Favorite stanza of poetry

[southerngirlwriter]

(inspired by Will Pitt's use of "Song of Myself" in GD)

This is also from Walt Whitman:

Writing and talk do not prove me
I know perfectly well my own egotism
And my omniverous words, and cannot say any less
And would fetch you, whoever you are
Flush with myself

DAMN, my man Walt could write!!

[HuckleB]

1. From "To Dorothy" by Marvin Bell

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

[BigMcLargehuge]

2. from Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est"

If you too could have paced behind the wagon that we flung him in
to watch the eyes writhing backwards in his face, his hanging face,
like a devil's sick of sin. And if you too could have heard, at every jolt,
the blood come gargling from his froth corrupted lungs,
obscene as cancer, bitter as a cud, of wide incurable sores on innocent tongues,
my friend, you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.

[ACK]

3. Kerouac Mexico City Blues

You start with the Teaching
Inscrutable of the Diamond
And end with it, your goal
is your startingplace,
No race was run, no walk
of prophetic toenails
Across Arabies of hot
meaning you just--
numbly don't get there


My fav of the moment.

I would throw some ee cummings or TS Eliot out later.

[soothsayer]

4. right this second, it's this

from "The Unknown" (told from the perspective of one of soldiers in the tomb of the unknown soldier) by E.O. Laughlin

And once my sweetheart came,
She did not--nay, of course she could not--know,
But thought of me and crooned to me the name
She called me by--how many years ago?
A very precious name. Her eyes were wet,
Yet glowing, flaming so....
She won't forget.

[Torrey Pines]

5. To His Coy Mistress

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow,
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest,
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.

[kimchi]

6. Aurora Leigh-Elizabeth B. Browning stanza and a half

The sun came, saying, 'Shall I lift this light
Against the lime-tree, and you will not look?
I make the birds sing-listen! . . but, for you.
God never hears your voice, excepting when
You lie upon the bed at nights and weep.'

Then, something moved me. Then, I wakened up
More slowly than I verily write now,
But wholly, at last, I wakened, opened wide
The window and my soul, and let the airs .
And out-door sights sweep gradual gospels in,
Regenerating what I was. O Life,
How oft we throw it off and think,-'Enough,
Enough of life in so much!-here's a cause
For rupture; herein we must break with Life,
Or be ourselves unworthy; here we are wronged,
Maimed, spoiled for aspiration; farewell Life!'
-And so, as froward babes, we hide our eyes
And think all ended.-Then, Life calls to us,
In some transformed, apocryphal, new voice,
Above us, or below us, or around . .
Perhaps we name it Nature's voice, or Love's,
Tricking ourselves, because we are more ashamed
So own our compensations than our griefs:
Still, Life's voice!-still, we make our peace with Life.

Never fails to get me outta the doldroms.

[TXvote]

7. I want you

like hot apple pie
in the kitchen at midnight
with the full moon shining
and the fridge door open
cold jug of milk
against my lips

[BigMcLargehuge]

8. how about a favorite last line?

Our savage servility slides by on rails of grease.

Rober Lowell: For the Union Dead

[kimchi]

10. GOOD MORNING!

Maya Angelou's On the Pulse of Morning

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.

[Bertha Venation]

12. amen.

[Spider Jerusalem]

11. Um...

that's from "For the Union Dead", actually; "The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease."

[BigMcLargehuge]

14. CRAP!!!!!!

lemme fix it

(hiding former English Major head in embarassment

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Allen Ginsberg, "America"

not really a stanza, but it's free verse, not structured, so...I just picked a good spot to cut off.

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don't feel good don't bother me.
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?


full text here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/america.html

In my opinion, this stands with "Howl" and "Kaddish" as Ginsberg's finest work. (In a different mood I probably would've posted some Pound or Eliot....)

[Bertha Venation]

13. My Lord's Prayer & my 23rd Psalm: CHOOSE SOMETHING LIKE A STAR

Robert Frost.

sorry, there's no good place to snip, so here it is

O star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud-
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to the wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

[amazona]

15. a sad one i just encountered

from GOING, GOING by Philip Larkin. (January 1972)

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn't going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won't be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won't be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.


Note -- while I don't live in England, I can see that my parish is being destroyed by over-development.

[Liberal Classic]

16. Ogden Nash

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than the pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep within the human race.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

[trackfan]

17. Ille mi par esse deo videtur

Ille si fas est superare divos
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit

Dulce ridentem misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi. Nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
vocis in ore

lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinnant aures, gemina teguntur
lumina nocte.



He who always sits with you, and who gazes
at you, and who hears you so sweetly laughing,
seems to me to equal a god, and sometimes
even surpass one -

if a thing like that is all right to say. What
misery! This rips away all my senses.
When I see you, Lesbia, I am tongue tied.
Words seem to fail.

Flames run through my body, and down my limbs. My
two ears ring and buzz, and my eyes now fail me,
covered, as they are, with a blinding darkness
blacker than midnight.

[TrogL]

18. T. S. Eliot - The Hollow Men

This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.

[CBHagman]

19. Oh, heck, I have to quote the whole thing.

William Butler Yeats, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing"

"Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any laughing throat,
For how could you compete,
Being honor bred, with one who, were it proved he lies
Were shamed neither in his own nor in his neighbor's eyes?

But being bred to a harder thing than triumph, turn away,
And like a laughing string whereon mad fingers play
Admid a place of stone, be secret and exult,
Because, of all things known, that is most difficult."

[LiviaOlivia]

20. Intimations of Immortality from Recollecctions of Early Childhood

William Wordsworth

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

[LanternWaste]

21. if all the bugs in all the worlds

if all the bugs in all the worlds
twixt earth and betelegeuse
should sharpen up their little stingers
and let their feelings loose
then all human beans
on saturn earth and mars
would finally find thier own significance
amongst the spinning of the stars

archie the cockroach



(Man, I don't know if I spelled 'betelegeuse right or night....)

[The Lone Liberal]

22. 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

[soleft]

23. The violent delights have violent ends

and in their triumph die

[nuxvomica]

24. A damsel with a dulcimer in a vision once I saw

It was an Abyssinian maid
And on her dulcimer she played
Visions of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
He symphony and song
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome,
Those caves of ice,
And all who heard would see it there
And all would cry "Beware! beware!
His flashing eyes! His floating hair!
Weaves a circle round him thrice!
And close your eyes in holy dread
For he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise."

That's from memory so I hope I didn't make too many mistakes.

[DivinBreuvage]

25. "The Enthusiast"

by Herman Melville (from Timoleon, 1891). The last stanza is the best, but forgive me if I give all three:

"Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him."

Shall hearts that beat no base retreat
In youth's magnanimous years --
Ignoble hold it, if discreet
When interest tames to fears;
Shall spirits that worship light
Perfidious deem its sacred glow,
Recant, and trudge where wordlings go,
Conform and own them right?

Shall Time with creeping influence cold
Unnerve and cow? the heart
Pine for the heartless ones enrolled
With palterers of the mart?
Shall faith abjure her skies,
Or pale probation blench her down
To shrink from Truth so still, so lone,
Mid loud gregarious lies?

Each burning boat in Caesar's rear,
Flames -- No return through me!
So put the torch to ties though dear,
If ties but tempters be.
Nor cringe if come the night:
Walk through the cloud to meet the pall,
Though light forsake thee, never fall
From fealty to light.

[GURUving]

26. I ate a cow named Charlie

His friends said he was quite snarly
He was good on a plate
And so he I ate
It was better than eatin' barley.

(my own creation.)