Some of My Favorite Poems

Recently I have been having a..."poet's block" (is there such a thing?)  I decided, in the meantime, to make a post about some of my favorite poems.  Initially I included some analyses too, but since many of the poems listed are not in public domain, I'm not sure how much I can quote from them.  So for the time being I'll just make a list, sans analysis.

Of the small sample of poetry I have read over the years, I have enjoyed few and remember fewer still, so these are not my absolute favorites, nor ones I necessarily understood, but ones that somehow have connected with a deeper part of me.

I rarely read poetry, preferring writing instead because it is a form of release and self-expression for me.  But sometimes I read a poem and the experience is very unique, like tasting an exotic fruit; or seeing a very familiar fruit peeled, cut, and arranged in such a way, that it blossoms in an exotic bouquet.

I don't know why I remember these poems.  Let me speculate.  Is it the music, the choice and arrangement of words, the clarity or depth of meaning or vision, the crispness or complexity of imagery, or the generosity of the heart that watered this farm of meaning and emotion that has blossomed from word roots beneath the soil of shared experiences?

At times a deep sadness, tenderness, joy, love, is felt, a scent so wonderful we want to bottle it, an extraordinary memory that must be preserved and protected in a vault.  Forever.  I wonder if what makes a great poet is the ability to notice the important cues in these kinds of special experiences, and collect them, order them, and present them to reader in a way that one is able to recreate those kinds of experiences in one's mind, feel them in the heart, and embody them. 

Presumably the process is often unconscious, the poet unaware of why s/he is writing a poem in a certain way.  Sometimes the reader too is unaware of the reasons why the poem has struck a chord.  But I think great poetry starts with the poet's sensitivity, observational skills, emotional honesty, openness to being touched by experience, and an ebullient expressiveness that comes to surface, allowing sharing those heartfelt experience in a beautifully unique way.  Beloved poets are courageous, loving, curious, ingenious.  They are alive, in touch with life, inside and out.

Perhaps a common problem with writing but also appreciating good poetry is the willingness and the how-to, to travel to depths of one's own emotional world.  I believe most of us have been there before but we may not remember the way now or may have hated the terrain; maybe we were terrified of the dark or feared losing our way back.  If this view is correct, then the great poet must know the way, the right way, the beautiful way, the sensitive way.

The next step would be to reach out to the reader, to us, to me.  Do I trust?  Do I take the hand?  Go on the perilous journey, let the words and the music permeate me?  Am I open to receiving the unexpected?  Willing to give up control and let go into experience, travel inwards and outwards at the same time?  It may be that the universally acknowledged great poems in history, are ones demanding too much (or less likely, too little) of the reader.  Which is why when the same person goes back to a poem year later and finding it surprisingly good or meaningful, one possibility is that this time the reader is able and willing to follow the guide.

The journey is not always worth one's time and trust, I think we can all agree.  Poetry can be bad, really bad.  Openness also makes one vulnerable and words can hurt, even when reading great poetry.  How to tell if a bad experience should be contributed to the reader, the poem, or the connection between them?  Just because a poem is popular does not guarantee it being great either.  I think that's worth pondering.

Still, sometimes the journey is worth it.  And on a rare occasion, I've heard, it can change the reader in an inexplicably satisfying way.  Musical words across space and time, changing a reader here and now.  How lucky is one to be in the presence of, and able to connect with, such poetry!

After great pain, a formal feeling comes, Emily Dickinson

Archaic Torso of Apollo, Rainer Maria Rilke

Bani Adam, Gulistan, Saadi Shirazi

A Blessing, James Wright

Edge, Sylvia Plath

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry, Jubilate Agno, Fragment B, Christopher Smart

Full Fathom Five, William Shakespeare

Funeral Blues, W. H. Auden

The Guest House, Jalaluddin Rumi

Half Moon, Federico García Lorca

Hook, James Wright

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota, James Wright

My Papa's Waltz, Theodore Roethke

A Noiseless Patient Spider, Walt Whitman

Nothing But Death, Pablo Neruda

Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Panther, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Pasture, Robert Frost

The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost

This living hand, John Keats

The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

The Wind Will Carry Us Away, Forough Farrokhzad

Writing a Resume, Wislawa Szymborska

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

               And should I then presume?

               And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head

               Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

               That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

And this, and so much more?—

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

               “That is not it at all,

               That is not what I meant, at all.”

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

"A Noiseless Patient Spider" by Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

 A noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to
         connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor
         hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.