I don't know that I have a favorite, but I do like the following quote by Robert Ardrey: "But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses."
Your Favorite Poem or Saying
by compound complex 54 Replies latest jw friends
-
-
diamondblue1974
Dawn (Sirona) and I were reading through some poetry the other week and she introduced me to Phillip Larkin; I loved it....how very apt!
This be the verse..- Phillip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don't have any kids yourself.
DB74
-
MsMcDucket
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourselfDiamondblue, that's a sad one.
-
betterdaze
Peas with Honey! Oh, how I gladly remember that one from Mrs. Murphy's second-grade class at Norwood Public School! Always wondered if it was a "pointy" knife or a butter one. The pointy one seemed dangerous to eat from.
From Edwin Markham:
He drew a circle that shut me out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in!
(Who knew you could sum up the ex-Witness experience in a simple Venn diagram?)
And the Belle of Amherst:
I'm nobody! Who are you??Are you nobody, too??Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!?They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!?How public, like a frog?To tell your name the livelong day?To an admiring bog!
(Neat little summary of the "apostates," the bog being the org.)
Anything and every thing from Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. Here's a list:
http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/quotable/singlehtml.htm
~Sue -
veradico
I just remembered a list I made a while ago on this subject. I'll paste it below.
"To his Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, "A Poison Tree" and "The Chimney Sweeper" and "The Tiger" and "The Divine Image" and "The Clod and the Pebble" by William Blake, "How Do I Love Thee?" by Elizabeth Browning, "My Last Duchess" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" by Robert Browning, "Kubla Khan or, a Vision In a Dream: A Fragment" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "A Bird Came Down" and "Because I could not stop for Death" and "I cannot live with you" "I never saw a moor" and "Success is counted sweetest" and "I had been hungry" and "A Certain Slant of Light" and "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" and "This World is not Conclusion" and "I'm nobody, who are you?" and "Faith is a fine invention" and “I would not paint a picture” by Emily Dickinson, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, "Fire and Ice" and "Design" and "Departmental" and Provide, Provide" by Robert Frost, "Delight in Disorder" by Robert Herrick, "Pied Beauty" and "Binsey Poplars" and "Thou art indeed just, Lord" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "A Dream Within A Dream" and "The Bells" and "The Conqueror Worm" and "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe, "Sonnet 116" and "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" and "When Icicles Hang By the Wall" (from Love's Labour's Lost act V scene II) and "Sigh no more, ladies" (from Much Ado About Nothing act II scene III) and "Tomorrow, and tomorrow" (from Macbeth act V sceneV) and "Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!" (from King Lear act III scene II) by Shakespeare, "Ozymandias" and "Love's Philosophy" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, "I Am Not Yours" and "Moonlight" by Sarah Teasdale, "Daffodils" and "The World Is Too Much with Us" by William Wordsworth, "Abou Ben Adhem" by James Leigh Hunt, "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, "My love is like to ice, and I to fire" and "One day I wrote her name upon the strand" by Edmund Spencer, "Jabberwocky" and "Father William" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll, "Richard Cory" and "Miniver Cheevy" by Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" by Christopher Marlowe, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop, "Gethsemane" and "Gunga Din" and some of the verses at the beginnings and ends of stories in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books, "Valentine" by Carol Ann Duffy, "First Fig" by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, "What the Bullet Sang" by Bret Harte, "Say not the struggle naught availeth" by Arthur Hugh Clough, "Ode (We are the music makers)" by Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy, "Imagination" by John Davidson, "The Destruction of Sennacherib" and "So we'll go no more a-roving" and "She walks in beauty" by Lord Byron, "Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou, "Sunlight" by Seamus Heaney, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "There was a child went forth" by Walt Whitman, "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "Leisure" by W. H. Davies, "Money" by C. H. Sisson, "o sweet spontaneous" and "what if a much of a which of a wind" and "i sing of Olaf glad and big" by e. e. cummings, "Brahma" and "Fable" by Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quantum Est Quod Desit ['To the brink but no further.']" by Thomas Moore, "Happy the Man" by John Dryden [translating Horace: Odes, book III, xxix], parts of Edward Fitzgerald's paraphrase/translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "Body" by Sasha Moorsom, "The Power of Maples" by Gerald Stern, "Love Is Love" by Sir Edward Dyer, "The Eagle" and "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Poem" by Simon Armitage, "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas, "To the Terrestrial Globe: by a miserable wretch" by W. S. Gilbert, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" by Edward Lear, "The Author to Her Book" by Anne Bradstreet, "Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish, "Nude Descending a Staircase" by X. J. Kennedy, "The Falcon to the Falconer" by Jonathan Steffen, "The Leaden-Eyed" by Vachel Lindsay, "Invictus" by W. E. Henley, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Oscar Wilde, "The Lie" by Sir Walter Raleigh, I like some of Alexander Pope's words, but I don't know how to guide you to the spots I like, "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear, "The Battle-Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe, "Before the beginning of years" by Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Poetry" by Marianne Moore, "The Hollow Men" by T. S. Eliot, "The End of the World" by Archibald MacLeish, "Song for the Clatter-Bones" by F. R. Higgins, "The Turtle" and "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man" and "Very Like a Whale" by Ogden Nash, "The Slaughter-House" by Alfred Hayes, "The Cremation of Sam McGee" by Robert Service, "Where's the Poet?" by John Keats, "Bonny Barbara Allan" [but the Scottish version, not the American one, which ruined it] by the famous Anonymous, "Terence, this is stupid stuff" by A. E. Housman, "Incident" by Countee Cullen, "Curiosity" by Alastair Reid, "Cinderella" by Anne Sexton, "Adivce to My Son" by Peter Meinke, "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Harlem" and "Theme from English B" (I hope I got the title right on that one.) by Langston Hughes, "The Unknown Citizen" by W. H. Auden, "Formal Application" by Donald W. Baker, "Love Song: I and Thou" by Alan Dugan, "Crow's First Lesson" by Ted Hughes, "Hurt Hawks" by Robinson Jeffers, "Five Ways to Kill a Man" by Edwin Brock.
-
DrMike
"You can't blame a snake for not having feet."
-
juni
In My Life
Album: Rubber Soul
(Lennon/McCartney)
There are places I'll remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you moreJuni Also any of Edgar Allen Poe or Ogden Nash and a lot more. I love to meditate on poetry.
It's very relaxing.
-
compound complex
Dear fellow poet, SF:
I cannot believe that your response led me to Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly" and Clement Moore's "The Night Before Christmas". I have the leather-clad book of poems from which your mother read to you! It is entitled ONE HUNDRED AND ONE FAMOUS POEMS, published by The Cable Company, 301 So. Wabash Ave., Chicago, Illinois, 1926.
PREFACE: A SPIRIT of daring out of all proportion to any hope of gain must at times possess a publisher. You doubtless have heard the story of the "One Hundred and One Best Songs"; how its publishers printed several hundred thousand books in order that they might be sold at a price so low as to enable every child to have one. That, likewise, is the aim of this collection."
The immortal words of Shelley, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe and Sandburg. How much greater an impact these sublime thoughts than those of JFR's CHILDREN! I hope somehow to share more of this precious jewel with you in future. Peace and love.
Yours truly,
CoCo
-
sf
Most excellent CoCo...thank you!
You have no idea how this brings up so much pain.
But yea, this IS the book.
Thanks again.
Incidently, I wrote a book of my own poems during my disfellowshipment and turmoil. I lost it.
sKally
-
freedomloverr
NARKISSOS- *****freedomlover(r),
Thank you.
I don't remember writing that, even less in which context, but I find it all the more moving that some words we say or write can go on their own way in other minds, as so many came to us from other people, making us what we provisionally "are"...
I like to think of resurrection as a daily though mostly unnoticed event: long dead or forgotten people keep on arising in our flesh, and even before we're dead we're already living in others we just crossed once with one word, one look or one smile we don't even remember.****
you are so correct in saying that we cross into other people through our words and we may never know that we've had that effect. incredible and magical.
thank you Narkissos. :)