Ship of Fools: Favourite Poems from my youth, and yours!

Thread: Favourite Poems from my youth, and yours! Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :

My all-time favourite poem is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I had not read in its entirety since I was about fourteen years old until earlier this morning. I wish I could commit it to memory!

I won't bother to quote it here because almost every adult with a good liberal arts education, which I have, knows it.

I also enjoy the most famous of the Shakespearean sonnets.

Next time I have insomnia I shall tackle "...Practical Cats". I'd like to see how it could be transmogrified into the blockbuster touring stage show that I worked on several times in various iterations (including a purpose-built inflatable!)

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sir Kevin:

I won't bother to quote it here

Good. Because you know how antsy we get about possible copyright infringements.

If anyone does feel moved to post about their favourite verses, a format of brief extract and a link to the full text would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

Firenze
Heaven Host

Posted by Galilit (# 16470) on :

Anything (well almost) by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

Wynken, Blynken and Nod

Posted by geroff (# 3882) on :

Things that go bump in the night.... etc - Spike Milligan. An iconic poem from my childhood - closely followed by the Owl and the Pussycat and The Jumblies (why Lear of course).

Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :

E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk name: Tekahionwake). The Camper We liked this in Boy Scouts, where a campfire thing to do in the bush was skits and dramatic readings between cups of tea and mosquitos. (She died in 1913, no copyright issues, poem available multiple places online. Here's one of many links.)

quote:
Night 'neath the northern skies, lone, black, and grim:
Naught but the starlight lies 'twixt heaven, and him.

Of man no need has he, of God, no prayer;
He and his Deity are brothers there.

Above his bivouac the firs fling down
Through branches gaunt and black, their needles brown.

Afar some mountain streams, rockbound and fleet,
Sing themselves through his dreams in cadence sweet,

The pine trees whispering, the heron's cry,
The plover's passing wing, his lullaby.

And blinking overhead the white stars keep
Watch o'er his hemlock bed--his sinless sleep.

Posted by Magersfontein Lugg (# 18240) on :

What a lovely question. I have so many!

Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas

and

The Listeners by Walter de la mare

come first to me as I think about it.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I have altogether too many favourites to name. Masefield, Yeats, Kipling and Eliot to name but a few have been quotable at many times throughout my life. I didn't really get properly into poetry until my teens when I discovered Shelley, and never looked back.

I wonder if anyone else here has also enjoyed the quotations that pop up in Dorothy Dunnett's "Lymond" novels? I came to those as a young teenager and some of those quotes have stayed with me too.

Posted by Magersfontein Lugg (# 18240) on :

Yes I have loads Ariel too.

I wonder if, without derailing this discussion, if it would be good for us to mention as well a poem which is a favourite from youth but which we may think isn't so well known too.

I love to read 'new' favourites [Smile]

today, and find it enriching.

So in this vein I offer:

From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson

I still love the sense of speed it gives in recitation

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

A couple I enjoy Wild Geese by Mary Oliver and Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

I have plenty of others but not all night for posting.

Jengie

Posted by Magersfontein Lugg (# 18240) on :

How lovely, Jengie. You must have had a cultured youth [Smile]

I didnt know Wild Geese and am grateful to be introduced to it.

but I do remember Ode - I think as a student I heard it set to music by ?Elgar.

Really looking forward to reading more new favourites!

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Magersfontein Lugg:

Really looking forward to reading more new favourites!

If you like meeting new poems, this thread unearthed a few gems.

Posted by Magersfontein Lugg (# 18240) on :

Thanks for that link, I've been and had a look. Great.

I do like peoples childhood favourites, though, especially when they are not ones I already know [Smile]

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

I think I was in 4th grade (age 10 or so) when introduced to Alfred Noyes' poem "the Highwayman".

My adult self looks askance at this rather lurid ballad, but at the time, I lived near the sea, loved all references to same, and a new word for a type of ship, galleon, imprinted itself permanently on my brain from its first (and the last) stanza. Also, I memorized the poem. I absolutely loved its powerful rhythm.

Posted by Drifting Star (# 12799) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
...Ode[/URL] by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

I have plenty of others but not all night for posting.

Jengie

Do you know the full text Jengie? There are 9 stanzas, although the first three are most widely known because it was abridged to go into Palgrave's Treasury. I can remember being so excited to find another 6 verses! Elgar's setting used all of them.

(tiny url goes to wikisource page with unacceptable characters in its url)

I used to learn poetry by heart while walking into and out of town when I was a teenager (3 miles each way) and again as a young adult. I'm so glad I did - I have a head full of resources whenever I'm stuck without a book!

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

This was my favorite poem when I was six years old.

Now I like a lot of Dylan Thomas's poems. I was lucky enough to hear him read some of his poems and other poets'. He read a poem by W. R. Rodgers about Mary Magdalene. I don't recall the title, so I can't find it on the internet. I can still hear Dylan Thomas's voice reciting some of that poem. His voice drove it into my memory.

Moo

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
He read a poem by W. R. Rodgers about Mary Magdalene.

Is this it?

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:

quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
He read a poem by W. R. Rodgers about Mary Magdalene.
Is this it?

Yes. thanks.

I will never forget Thomas delivering the lines

quote:
Mary saw her God.
Did you hear me? Mary saw her God!

Thomas had a wonderful ability to read poetry.

Moo

Posted by Piglet (# 11803) on :

quote:
Originally posted by geroff:
Things that go bump in the night.... etc - Spike Milligan ...

Thanks for reminding me of that Spike Milligan poem, Geroff - it was in a book by him I had as a child called Silly Verse for Kids, which also had this little gem.

A cheer from me for The Owl and the Pussycat too, which my mum would recite to us, and we read it to her when her "ordinary" memory had all but gone, but she could still fill in the alternate lines.

[Tear]

Posted by Meesothorny (# 17603) on :

I love Jane Kenyon:

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Full text

(Edited for copyright)

[ 02. November 2014, 06:17: Message edited by: Firenze ]

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

A reminder of my post up thread.

Extract and link only, please.

(Yes, I know. Absurdly hyper-cautious. But OTOH simple, consistent and easy to remember).

Firenze
Heaven Host

Posted by the famous rachel (# 1258) on :

When I was quite small, certainly before I went to school, my Mum used to read to me from a book called "Hilda Boswell's Treasury of Poetry". She kept it, and I have it beside me now, as I now read to my son from it occaisionally. My favourite poem was "Mice" by Rose Fyleman. I also loved "Bedtime" by Thomas Hood. Interestingly, it took me quite some searching on the Internet to find the right words for this one. It's evidently used as a lullaby in a shorter and less elegant form, which is unfortunate, as my childhood self loved the repetition in the last verse, which usually seems to be omitted or edited:

"Good night, little people
Good night and good night;
Sweet dreams to your eyelids
Til dawning of light;
The evening has come, there's no more to be said,
It's time little people were ging to bed!"

When I was a little bit older, I was given a book of poems by Shel Silverston, My favourite of those was "Hammock". This is too short to quote anything from, and anyway, it really needs the illustration, which is in the linked version.

None of this is very highbrow compared to what other people are quoting, but these are poems which have stuck with me since I was very tiny!

Best wishes,

Rachel.

Posted by Jengie jon (# 273) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Magersfontein Lugg:
How lovely, Jengie. You must have had a cultured youth

I didnt know Wild Geese and am grateful to be introduced to it.

but I do remember Ode - I think as a student I heard it set to music by ?Elgar.

Really looking forward to reading more new favourites!

Sorry, as my brain was fogged with cold, I ended up semi reading the thread and just choose two rather special verses. Although in my childhood I did request the Complete Odes and Epodes of Horace (in translation) as a teenager. So maybe your observation is not that far off.

The poems that I do turn to from childhood include Sea Fever by John Masefield which is the opening poem in Young Pegasus: An Anthology of Verse parts IV-V. This was my mother's textbook when at school. Also because of a story book The Hound of Heaven which was featured in it.

quote:
Originally posted by Drifting Star
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
...Ode[/URL] by Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

I have plenty of others but not all night for posting.

Jengie

Do you know the full text Jengie? There are 9 stanzas, although the first three are most widely known because it was abridged to go into Palgrave's Treasury. I can remember being so excited to find another 6 verses! Elgar's setting used all of them.

Yes. I sought that verse out when I was in my late twenties for a friend who was going into a convent. As a result, I have a copy in "The Faber Popular Reciter" that has all nine verses. Its just been a while since I have read it.

Jengie

[ 02. November 2014, 20:54: Message edited by: Jengie jon ]

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

The Owl and the Pussycat (thanks for the memories!) and Hey Diddle Diddle were my favorite poems when I was very wee! I think my mother read them to us every night, probably because I asked for her to do so!

For many years now, my favorite poet is Baxter Black, Cowboy Poet.

Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Jengie jon:
Also because of a story book The Hound of Heaven which was featured in it.

Jengie

That's not a poem - that's a tome! I'll read it after school.

Posted by Heavenly Anarchist (# 13313) on :

I was a serious romantic child with a taste for the more traditional; Shelley's Love's Philosophy and Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Then in my later teens it was Ted Hughes, both his Crow series and his nature poems, oh, and Full Moon and little Freda. It wasn't until I was older that I discovered the more childish delights of Belloc's Lords - Lundy is my favourite.
I love reading out loud and I subjected my children to endless readings of Dahl's Revolting Rhymes. I still read the Edgar's The Lion and Albert to my youngest, in a Lancastrian accent honed from childhood elderly relatives.

Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :

The only poem I memorized that I still know by heart: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. Quite sad and romantic. [Tear]

So much by Yeats- The Second Coming, Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, When You Are Old, and the Jane and the Bishop poems. I am also fond of J. Alfred Prufrock.

When I was a child, I had two volumes of poems by A. A. Milne. Two favorites were Hoppity and The King's Breakfast-

quote:
The King sobbed, "Oh, deary me!"
And went back to bed.
"Nobody,"
He whimpered,
"Could call me
A fussy man;
I only want
A little bit
Of butter for
My bread!"

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

I remember learning "The war song of Dinas Vawr" by Thomas Love Peacock. "Rhe mountain sheep are sweeter but the valley shhep are fatter" - now, whenever I see a picture of Carreg Cennen in west Wales, I think of that poem.
I also love "Sea Fever", which wsa the recitation in a school eisteddfod (sort of an arts competition).

Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :

At school I made a deliberate effort to seek out Wilfrid Gibson's Ballad of Flannan Isle, for no reason other than that Tom Baker quotes a snippet at the end of "Horror of Fang Rock".

Full text under the link; the snippet goes:

quote:
Aye: though we hunted high and low,
And hunted everywhere,
Of the three men's fate we found no trace
Of any kind in any place,
But a door ajar, and an untouched meal,
And an overtoppled chair.

Posted by bib (# 13074) on :

I love Yeat's poem "When you are old and grey and full of sleep". Many of his poems are wonderful in my eyes.

Posted by Bob Two-Owls (# 9680) on :

As a special treat, if we had been especially good, the Latin teacher would let us translate some of the fruitier poems by Catullus. My latin is no longer up to it but I still love reading them with a parallel translation for the harder bits (fnarr fnarr).

Dear old Lesbia, I often wondered what she looked like.

Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Lord Jestocost:
At school I made a deliberate effort to seek out Wilfrid Gibson's Ballad of Flannan Isle, for no reason other than that Tom Baker quotes a snippet at the end of "Horror of Fang Rock".

A very fine poem but unsettling: did three dead men fail to sit down to dinner?

Posted by Enoch (# 14322) on :

Back in the far off days when I was at school, one of the subjects I did for A Level was English. In those days, you spent two years going from O level to A level, but the Examination Boards did not publish what the set books were going to be until just before the end of the first year. So you spent that year exploring your subject more generally. One of the things we had to do was to write a study of a particular writer, and for various reasons I chose Clare. He was not that well known then, and I still think he's underrated. I can hardly think of anything he wrote that isn't a gem.

Posted by Adam. (# 4991) on :

The only poetry I've ever memorized have been verse plays (having done a few Shakespeare), a poem about summer by Catullus that I had to memorize for Latin (and can't remember any of now), and Psalm 95 for Hebrew class (which I can still do a fair bit of). The 8th graders at our parish school are studying Romeo & Juliet in language arts right now, so I went in a performed Romeo's "banished?!" speech for them. I'd forgotten how exhilarating it can be to inhabit those texts as a performer.

I had my main poet-crush on Yeats as a teenager, my favorite probably being Tread softly.

My current favorite poem is almost certainly Herbert's Love bade me welcome, which is all the theology anyone needs to no, expressed beautifully.

Posted by churchgeek (# 5557) on :

I can't say how much it warms the heart to see this discussion of poetry.

I've also always loved "Prufrock," as well as "The Hollow Men," which Daniel Amos paraphrased in a song that I listened to over and over as a teenager.

In college, I had to recite a poem in French (in my French phonetics class), and I picked Baudelaire's "Harmonie du soir." It's a pantoum, which I didn't know at the time. But I used the pattern to write one of my own, which you can read (and hear a musical setting done by a stranger on the internet - I mean, someone I met on another web forum) here.

I'm also a huge fan of Sylvia Plath. Her poem "Street Song" is a favorite of mine, 'cause I relate to it. But that's not from my youth.

Oh, and Yeats, of course - I particularly like the way the Waterboys set "The Stolen Child."

And John Cale's Words for the Dying - setting of four Dylan Thomas poems. You can hear Thomas read "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" online (google it, I'm too lazy to do that now), and hear that Cale seems to have based his setting on Thomas' own vocal cadences. Really cool. I love that in part because, as sort of a poet myself, when I used to do readings, I found that around the 3rd or 4th time I read any poem, it developed a "tune," so to speak. I wonder if that's a common experience among poets?

Posted by Robert Armin (# 182) on :

When I was about 9, we did Blake's "Tyger" at school. At 21 I wrote about it in a final's paper, and continue to see new things there. How many poems are accessible to such a wide age range?

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

My English master used to use "Tyger" as an example of how not to recite poetry:
Ty-ger ty-ger burn-ning bright
In the for-ests of the night
so the rhythm was deda deda de dada
deda deda de de da

Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :

I have a happy memory of learning the opening lines of Tennyson's 'The Revenge' with mu mum when I was quite young. Can't remember when but it was before I was seven.

[ 10. November 2014, 17:45: Message edited by: Albertus ]

Posted by Darllenwr (# 14520) on :

Am I alone in having been taught a profound loathing of poetry by my Grammar School English master?

I'm sure that I cannot be the only one who learned to dread the questions that started, "What does the poet mean when he says ...?" It never seemed to matter what I wrote, it was always wrong. I don't think I would have minded so much if my teacher had ever troubled to explain why I was wrong. Equally, it would have been easier to accept if he hadn't taken a malicious delight in reading out your mistakes to an eager class, before throwing your exercise book at your head. I learned to loath poetry with a passion and it is a loathing I still have nearly 40 years later.

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

How very, very sad.

Also bloody stupid way to teach poetry. Poems are not bits of explanatory prose mucked about with in order to make them harder to understand. To translate them into some kind of 'meaning' is to miss the point.

Posted by Huia (# 3473) on :

Slightly different, but wasn't there a composer (Mozart or one of the famous ones) who, on being asked what a piece of music meant simply played it again? Always sounded like a good answer to me.

Huia

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

Here is one poet's statement about meaning in poetry.

Moo

Posted by Sir Kevin (# 3492) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
How very, very sad.

Also bloody stupid way to teach poetry.

Not my wife's method I am sure, though some of her pupils might benefit from having a composition book thrown at them she has not done so yet! She teaches English language and literature to young teenagers at a school about 15 minutes drive from the house. She does a poetry unit every Friday and encourages the lads and lasses to write poems themselves, for a grade.

Posted by Egeria (# 4517) on :

Our sixth grade teacher, who had been an English major, not only taught us a load of grammar but also required us to memorize poetry; we usually had a choice of several poems. My favorite from that time was "Sea Fever" by John Masefield. Thanks, Mrs. Cooper!

I came across "Forgive My Guilt" by Robert P. Tristram Coffin a couple of years later; just thinking about that one makes the tears pop right out.

On my own I memorized "the Master Speed" by Robert Frost. And Frost's "Two Tramps in Mud Time"--about doing work "for heaven's and the future's sake"--ought to be in every student's syllabus.

But my favorite now and for many years past is "The Old Ships" by James Ellroy Flecker. I memorized it as a teenager and have a copy posted above my desk at work among the postcards and cat photos.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

Flecker isn't as well-known as he should be, and printed collections of his poems are hard to get hold of. I enjoyed his poems when I finally got hold of them. "Pillage" has a very pleasing internal rhyme scheme, and "Tenebris Interlucentem" is short but good. "Old Ships" is certainly one of his best.

Posted by Bernard Mahler (# 10852) on :

Masefield's 'Cargoes' and Tennyson's 'Crossing the Bar' I know these by heart. I also love the latter's 'Lady of Shalott'. I haven't yet got it memorized, but I'm working on it!

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

I bought a delightful little pocket anthology of poems the other day, with lovely headers and gilded edges and a bookmark. It's for keeping in my handbag for those times when you feel like dipping into a bit of poetry. The "Poems on the Underground" is what gave me the idea; sometimes they can divert you quite effectively into an appreciation of something altogether nicer and more wholesome than gritty public transport.

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