Poems

To me Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the greatest poetry ever written. I’m also very fond of Housman and Auden.

Children are encouraged to write descriptive lines and arrange them so that they look like poems. Some will progress beyond that, but most won’t.

We had a wonderful English teacher who made us write poems with proper formal structure when we were in the sixth form. I could do it, but some found it very difficult to scan and rhyme correctly.

Love both of those Trisher and Greyduster. Clever, both of them. Wonderful words and a rhyme about them.

But I still don't like most of the stuff that's spouted on Poetry Please!

I don’t think I ever listened to Poetry Please. I must make a point of it. Grandma70s I love “The lads in their Hundreds” from Houseman’s ‘A Shropshire Lad’. It has been set to music by both Butterworth and Arthur Somervell, but it has one of the most beautiful, and sad, and resonant lines I have ever read - “to carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man”. It brings a lump to my throat.

Greyduster that is one poem that has always stayed in my memory since we read it for GCE.

I still have the text book with my scribbled notes in the margins (which I can't read because the writing is tiny!).

We watched something on tele a while ago and I was struck by how many older people could recite poems they had learnt in their youth. It seemed so poignant

If you like sonnets have you read Tony Harrison's? Here's one
Long Distance II
Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.

You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.

He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon he'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

My grandson had to learn The Highwayman at school last year, and his mouth fairly fell open when I recited it from memory. Even DH chipped in with a verse or two!

I know and love that one, Trisher. It reminds of when I keep coming across a much loved friend’s name in my contacts list and can’t bear to delete it.

Oh so sad!

It always reminds me of my grandparents. Even though my GD died before my Gran I remember him sitting by the fire waiting for her to get back from the shops with something nice for tea.
The Highwayman and The Listeners are the two I remember from primary school

Another favourite from Primary school:

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

This has come up before (meaning the poetry/ prose debate).

I posted one of mine on here, and opinion was divided.

Can anyone find it? It was about an old man and a cat.

This one Phoenix?

You had a name once, a proper name, not cat, or kitty or puss
You offered companionship on your own terms, acquiescing to a caress, or bestowing your own blessing, rubbing your head against his leg.

You never counted years, and now he has lost the knack.
The gnarled hand reaches out to stroke the bony back.

Your name, your proper name is still there,
Somewhere deep inside the old mans head.
But no matter that he cannot recall it now, at this exact moment.
The gas fire sputters,
And in the warm, quiet room, companionship is enough."

Then Soutra came up with this:

"A poem is a poem when the language is fine
The images clear even if it don't rhyme.
When it's made up of sentences, even though it all flows
You know that what you reading is prose."

Which sums it up perfectly for me. (And it was my thread!) I'm still confused and I supposed a bit annoyed that rhyming poems which canter along are out of fashion. That sentences are poems if each one starts on new line.

(And our old cat was called Fred, but answered only to Frederick. His proper name!)

Thank you Nfk that indeed is the one!

That’s a lovely poem trisher very moving.

I can’t recite any poem from memory.... I love poetry and read it a lot, but only a few lines here and there have ever stuck in my memory.

I like all sorts, Dylan Thomas my favourite, also Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, mainly I like 20th century poetry.

We had thread once where people posted poems they liked. It introduced me to some new ones and reminded me of old favourites. Would it be an idea to start it again?

Good idea, Trisher
For those who like a little fun, how about a Limerick thread in Games, where the OP posts the first line, and subsequent posters write a line each? Would anyone be interested? Whoever writes the punchline gets to write the first line of the next.

Yup - I'm up for that. I will await your thread and the first line!

Me too.

And me, though I probably wouldn’t be any good at it!

I remember this one from my schooldays too, by Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Which gives pause for thought as we remember previous civilisations (and our own mortality).

Ooh, one of my very favourites, that one! Thank you!

I love the way this first verse flows, but I'm not bothered about the rest of the poem.
I have been egging on my visiting daughter who bravely offered to give the bathroom a deep clean including painting the ceiling, have filled two wastepaper baskets with half empty bottles and ancient odds and sods of make-up so have not yet posted the first line of a limerick...I shall away and correct that.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.