Do you have a favorite poem?

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Oh, man. That’s like picking your favorite child.

One of my favorites is G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto.

Also Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken.
 
Opportunity by Edward Rowland Sill. He also did one called The Fool’s Prayer which is pretty good. Hope is the thing with feathers, by Emily Dickinson, is another favorite.

I seem to remember one called Winkin’ Blinkin’ and Nod. I’m not sure if that counts more as a nursery rhyme or a poem, but that was one I always liked.

Speaking of which, I think I’m doing some winking, blinking and nodding myself. Goodnight, folks!
 
Shel Silverstein

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I used to like John Donne a lot.
I tried to read his biography as a teenager but got frustrated with him after the part where he became a Protestant so he wouldn’t get killed for being a Catholic. He sure wasn’t any Robert Southwell.
As an adult I can understand a little more though.

I was also put off by the incredibly detailed dissections and analyses that scholars would make of his poems.
I guess I prefer to just enjoy poetry rather than analyze every word of it. It wasn’t written to be picked to pieces.

I always liked this one because it was nice and weird

www.poetryfoundation.org

The Flea by John Donne | Poetry Foundation

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
www.poetryfoundation.org www.poetryfoundation.org
 
I recently enjoyed Second Space by Czeslaw Milosz. In this book he writes about old age and his Catholic faith.
 
There are two poems that I enjoy rereading from time to time, though never in full, from start to finish, at one go. They’re both much too long for that. One is Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ verse translation, and the other is The Ring and the Book by Browning.

Here’s a slightly sinister poem that is short enough to post here. It’s by W. H. Auden;.

Gare du Midi

A nondescript express in from the South,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, a face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: something about the mouth
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling, Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may have just arrived.
 
BartholomewB said:
There are two poems that I enjoy rereading from time to time, though never in full, from start to finish, at one go. They’re both much too long for that. One is Dante’s Divine Comedy, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ verse translation, and the other is The Ring and the Book by Browning
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I also love The Divine Comedy. My favorite translation is by Mark Musa. Unlike Sayers’ translation, it does not rhyme.
 
I’ve never looked at Mark Musa’s translation, I’m sorry to say. However, one of the things I like about the Dorothy L. Sayers is that she reproduces Dante’s rhyming scheme and, amazingly enough, manages to make it work. She also successfully reproduces, when needed, Dante’s dry, ironic sense of humor, which for me is another plus.

The other translations I’ve looked at are Longfellow, which is too solemn and stately for my taste; Allen Mandelbaum, in unrhymed verse; and Charles Singleton, in prose. But DLS is the only one I’ve read all the way through.
 
Yes. It’s Walt Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.
 
SugarMagnolia said:
I also love The Divine Comedy. My favorite translation is by Mark Musa. Unlike Sayers’ translation, it does not rhyme.
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Although I chose another as my favorite, I think The Divine Comedy is the most perfect piece of writing ever composed.
 
BartholomewB said:
I’ve never looked at Mark Musa’s translation, I’m sorry to say. However, one of the things I like about the Dorothy L. Sayers is that she reproduces Dante’s rhyming scheme and, amazingly enough, manages to make it work. She also successfully reproduces, when needed, Dante’s dry, ironic sense of humor, which for me is another plus.

The other translations I’ve looked at are Longfellow, which is too solemn and stately for my taste; Allen Mandelbaum, in unrhymed verse; and Charles Singleton, in prose. But DLS is the only one I’ve read all the way through.
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I’ve also looked into Longfellow and Mandelbaum which I found for free online. I dipped into Sayers a little bit too. I like to compare translations. I think I favor Musa’s translation because it was the first one I read.
 
ConstantLearner said:
Although I chose another as my favorite, I think The Divine Comedy is the most perfect piece of writing ever composed.
Click to expand...
I tried reading it as a teenager and abandoned it somewhere in the middle of hell. The imagery was so disturbing. But I went back to it years later and loved it, especially Purgatory.
 
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.
-William Butler Yeats
 
That’s a beautiful poem, @Irishmom2! I had forgotten about that one! Thanks for posting it.
 
The House With Nobody In It because Mom used to recite it with such expression…
 
God’s Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
 
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