter how pain tries to stop us.

If You Forget Me


I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda

How my love waxes and wanes in the face of anothers love for me, sweet, simple, and self explanatory. :)

I will add some more later, what poems struck you straight away, and why?

mod edit: *merged*
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Athenian200

Protocol Droid
Joined
Jul 1, 2007
Messages
8,828
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
4w5
From "Lord of the Rings". This is what I want for my enemies when I'm angry.
Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone:
never more to wake on stony bed.
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead.
In the black wind the stars shall die,
and still on gold here let them lie;
till the dark lord lifts his hand
over dead sea and withered land.

And these two poems by Emily Dickinson
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

--------------------------------------------

This world is not conclusion;
A sequel stands beyond,
Invisible, as music,
But positive, as sound.
It beckons and it baffles;
Philosophies don’t know,
And through a riddle, at the last,
Sagacity must go.
To guess it puzzles scholars;
To gain it, men have shown
Contempt of generations,
And crucifixion known.
 

Sahara

New member
Joined
Jul 14, 2007
Messages
927
MBTI Type
INFP
Thanks athenian, I realy liked the lord of the ring one, I could see me feeling that for my enemies too. ;)
 

Geoff

Lallygag Moderator
Joined
Apr 24, 2007
Messages
5,584
MBTI Type
INXP
From "Lord of the Rings". This is what I want for my enemies when I'm angry.

Excellent choice. That is the ringwraith's words if I remember rightly. Edit : I meant barrow wight.

That for me is one of the most atmospheric pieces of fiction ever written. That feeling of lost on an open moor in the fog.. and drawn down into a dark forgotten world of endless painful undeath.

As a young child I had to skip that chapter, it scared me. Since I recognise it for what it is.. a key part of the mythos that makes up the British Isles. I live just a short distance from withered green downs, wight-styled barrows and lonely standing stones.


-Geoff
 

Ivy

Strongly Ambivalent
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
23,989
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
6
It seems people either love or hate this one, but I love it. William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.
 

Geoff

Lallygag Moderator
Joined
Apr 24, 2007
Messages
5,584
MBTI Type
INXP
I've always loved this one. I don't view it as being a prayer as much as guidance for life. I wonder what type he was?

Prayer of Sir Francis Drake (Old English Seadog and hero!)

Sir Francis Drake said:
Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true Because we have dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord, when With the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life, We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth, We have allowed our vision Of the new Heaven to dim.

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, To venture on wider seas
Where storms will show your mastery;
Where losing sight of land, We shall find the stars.
We ask You to push back The horizons of our hopes;
And to push into the future In strength, courage, hope, and love.
 

Langrenus

New member
Joined
Apr 23, 2007
Messages
358
Something wonderful about the imagery of this poem, and the ending is fantastic.

Gerard Manley Hopkins said:
SPRING AND DEATH

I had a dream. A wondrous thing,
It seem'd an evening in the Spring.
– A little sickness in the air
From too much fragrance everywhere.
As I walk'd a stilly wood,
Sudden, Death before me stood.
In a hollow lush and damp,
He seem'd a dismal murky stamp
On the flowers that were seen
His charnelhouse-grate ribs between,
And with coffin-black he barr'd the green.
"Death," said I, "what do you here
At this Spring season of the year?"
"I mark the flowers ere the prime
Which I may tell at Autumn-time."
Ere I had further question made
Death was vanished from the glade.
Then I saw that he had bound
Many trees and flowers round
With a subtle web of black,
And that such a sable track,
Lay along the grasses green
From the spot where he had been.

But the Spring-tide pass'd the same;
Summer was as full of flame;
Autumn-time no earlier came.
And the flowers that he had tied,
As I mark'd not always died
Sooner than their mates; and yet
Their fall was fuller of regret:

It seem'd so hard and dismal thing,
Death, to mark them in the Spring.
 
O

Oberon

Guest
This is the first one I thought of, because I have been the creature.

From Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
 

Ivy

Strongly Ambivalent
Joined
Apr 18, 2007
Messages
23,989
MBTI Type
INFP
Enneagram
6
Randall Jarrell
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
 

JILebedev

New member
Joined
May 1, 2008
Messages
14
You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play was the original title for a poem by J.R.R. Tolkien. It was then changed to Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva, The Cottage of Lost Play and then finally changed to The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva. It was written in 1915 and is published within The Book of Lost Tales Part 1.

You and Me / and the Cottage of Lost Play

You and me - we know this land
And often have been there
In the long old days, old nursery days,
A dark child and a fair.
Was it down the paths of firelight dreams
In winter cold and white,
Or in the blue-spun twilit hours
Of little early tucked-up beds
In drowsy summer night,
That You and I got lost in Sleep
And met each other there -
Your dark hair on your white nightgown,
And mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,
Or rollicked in the fairy sand
And gathered pearls and shells in pails,
White all about the nightingales
Were singing in the trees.
We dug for silver with our spades
By little inland sparkling seas,
Then ran ashore through sleepy glades
And down a warm and winding lane
We never never found again
Between high whispering trees.

The air was neither night or day,
But faintly dark with softest light,
When first there glimmered into sight
The Cottage of Lost Play.
'Twas builded very very old
White, and thatched with straws of gold,
And pierced with peeping lattices
That looked toward the sea;
And our own children's garden-plots
Were there - our own forgetmenots,
Red daisies, cress and mustard,
And blue nemophile.
O! all the borders trimmed with box
Were full of favorite flowers - of phlox,
Of larkspur, pinks, and hollyhocks
Beneath a red may-tree:
And all the paths were full of shapes,

Of tumbling happy white-clad shapes,
And with them You and Me.
And some had silver watering-cans
And watered all their gowns,
Or sprayed each other; some laid plans
To build them houses, fairy towns,
Or dwellings in the trees;
And some were clambering on the roof;
Some crooning lonely and aloof;
And some were dancing fairy-rings
And weaving pearly daisy-strings,
Or chasing golden bees;
But here and there a little pair
With rosy cheeks and tangled hair
Debated quaint old childish things -
And we were one of these.

And why it was Tomorrow came
And with his grey hand led us back;
And why we never found the same
Old cottage, or the magic track
That leads between a silver sea
And those old shores and gardens fair
Where all things are, that ever were -
We know not, You and Me.

The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva

We knew that land once, You and I,
and once we wandered there
in the long days now long gone by,
a dark child and a fair.
Was it on the paths of firelight thought
in winter cold and white,
or in the blue-spun twilit hours
of little early tucked-up beds
in drowsy summer night,
that you and I in Sleep went down
to meet each other there,
your dark hair on your white nightgown
and mine was tangled fair?

We wandered shyly hand in hand,
small footprints in the golden sand,
and gathered pearls and shells in pails,
while all about the nightengales
were singing in the trees.
We dug for silver with our spades,
and caught the sparkle of the seas,
then ran ashore to greenlit glades,
and found the warm and winding lane
that now we cannot find again,
between tall whispering trees.

The air was neither night nor day,
an ever-eve of gloaming light,
when first there glimmered into sight
the Little House of Play.
New-built it was, yet very old,
white, and thatched with straws of gold,
and pierced with peeping lattices
that looked toward the sea;
and our own children's garden-plots
were there: our own forgetmenots,
red daisies, cress and mustard,
and radishes for tea.
There all the borders, trimmed with box,
were filled with favourite flowers, with phlox,
with lupins, pinks, and hollyhocks,
beneath a red may-tree;
and all the gardens full of folk
that their own little language spoke,
but not to You and Me.

For some had silver watering-cans
and watered all their gowns,
or sprayed each other; some laid plans
to build their houses, little towns
and dwellings in the trees.
And some were clambering on the roof;
some crooning lonely and aloof;
some dancing round the fairy-rings
all garlanded in daisy-strings,
while some upon their knees
before a little white-robed king
crowned with marigold would sing
their rhymes of long ago.
But side by side a little pair
with heads together, mingled hair,
went walking to and fro
still hand in hand; and what they said,
ere Waking far apart them led,
that only we now know.
 

LadyJaye

Scream down the boulevard
Joined
Nov 6, 2007
Messages
2,062
MBTI Type
ENFP
Enneagram
7w6
Instinctual Variant
so/sx
The Panther by Rilke. Such a powerful use of imagery - it crushes me every time I read it.

Also, I'm a big fan of Robert Browning. Women and Roses is sensational.
 

disregard

mrs
Joined
Apr 23, 2007
Messages
7,826
MBTI Type
INFP
Bereavement

Whose was that gentle voice, that, whispering sweet,
Promised methought long days of bliss sincere!
Soothing it stole on my deluded ear,
Most like soft music, that might sometimes cheat
Thoughts dark and drooping! 'Twas the voice of Hope.
Of love and social scenes, it seemed to speak,
Of truth, of friendship, of affection meek;
That, oh! poor friend, might to life's downward slope
Lead us in peace, and bless our latest hours.
Ah me! the prospect saddened as she sung;
Loud on my startled ear the death-bell rung;
Chill darkness wrapt the pleasurable bowers,
Whilst Horror, pointing to yon breathless clay,
"No peace be thine," exclaimed, "away, away!"

William Lisle Bowles
 

Metamorphosis

New member
Joined
May 9, 2007
Messages
3,474
MBTI Type
INTJ
So many to choose from.

Percy Bysshe Shelley - The Mask of Anarchy

...too long to type...
'And the bold, true warriors
Who have hugged Danger in wars
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

'And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

'And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

'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 Sheepdogs by Russ Vaughn

Most humans truly are like sheep
Wanting nothing more than peace to keep
To graze, grow fat and raise their young,
Sweet taste of clover on the tongue.
Their lives serene upon Life's farm,
They sense no threat nor fear no harm.
On verdant meadows, they forage free
With naught to fear, with naught to flee.
They pay their sheepdogs little heed
For there is no threat; there is no need.
To the flock, sheepdog's are mysteries,
Roaming watchful round the peripheries.
These fang-toothed creatures bark, they roar
With the fetid reek of the carnivore,
Too like the wolf of legends told,
To be amongst our docile fold.
Who needs sheepdogs? What good are they?"
They have no use, not in this day.
Lock them away, out of our sight
We have no need of their fierce might.
But sudden in their midst a beast
Has come to kill, has come to feast
T! he wolves attack; they give no warning
Upon that calm September morning
They slash and kill with frenzied glee
Their passive helpless enemy
Who had no clue the wolves were there
Far roaming from their Eastern lair.
Then from the carnage, from the rout,
Comes the cry, "Turn the sheepdogs out!"
Thus is our nature but too our plight
To keep our dogs on leashes tight
And live a life of illusive bliss
Hearing not the beast, his growl, his hiss.
Until he has us by the throat,
We pay no heed; we take no note.
Not until he strikes us at our core
Will we unleash the Dogs of War
Only having felt the wolf pack' wrath
Do we loose the sheepdogs on its path.
And the wolves will learn what we've shown before;
We love our sheep, we Dogs of War.

Invictus - William Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
 

anii

homo-loving sonovagun
Joined
Jul 9, 2007
Messages
901
MBTI Type
infp
Enneagram
9
e.e. cummings -

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
 

elfinchilde

a white iris
Joined
Jan 26, 2008
Messages
1,465
MBTI Type
type
love this poem a lot.

------------

"Here I Love You"
By Pablo Neruda

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.
Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.
Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.
The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.
 

mippus

you are right
Joined
Jan 15, 2008
Messages
906
MBTI Type
Intp
Enneagram
5w6
The older , the more I like this one:


I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.


(Yeats)
 

tovlo

New member
Joined
May 2, 2007
Messages
248
MBTI Type
INFJ
Another from Pablo Neruda:

Love Sonnet LXXIX
by Pablo Neruda

By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness
like a double drum in the forest, pounding
against the thick wall of wet leaves.

Night travel: black flame of sleep
that snips the threads of the earth's grapes,
punctual as a headlong train that would haul
shadows and cold rocks, endlessly.

Because of this, Love, tie me to a purer motion,
to the constancy that beats in your chest
with the wings of a swan underwater,

so that our sleep might answer all the sky's
starry questions with a single key,
with a single door the shadows had closed.
 

Owl

desert pelican
Joined
Feb 23, 2008
Messages
717
MBTI Type
INTP
If

By Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
 

Councilor

New member
Joined
May 13, 2008
Messages
24
MBTI Type
ISTP
We entreat thee from violence refrain,
for nothing more do we disdain,
for in so doing that which we might gain,
would be forever lost in tears like rain.
Elowen, Starflight
 
Top