Poetry Suggestions

7-17-06 | Me!

[SoftballMominVA]

I'm looking for suggestions of classic American, British or European poetry.

[pissant]

Tell her to stay away from Pissant's limericks, despite their classic status. ;o)

[Cyclopean Squid]

I can't believe I forgot my favorite: Poe's The Conqueror Worm

Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things

That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!

That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

I'm also a big fan of Whittier's Maud Muller (not posted here for space considerations).

[boris]

Locksley Hall by Tennyson:

"For I dipp'd into the future
Far as mortal eye could see--
Saw the Vision of the World
And all the wonder that would be.
Saw the heavn's fill with commerce;
Argosies of magic sails
Pilots of the purple twilight
Dropping down with costly bales

-------------------------------

The Mistress of Vision by Francis Thompson:

"All things by immortal power
Hiddenly to each other linkéd are;
That thou cans't not touch a flower
Without troubling a star."

--Boris

[WL Mantis]

Hmm...
You've probabluy done all these but..

To Autumn; his other odes, J. Keats

On His Blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent"); Paradise Lost (if you can), J. Milton

Daddy; Mushrooms, S. Plath

The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot

Sonnets of Shakespeare, preferably all, but LXXIII, XVIII, CXXX,LXXI are some of the more circulated. Good Website for this: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonn01.htm

Remember; C.G. Rossetti

E.A. Poe, All

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard; T. Gray

"Lewis Carrol", All

A Prayer For my Daughter; When you are Old; The Second coming; Leda and the Swan; The Lake Isle of Innifree; Among School Children, W.B. Yeats,

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Birches; After Apple-Picking; The Road Not Taken; Acquainted with the Night, R. Frost

The Tyger; The Little Black Boy; A Poison Tree; Auguries of Innocence, W. Blake

It goes on. These are the ones that come to my mind first.