Who are your favourite poets/poems?

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Lizzykins wrote: »

I'm not a fan of Yeats at all but I absolutely love that poem

:eek:

Not a Yeats fan??

Scandalous!;)

Lizzykins

I think it was more the man I didn't like than the poetry! Patrick Kavanagh is my out and out favourite.

Valmont

Robert Service is a poet who wrote about the gold rush pioneers and became fabulously rich in doing so; after living in the Klondike for a while, he used his riches to move to the south of France where he lived most of his life. This poem of his is my favourite:

Have you ever heard of the Land of Beyond,
That dreams at the gates of the day?
Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,
And ever so far away;
Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls,
And ye of the trail overfond,
With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,
Let's go to the Land of Beyond!

Have you ever stood where the silences brood,
And the vast horizons begin,
At the dawn of the day to behold far away
The goal you would strive for and win?
Yet ah! in the night when you gain to the height,
With the vast pool of heaven star-spawned,
Afar and agleam, like a valley of dream,
Still mocks you a Land of Beyond.

Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail;
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A fairness that never will fail;
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal
A manhood that irks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond!

Lizzykins

Here is another I like.. It's by Minnie Louise Haskins and part of it was included in King George VI's Christmas speech of 1939.

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'
And he replied,
'Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!'
So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.
So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?
In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention."

Seren_

I love Sylvia Plath, some of her poems are just brilliant.

`Poppies in July` is my favourite:

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.