Your favourite poem?

[Martinus]

Do you have one? It could be anything - a song is a poem written to music - and it doesn't need to make sense, be somehow significant to your life - just be that piece of poetry that stirs something inside you, even if you cannot really explain it.

For me, it's "Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. I was reminded of it recently, as the most famous Polish translator of it, Stanislaw Baranczak, just died in Boston.

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

[Eddie Teach]

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

[Martinus]

Very nice.

[celedhring]

Not famous for his poetry, but my favorite English language poem is one by Kipling:


WHEN the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,   
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;   
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,   
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"   
 
Wherefore he called to his wife and fled to fashion his work anew—          
The first of his race who cared a fig for the first, most dread review;   
And he left his lore to the use of his sons—and that was a glorious gain   
When the Devil chuckled: "Is it Art?" in the ear of the branded Cain.   
 
They builded a tower to shiver the sky and wrench the stars apart,   
Till the Devil grunted behind the bricks: "It's striking, but is it Art?"   
The stone was dropped by the quarry-side, and the idle derrick swung,   
While each man talked of the aims of art, and each in an alien tongue.   
 
They fought and they talked in the north and the south, they talked and they fought in the west,   
Till the waters rose on the jabbering land, and the poor Red Clay had rest—   
Had rest till the dank blank-canvas dawn when the dove was preened to start,
And the Devil bubbled below the keel: "It's human, but is it Art?"   
 
The tale is old as the Eden Tree—as new as the new-cut tooth—   
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;   
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart,   
The Devil drum on the darkened pane: "You did it, but was it Art?"   
 
We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice-peg,   
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yolk of an addled egg,   
We know that the tail must wag the dog, as the horse is drawn by the cart;   
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It's clever, but is it Art?"   

When the flicker of London's sun falls faint on the club-room's green and gold
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their pens in the mold—   
They scratch with their pens in the mold of their graves, and the ink and the anguish start   
When the Devil mutters behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it art?"   
 
Now, if we could win to the Eden Tree where the four great rivers flow,   
And the wreath of Eve is red on the turf as she left it long ago,   
And if we could come when the sentry slept, and softly scurry through,   
By the favor of God we might know as much—as our father Adam knew.   

[Scipio]

Whoosh. So many good ones. I like Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, by Robert Browning. Also, Torquemada by Longfellow. But my favorite is probably Eugene Onegin by Pushkin. Stephen Fry produced an excellent audiobook of it, that is available for free.

http://fryreadsonegin.com/

[Sheilbh]

Larkin. Probably either High Windows:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's   
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide   
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Or An Arundel Tomb:

Side by side, their faces blurred,   
The earl and countess lie in stone,   
Their proper habits vaguely shown   
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,   
And that faint hint of the absurd—   
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque   
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still   
Clasped empty in the other; and   
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,   
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.   
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace   
Thrown off in helping to prolong   
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,   
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths   
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright   
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths   
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.   
Now, helpless in the hollow of   
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins   
Above their scrap of history,   
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into   
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be   
Their final blazon, and to prove   
Our almost-instinct almost true:   
What will survive of us is love.

[Razgovory]

Do you have one? It could be anything - a song is a poem written to music - and it doesn't need to make sense, be somehow significant to your life - just be that piece of poetry that stirs something inside you, even if you cannot really explain it.

For me, it's "Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. I was reminded of it recently, as the most famous Polish translator of it, Stanislaw Baranczak, just died in Boston.

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

He did a real shit job.  It's all still in English!

[Eddie Teach]

Maybe you speak Polish and don't realize it.

[Josephus]

In Grade One, we all had to recite this: Pretty much the only poem I ever learned.

I hear a sudden cry of pain!
There is a rabbit in a snare:
Now I hear the cry again,
But I cannot tell from where.

But I cannot tell from where
He is calling out for aid!
Crying on the frightened air,
Making everything afraid!

Making everything afraid!
Wrinkling up his little face!
And he cries again for aid;
- and I cannot find the place!

And I cannot find the place
Where his paw is in the snare!
Little One! Oh, Little One!
I am searching everywhere!

[Syt]

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

My favorite illustration of the transience of everything.

[Caliga]

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away...

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door...

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there,
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away...

[PDH]

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.

-Randall Jarrell

[The Brain]

Always the poor Mexicans.

[The Brain]

I've always liked The Poet's Song by Tennyson.

The rain had fallen, the Poet arose,
   He passed by the town, and out of the street,
A light wind blew from the gates of the sun,
   And waves of shadow went over the wheat,
And he set him down in a lonely place,
   And chanted a melody loud and sweet,
That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud,
   And the lark drop down at his feet.

The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee,
   The snake slipt under a spray,
The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak
   And stared, with his foot on the prey
And the nightingale thought, "I have sung many songs,
   But never a one so gay,
For he sings of what the world will be
   When the years have died away".

[FunkMonk]

Larkin. Probably either High Windows:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's   
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide   
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Or An Arundel Tomb:

Side by side, their faces blurred,   
The earl and countess lie in stone,   
Their proper habits vaguely shown   
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,   
And that faint hint of the absurd—   
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque   
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still   
Clasped empty in the other; and   
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,   
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.   
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace   
Thrown off in helping to prolong   
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,   
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths   
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright   
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths   
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.   
Now, helpless in the hollow of   
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins   
Above their scrap of history,   
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into   
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be   
Their final blazon, and to prove   
Our almost-instinct almost true:   
What will survive of us is love.

I've always been partial to Aubade. Here is a reading by Larkin.

http://youtu.be/IDr_SRhJs80