Our favourite poems.

[scoundrel]

Here is a sample of threads we have had in recent days:

What is is about Fisting? (blech)
Hiring a former porn star as an escort? Yes/No? Dunno: don't ask me.
Watching your wife screw (gawdelpus)
If you could build your porn Mount Rushmore (zzzzzzz)
and now: Have you f**k*d a published model/pornstar?

Maybe I am alone here (I know I'm not actually) but I think VEF members are in many cases bright and thoughtful people. There is no connection between liking quality pornography and having no brains, taste or class.

Let's see if I'm right or wrong.

My proposition:

Poetry is the ultimate art of the written word. At its best, it is beautiful for its own sake and also condenses meaning and thought. It can be profound; it can be funny and as light as a feather. It can also be a song lyric: indeed, song writers are the most prolific poets of our times.

I invite you all to name poems you particularly enjoy and give some personal thoughts about them. Here's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost:

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/856.html

An absolute gem of a poem, which uses simple words and images to express a really complex idea about the weight of obligations.

Anyone else got one you particularly like?

[risen]

I read Longfellow's Hiawatha as a child and the rhythms that it contains still live with me now, nearly 50 years on.


Favourite and most memorable short poem - Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee? from her Sonnets From The Portuguese 43.

How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth
and breadth
and height
My soul can reach,
when feeling out of sight.
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need,
by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely,
as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely,
as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion
put to use In my old griefs,
and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,
--I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears,
of all my life!
--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by risen

I read Longfellow's Hiawatha as a child and the rhythms that it contains still live with me now, nearly 50 years on.


Favourite and most memorable short poem - Elizabeth Barrett Browning's How Do I Love Thee? from her Sonnets From The Portuguese 43.

That's a beautiful poem, risen. Thank you for posting it. Already, I feel the pain of Have you f**k*d a published model/pornstar? starting to ease.

[the real McCoy]

I was going too start a thread named 'What shoe size is really the best'.
Just to lift things up a bit ... Also it's fairly harmless to discuss.

My contrib, (almost) just top of my head:

"
Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith

And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
...

I shouted out, (whoo whoo)
"Who killed the Kennedys?" (whoo whoo)
When after all (whoo whoo)
It was you and me (whoo whoo)
"

Perhaps off topic, since it's rock lyrics, by rolling Stones.

Cheers,
/trm

[windymiller]

"Wait for Me"
Konstantin Simonov

Wait for me and I'll come back,
But wait with might and main,
Wait throughout the gloom and rack
Of autumn's yellow rain.
Wait when snowstorms fill the way,
Wait in summer's heat,
Wait when, false to yesterday,
Others do not wait.
Wait though from that far off place
No letters come to you.
Wait when all the others cease
To wait, who waited too.
Wait for me and I'll come back.
Do not lightly let
Those who know so well the knack
Teach you to forget.
Let my mother and my son
Believe that I have died;
Let my friends, their waiting done,
At the fireside,
Lift the wine of grief and clink
To my departed soul.
Wait, and make no haste to drink
Alone amongst them all.
Wait for me and I'll come back,
Defying death. When he
Who could not wait shall call it luck
Only, let it be.
They cannot know, who did not wait,
How in the midst of fire
Your waiting saved me from my fate.
Your waiting and desire.
Why I still am living, we
Shall know, just I and you:
You knew how to wait for me
As no other knew.



I first came across this poem when I heard Sir Laurence Olivier recite it in the fantastic documentary series The World At War, more years ago than I care to remember. It was written by a Russian officer and published in Pravda during WWII. There is a popular myth that it was written in a letter by an unknown soldier to his sweetheart back home, but the author and his works are well known. The publication was really a propaganda excercise but virtually every Russian soldier could recite it word for word. It really captured my imagination as a young boy and all these years later it still makes my spine tingle each time I read it.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by the real McCoy

Perhaps off topic, since it's rock lyrics.

Cheers,
/trm

Very much on topic Mac! This lyric is like a modern version of an Anglo Saxon riddle: it's clever and cuts deep. Nice one.

I'm not strong on Rock lyrics. The names of the group and the lyricist would be welcome: but you already said! Its by The Rolling Stones. I should learn to read prose.

[scoundrel]

I remember this from The World At War: how moving it was. This is a fine poem windymiller, and thank you for posting it.

[Bovon]

Possibly the most truthful 4 lines I've read.

Philip Larkin: This Be The Verse -

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

*************
And whatever you religious persuasion, or none,
They do say that you're never forgotten until
No one remembers you.
And so Laurence Binyon's lines, from the poem: For The Fallen, always stir the heart:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

[Tmee2020]

From my own backyard Banjo Paterson's "Clancy of the Overflow" and "The Man from Snowy River".

Beowulf

Then there is the poetry of Shakespeare, and not just from the sonnets, from the plays as well:
That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

If Paterson is in the Championship then these blokes are definitely Premier League.

Coleridge: Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner
Shelley: Ozymandias
William Blake: The Tiger
John Keats: To Autumn
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Keats wrote that at Winchester in the autumn of 1819. It was his last poem.

Their portraits are on display in Room 18 at the National Portrait Gallery.

[anklebiter]