Connecting Singles^® Forums100% Free Online Dating

does anyone have a favourite poem, i would love to hear it.

We have several here that seem to roll off intriguing prose daily...

That said, "...one could do worse than be the swinger of birches..."

oh, my favorite is soooo long, Divine Comedy.

Pied Beauty, (or anything) by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Anything by S.T. Coleridge or William Blake...way too many to list...

Work without Hope-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair--
The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--
And WINTER slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring !
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow,

Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye Amaranths ! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not ! Glide, rich streams, away !
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll :
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul ?
WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve,
And HOPE without an object cannot live.

I can see why among your favorites.

I paused on the last line - and kept inverting it.

I have been thinking WAY too much these days...

Michelangelo Buonarroti is one of my favorites ... Anna Ahmatova and Marina Tzvetaeva are the greates poetesses of all times ( unfortunately it is quite difficult to translate , preciesly, from Russian, their poems)




Michelangelo Buonarroti

Too much good luck no less than misery
May kill a man condemned to mortal pain,
If, lost to hope and chilled in every vein,
A sudden pardon comes to set him free.

Thus thy unwonted kindness shown to me
Amid the gloom where only sad thoughts reign,
With too much rapture bringing light again,
Threatens my life more than that agony.

Good news and bad may bear the self-same knife;
And death may follow both upon their flight;
For hearts that shrink or swell, alike will break.

Let then thy beauty, to preserve my life,
Temper the source of this supreme delight,
Lest joy so poignant slay a soul so weak.




and of course this one




Dante

What should be said of him cannot be said;
By too great splendor is his name attended;
To blame is easier than those who him offended,
Than reach the faintest glory round him shed.


This man descended to the doomed and dead
For our instruction; then to God ascended;
Heaven opened wide to him its portals splendid,
Who from his country's, closed against him, fled.



Ungrateful land! To its own prejudice
Nurse of his fortunes; and this showeth well
That the most perfect most of grief shall see.


Among a thousand proofs let one suffice,
That as his exile hath no parallel,
Ne'er walked the earth a greater man than he.

Be the man we are meant to be

At some point in our lives
We are tired of everything
The way things turn out to be
The way we turn ourselves into
Then one day
We ask to ourselves
‘Isn’t that enough is enough?’

What kind of life are we living?
If we really live at all
Or are we just a basket
Got thrown around
By fate
By circumstances
And, hard to believe,
by our own making?

The usual answer would be
We are stuck
We are born that way
How could we do things differently?

Hardly do we realize
We throw our own dice
In short
We create ourselves

Yes it won’t take much
One hesitancy
One cowardice
Are all it takes
To spiral down our own lives

At the same time
It won’t need an Einstein
To reclaim our lives
The way it is meant to be
For a start
What about throwing away
Our flawed perception
Our defeatist attitude

Why don’t we venture out
And experience the world
Like a man
With nothing to lose
But the whole world to gain

As they say
Life is to be lived
To experience
So why then restrict ourselves
To the world we are used to

Wisdom
Wealth
Aren’t that far away
The important thing is
To explore ourselves
And know
What we've got to give

Only by trial and error
We will then finally be
The man we are meant to be
Not a basket
But the man who make the basket!

Thank you, the Buonarroti is brilliant and I have not encountered his work before. Dante is among my favorites as well.

"I was given the Hellenic tongue
my house a humble one on the sandy shores of Homer.
----My only care my tongue on the sandy shores of Homer.
The sea-bream and perch
----windbeaten verbs
green currents with the cerulean
----all that I saw blazing in my entrails
sponges, medusae
----with the first words of the Sirens
pink shells with their first dark tremors."
(from Axion Esti, 1959)

"The Men Who Won't Fit In"
(Robert W. Service)

There's a race of men who won't fit in,
A race that can't stay still.
So they break the hearts of kith and kin
And roam the world at will.
They range the feild and they rove the flood
And climb the mountain's crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood
And they don't know how to rest!

If they just went straight, they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they're always tired of the things are,
And they want the strange, and new.
They say: "Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!"
So they chop and they change and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his day is past
'Til he stands one day with a hope that's dead
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed! He has missed his chance,
He has just done things by half.
Life's been a jolly good joke on him
And now is the time to laugh!
Ha ha! He is one of the legion lost,
He was never meant to win!
He's a rolling stone and it's bred in the bone;
He's a man who won't fit in.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN-Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Louis Stevenson
(From Songs of Travel)

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor even friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me...

This probably isnt my favorite poem, but it is one of my favorite poems by a living poet. She's amazing and if you love or like poetry I encourage you to seek her out



Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Thank you, thank you, thank you....

Love Mary Oliver...expecially the poem that you posted and When Death Comes.

When Death Comes


When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

Michelangelo is a genius not just an Artist, his poems as immortal as and his Art. Though he is not for everyone to except ... too graphic, too realistic.

Dante Alighieri Ah! YES grew up with his Inferno since age of 4 .....


"Remember tonight.. for it is the beginning of always"


What else to add ... Hands down



Thank you bajanblue for loving Dante and being curious about Michelangelo

Sensation


On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.


Arthur Rimbaud
March 1870.

Very nice.