the ask @AAR: What’s your favorite poem?

So hard to choose! Macbeth’s utter despair really resonated with me though in the following poem:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

I would also strongly recommend Mary Jean Chan’s brilliant poem collection, ‘Fléche’. I am in awe at the sheer beauty of her words, which manage to perfectly encapsulate the immigrant experience and her burgeoning sexuality.

When I was in school, we still memorized poetry, and I sort of got into the habit. It’s one of those things for which I’m grateful, because I now have all those lovely bits and pieces floating around in my memory to pull out and fondle whenever I like.

I love, love, love ONE ART by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster.
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
-Even looking at you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Thanks for the reminding me of this poem that always makes me shiver

The Auden was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this post. I have loved reading Maya Angelou and Anais Nin since college and I also remember reading Tennyson’s The May Queen and Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 as a school girl and those handwritten poems are tucked in my fire box that I keep under the bed.

What a lovely post!

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

“Ulysses” by Tennyson. One of the most poignant poems in the English language with so many themes: for example, the yearning of a man of great deeds and adventures when they are over, the depredations of getting old etc.–and yet it ends on such an uplifting note: Nothing more beautiful than the imagery of the last verse.

t little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I’m a Yeats girl. We are living in The Second Coming right now. Here’s one of his not so downbeat.

When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

love love love Dover Beach. But since that one is already taken, I also love this one by Sylvia Plath

Mad Girl’s Love Song
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my lids and all is born again.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,And arbitrary blackness gallops in:I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bedAnd sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said,But I grow old and I forget your name.(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;At least when spring comes they roar back again.I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

Hey, poetry lovers. I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend http://www.rattle.com. Not only do they have an interesting selection of modern poems to read, they hold weekly and monthly poetry contests that pay selected poets quite generously. Their “Poets Respond” section invites poets to write about current events that occurred within the past week, and their monthly “Ekphrastic Challenge” invites poets to create work based upon a particular image. Competition is stiff, but it might be fun. Just a head’s up.

BTW, great selection of poems posted here in the comments so far.

One of the most relatable for me is Advice to Myself by Louise Erdrich:

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

“Advice to Myself” by Louise Erdrich from Original Fire. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

Dover Beach
BY MATTHEW ARNOLD
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Not necessarily my favorite but the only one I memorized in school that I can still recite-

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now by A.E. Housman

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Also, Stephen Crane, A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe: 
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe, 
“The fact has not created in me 
A sense of obligation.”

(WendyW=former Wendy :D )

DER RAUCH

Das kleine Haus unter Bäumen am See

Vom Dach steigt Rauch

Fehlte er

Wie trostlos dann wären

Haus, Bäume und See.

This very short poem by Bert Brecht is one of my favourites. So much said with so few words.
I could not find a translation, so here is mine:

THE SMOKE

The little house under trees at the lake
Smoke rises from the roof
Were it missing
How bleak then would be
House, trees and lake

I enjoy teaching Kizer’s poem below in a segment on feminist poetry in an American lit seminar. I have too many poems to narrow to one favorite, but this poem seems fitting in light of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes’s historic speech yesterday in Congress yesterday.
 
Bitch
By Carolyn Kizer

Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.
He isn’t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
The bitch changes her tone; she begins to whimper.
She wants to snuggle up to him, to cringe.
Down, girl! Keep your distance
Or I’ll give you a taste of the choke-chain.
“Fine, I’m just fine,” I tell him.
She slobbers and grovels.
After all, I am her mistress. She is basically loyal.
It’s just that she remembers how she came running
Each evening, when she heard his step;
How she lay at his feet and looked up adoringly
Though he was absorbed in his paper;
Or, bored with her devotion, ordered her to the kitchen
Until he was ready to play.
But the small careless kindnesses
When he’d had a good day, or a couple of drinks,
Come back to her now, seem more important
Than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal.
“It’s nice to know you are doing so well,” I say.
He couldn’t have taken you with him;
You were too demonstrative, too clumsy,
Not like the well-groomed pets of his new friends.
“Give my regards to your wife,” I say. You gag
As I drag you off by the scruff,
Saying, “Goodbye! Goodbye! Nice to have seen you again.”
 
 
Carolyn Kizer, “Bitch” from Mermaids in the Basement. Copyright © 1984 by Carolyn Kizer. http://www.coppercanyonpress.org.

So, so many good ones. In the English language, because she (and this particular poem) made me start reading English poetry when I was in my mid-teens, I have to select:

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 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 every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

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.

It’s from “The Sonnets From the Portuguese” (the Portuguese here meaning Luís de Camões).

However, perhaps my favourite poem is from Sappho. I first read it in a Portuguese translation (still my prefered translation), but below I’m including the 2014’s English translation by Diane J. Raynor:

Sappho, Fragment 31

To me it seems that man has the fortune

of gods, whoever sits beside you 

and close, who listens to you 

sweetly speaking

and laughing temptingly. My heart 

flutters in my breast whenever 

I quickly glance at you — 

I can say nothing,

my tongue is broken. A delicate fire

runs under my skin, my eyes

see nothing, my ears roar,

cold sweat

rushes down me, trembling seizes me, 

I am greener than grass.

To myself I seem 

needing but little to die.

Interesting topic for this week’s Ask. I used to approach poetry with the same disrespect I treated romance- maybe because I had seen so many rotten examples of the former. But over time, I’ve softened my stance somewhat. While poetry isn’t my go-to reading choice, I’ve allowed myself to enjoy the art form for its lyrical beauty and appeal to emotion.

I am reminded of H.L. Mencken’s quote about poetry, “Poetry is two quite distinct things and may be either or both. One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the single words cellar-door and sarcoma are musical. The other is a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday. In brief, poetry is a comforting piece set to more or less lascivious music.” For all the man’s faults by 21st century standards, I will say that reading his passages- which often have that musical quality to them- is a joy.

As for an actual poem, I found this lovely gay romance poem some time ago that resonated with me. This is “Beautiful Signor” by Cyrus Cassells:(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52206/beautiful-signor).

Beautiful Signor
BY CYRUS CASSELLS
All dreams of the soul
End in a beautiful man’s or woman’s body.

—Yeats, “The Phases of the Moon”
 
Whenever we wake,
still joined, enraptured—
at the window,
each clear night’s finish
the black pulse of dominoes
dropping to land;

whenever we embrace,
haunted, upwelling,
I know
a reunion is taking place—      

Hear me when I say
our love’s not meant to be
an opiate;
helpmate,
you are the reachable mirror
that dares me to risk
the caravan back
to the apogee, the longed-for
arms of the Beloved—

Dusks of paperwhites,
dusks of jasmine,
intimate beyond belief

beautiful Signor

no dread of nakedness

beautiful Signor

my long ship,
my opulence,
my garland

beautiful Signor

extinguishing the beggar’s tin,
the wind of longing

beautiful Signor

laving the ruined country,
the heart wedded to war

beautiful Signor

the kiln-blaze
in my body,
the turning heaven

beautiful Signor

you cover me with pollen

beautiful Signor

into your sweet mouth—

This is the taproot:
against all strictures,
desecrations,
I’ll never renounce,
never relinquish
the first radiance, the first
moment you took my hand—

This is the endless wanderlust:
dervish,
yours is the April-upon-April love
that kept me spinning even beyond
your eventful arms
toward the unsurpassed:

the one vast claiming heart,
the glimmering,
the beautiful and revealed Signor.

Oranges by Gary Soto

The first time I walked With a girl,
I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking Beneath my steps,
my breath Before me, then gone,
As I walked toward Her house,
the one whose Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me,
until She came out pulling
At her gloves, face bright With rouge.
I smiled, Touched her shoulder,
and led Her down the street,
across A used car lot and a line
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted –
Light in her eyes, a smile Starting at the corners Of her mouth.
I fingered A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quietly
on
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine,
And held them, knowing Very well what it was all
About.

Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand in mine
for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

I have always loved this poem because it says so much in such a seemingly simple manner.

My favorite poem is Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” which perfectly sums up for me the feeling you get when you’re reading and it’s quiet. (Stevens is one of my favorite poets and his “13 Ways of Looking at A Bkackbird” is also one of my favorites. Still, you asked for one so I’m giving you only one.)

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.