Posted on 01/12/2014 6:41:22 PM PST by not2be4gotten.com
I remember poetry night, at the kitchen table, every Wednesday.
When I was a kid, I hated "poetry night" when we had supper together.
My mom made us read poems, every Wednesday night.
It was so uncool.
That was 30 years ago and I was in my teens.
And now, I ask you to consider the following:
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost...
I had to recite that poem in first grade in 1967. I played hell learning every line in that poem but I got it done. I still remember the words after all these years. Thanks for the reminder.
That’s beautiful. My dad could recite stanza after stanza of Kipling when I was a kid. And “The Highwaymn, the Highwayman came riding up to the old Inn door...”
He’d learned these poems and committed them to memory in his teens and could still recite them when he was in his fifties.
I love that poem, and the image it raises.
I grew up on “A Child’s Garden of Verses”, and a favorite all my life is “The Best Loved Poems of the American People”. It is a treasure!
I just find that to be so ... well, so poetic.
As I've lived many years since then, I lean towards Yeats.
My favorite poem, because I don't QUITE understand it, but I like attempting to.
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.
Thanks for this thread.
The thoughts evoked
From what you said,
Will comfort me
As I head to bed.
Here is one I like.
“I think that I shall never see, A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.”-Ogden Nash
That was wonderful!
Thanks to your mom.
What a lovely thread. Memories come flooding back. The very first poem that I memorized in 2nd grade was:
God’s World
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, — Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, — let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“I think that I shall never see, A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.”-Ogden Nash
From the same author:
You shake and shake the ketchup bottle; none comes out, and then a lot’ll.
An elementary school teacher once gave my older sister two poetry books: Poems of Childhood (Eugene Field) and A Child’s Garden of Verses. She abandoned them and guess who appropriated them?
When Cummings came to read his poetry at my college, and he got to the part where he mentions the UN, he pronounced it “the un.” I was the only one who laughed.
A college buddy used to have Eliot on 33rpms. “All aboard. It’s time.” That was what we did instead of studying.
If you should behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say ouch.
Better still, if called by a panther,
Don’t anther.
For the longest time I said “quid pro quo” instead of “quo pro quid” because that was the way Nash had it. Or do I still have it backwards?
That was very nice.
Thankyou for that...
In high school we had to remember a portion of a poem by William Cullen Bryant. I did not like literature classes, but I still remember that poem, “Thanatopsis.”
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust; approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
I love that poem...
About that poem..do you think it’s about a guy weary of life that is thinking about just ending it right there?
One of my favorite poems, though, as a MS born and bred girl, I rarely ever saw snow. It wasn’t until I was an adult, married, and moved north of the Mason Dixon line, that I understood this poem. Standing in the woods, with a heavy snow falling, is just such a peaceful place.
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