Which is your favourite poem and why?

Charge of the Light Brigade - Alfred Lord Tennyson. I had to learn this at school and found it quite sad.

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas, the ultimate concise description of an English country station.
That always comes to my mind, Grandma70s
It was written just before WW1, I think, and Edward Thomas was killed in 1917.
It's a short poem but evocative of pre-WW1 English countryside, quiet, peaceful, gentle.

www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/adlestrop/

I remember the Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow which we read at junior school.

I wonder if our DGC are missing out on all this loveliness?

"On Eden Rock" by Charles Causley is a favourite. I suppose you'd say that it's about love, loss and the passage of time.

Plus "I Asked the Boy who cannot see what is Colour" which is I think anonymous. Just lovely descriptions.

Doodledog towards the end of the poem there was something about returning in the woman’s dreams to kiss her - that sounds corny, but it wasn’t!
I now pay 79p a month to Apple to store everything in my phone on the Cloud. Then you can recover it all if you ever need to.
Once in America we were taking to someone whose phone fell out of his pocket and into the dock. We felt terrible as he was helping us at the time. But he just said he needed a new phone anyway & everything was on the Cloud & a few hours later he had a new phone with everything ready-installed!

Viridian Thank you - that’s a wonderful poem & I shall save that one too, but it’s not it!

Moonlight
‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ another of my favourites.

Thank you for starting this thread Bakingmad

Another poem I remember is Naming of Parts by Henry Reed which illustrates the contrast between war and the beauty of nature.
www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/naming-of-parts/

Storm in the Black Forest:

Now it is almost night, from the bronzy soft sky
jugfull after jugfull of pure white liquid fire, bright white
tipples over and spills down,
and is gone
and gold-bronze flutters beat through the thick upper air.

And as electric liquid pours out, sometimes
a still brighter white snake wriggles among it, spilled
and tumbling wriggling down the sky:
and then the heavens cackle with uncouth sounds.

And the rain won’t come, the rain refuses to come!

This is the electricity that man is supposed to have mastered
chained, subjugated to his own use!
supposed to!

D.H. Lawrence

I love Kubla Khan by Coleridge. I studied it for A Level and learnt the first part by heart. It is very atmospheric and it is easy to picture this remote and slightly eerie place.

I also like Abou ben Adhem because of its message of hope for those who find belef in God difficult.

I shall lower the tone by saying pretty much anything by Pam Ayres. 'Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth' might be appropriate for some of us

It sounds a morbid title but the words are everything to me. I first heard it at my best friend Patrick’s funeral. I worked with him when I was in my twenties until I had my son at 31. We kept in touch over twenty five years he watched my children grow up. I knew he was ill and we did see him but then I heard nothing. Another former colleague rang to tell me he died I just about got to the funeral in time. Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye.

Sarnia

I shall lower the tone by saying pretty much anything by Pam Ayres. 'Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth' might be appropriate for some of us

Oh yes!

Me too, that one in particular

The Golden Road to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker is one of my favourites. My mother used to quote large segments, and I learned much of it by osmosis. These two stanzas in particular mean a great deal to me.

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lies a prophet who can understand
Why men were born: but surely we are brave,
Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

I like the sound of that Bodach I must look it up.
Btw what is a Bodach??

Sarnia

I shall lower the tone by saying pretty much anything by Pam Ayres. 'Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth' might be appropriate for some of us

Not lowering the tone at all. PA is fantastic.

I like a more recent poem by Max Boyce. I think it's called When only the Tide Went Out.

3dognight aquagranI was only thinking about that poem “The Highwayman” the other day. I don’t know why it came into my head, but I remember our primary school teacher reading it to us and we had to learn the first verse. He was using it as an example of where the beat of the poem copies the beat of a horse galloping, or at least I think he was!?

I've just found the Max Boyce poem on YouTube. It was written about the first lock down so worth a listen.

To name one is virtually impossible for me. Of those already mentioned I would go with The Highwayman, and Naming of Parts and its companion Judging Distances, the latter always reminding me of our CCF instructor yelling “If the hill looks to you like a humpty-backed camel say ‘the hill like a humpty-backed camel’!”

But I think my favourite would have to be a sonnet, possibly Shakespeare’s 130, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. But then, I am a sucker for French sonnets of the Sixteenth Century.

Oh dear, I should never have started this comment.

janeainsworth Yes I’m enjoying it too.

I wasn’t sure what response I would get but there are so
many lovely poems I haven’t heard of before. I shall be spending a while googling them all.

lemongrove

I like the sound of that Bodach I must look it up.
Btw what is a Bodach??

Bodach (Scots Gaelic): an old man; a spectral figure (often a harbinger of doom); a mountain in Scotland.

Take your pick.

Same as you, Kitty Shakespeare 116.
But poetry has never been my favourite part of english literature.
Except for this poem by Wilfred Owen
Strange Meeting
which we learnt for A level.
Confirmed my feelings of the uselessness of war.

If we are 'lowering' the tone, can I say Spike Milligan! I love him!

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 23,

‘If I Lay Here Dead’

Sounds morbid, but she is speaking of true love.

I know it off by heart.

First saw it on a Pirelli calendar, and still remember it, oh, 50 years later.

Spike Milligan’s Smile, very appropriate now I think.

Pam Ayers for me too.........
I am a little rabbit
Sitting in my hutch
I only sit up this end
I don’t like that end much....?

Wordsworth ...Daffodils always remember this poem from my schooldays.

Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Sea Fever - John Masefield
Cargoes
Fear No more the Heat of the Sun - Shakespeare and more of his sonnets.
Ozymandias
The Jackdaw of Rheims
The Ancient Mariner
and loads of AA Milne

Gwyneth Daffodils for me too. It was my mum's favourite and she learnt it at school and would often suddenly recite it for us as children. I read it out at her funeral, and like to think she could hear me and enjoyed it.