Langston Hughes poem is timeless...Unfortunately injustice continues in our world...just another reason to acknowledge its existence and work towards its extinction...
"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" Tennyson's Ulysses. Actually almost anything by Tennyson which my Dad read to me instead of nursery rhymes.
From Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas. I had the pleasure of visiting Adlestrop some years ago. The atmosphere is exactly as Thomas describes it, though all that remains of the station is the sign bearing its name
My poetry days are long behind me and they are mostly in Hungarian. I have nothing in English, but there is a quote spoken by one of Solzhenitsyn's character (Sologdin if I remember correctly) in "The First circle" which I read in French translation:
"J'ai fermé mes yeux aux fantômes, seul les espoir bien lointaine agit parfois mon cœur"
"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast fate / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries ... " (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29)
or
"Glory be to God for dappled things!" (Hopkins, "Pied Beauty")
or
"The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / upon the place beneath." (Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice")
or
"The soul sits ceremonious, like Tombs" (Dickinson, "After great pain")
1) I live by a lake and love nature, and I am often reminded of these verses by the French poet, Lamartine. Alas, they are in French but he essentially says that everything changes, but the same sun rises for you everyday, testament to the permanence of nature.
“Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime ;
Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours
Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,
3) The one that resonates most with my spiritual beliefs that the Self is divine is Love after Love by Walcot. Incidentally Walcot did not write this with the Bhagavad Geeta in mind: https://anuprabhala.substack.com/p/love-after-love
-Catullus, for all those times in high school I wanted to sound emo but speak nerd. And for all those times as an 30something adult when I've wanted to speak just enough nerd to convince someone that I'm way too boring to appreciate the intricate details of their ex drama and they should just leave me in peace at the bar with my book where I belong.
This was my father’s mantra. And good advice for life. Said more colloquially, it’s important to always be able to look yourself in the mirror without shame.
I don't have it memorized or anything but I think about it often when people talk and talk and talk and talk and talk about finding solutions but don't just make solutions. It's fitting for bureaucracy or politics, intellectual group discussions, business or organizational management, interpersonal dramas...
It's funny because I ultimately ended up not enjoying / appreciating much of Paradise Lost, and I don't like Milton as a person. But this is definitely the lines of poetry I think about the most often, bar none.
W.H. Auden's "God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would've written had your life been good." It was part of an 8-min monologue I had as the character Butch Honeywell at the end of our end of sixth form play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. I'll never get it out of my head, nor the next line in my speech... "She was poem..."
There was a verse that I only remember the meanings of but not the words: the girl reminds her love not to lose his young heart whenever and no matter what happens.
Morbid, I know, but speaks of the fragility of life with allusion to Macbeth. Many Frost lines live at my fingertips. “Consigned to the moon…” is another (old man’s winter night)
"The woods are lovely, dark and deep/But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep."
-Robert Frost.
A regular reminder to myself to balance my dreams against my responsibilities.
Glory be to God for dappled things…
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
You must change your life.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
That Rilke is the one I thought of first, too!
I think of many Frost poems often. This is one of the best!
"What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"
and
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."
Clearly a big Mary Oliver fan.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”
But also
“But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lye
Deserts of vast Eternity.”
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Langston Hughes poem is timeless...Unfortunately injustice continues in our world...just another reason to acknowledge its existence and work towards its extinction...
“My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
One of my favorite poems and my favorite lines! Every time I read it, it gives me chills.
Me too! Just an unbelievable ending to such a visceral poem.
Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
- W. B. Yeats
or
a red wheel
barrow...
(William Carlos Williams)
which then makes me think of Rosebud and then I'm lost to thought
"To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield" Tennyson's Ulysses. Actually almost anything by Tennyson which my Dad read to me instead of nursery rhymes.
"April is the cruellest month" —The Waste Land; my wife and I like to tease each other about how she hates winter and this line comes into play often.
There once was a man from Nantucket...
- Anonymous
Summer's going fast, nights growing colder
Children growing up, old friends growing older
Freeze this moment a little bit longer
Make each sensation a little bit stronger
- Time Stand Still, Neil Peart
Who says that my poems are poems?
My poems aren't poems at all
When you understand
that my poems really aren't poems
then we can talk poetry together
- Ryōkan
I can't pick just one. My mind is always on shuffle. (And a shoutout to those wonderful folks at Substack for screwing up formatting in comments.)
Mine too...impossible to choose, poetry is a constant refrain in my head.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
From Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas. I had the pleasure of visiting Adlestrop some years ago. The atmosphere is exactly as Thomas describes it, though all that remains of the station is the sign bearing its name
..and all the birds...one of my favourites too.
My poetry days are long behind me and they are mostly in Hungarian. I have nothing in English, but there is a quote spoken by one of Solzhenitsyn's character (Sologdin if I remember correctly) in "The First circle" which I read in French translation:
"J'ai fermé mes yeux aux fantômes, seul les espoir bien lointaine agit parfois mon cœur"
Probably the most gripping line of my life.
just the beauty of the image.
“Time passes through me in the shape of a dream / Clawing ferociously through my memories” — Vildhjarta “Traces”
I look forward to the answers to this question
Mary Oliver's "One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began," (The Journey)
Langston Hughes' "Or does it explode?" (Harlem)
Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments
What though on hamely fare we dine, wear hoddin grey an' a' that
I guess it is the flag of my disposition, of hopeful green stuff woven
Song, let them take it, for there's more enterprise in walking naked
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity
Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Which line of poetry do you think about most often?
Great Question!
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open"--Muriel Rukeyser, "Käthe Kollwitz"
"The art of losing isn't hard to master"--Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"
"Something there is that doesn’t love a wall"--Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"
At the moment, from Seamus Heaney’s poem Digging.
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it”
I grow old … I grow old
I shall wear the legs of my trousers rolled.
Depending on the mood:
"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast fate / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries ... " (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29)
or
"Glory be to God for dappled things!" (Hopkins, "Pied Beauty")
or
"The quality of mercy is not strained / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / upon the place beneath." (Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice")
or
"The soul sits ceremonious, like Tombs" (Dickinson, "After great pain")
1) I live by a lake and love nature, and I am often reminded of these verses by the French poet, Lamartine. Alas, they are in French but he essentially says that everything changes, but the same sun rises for you everyday, testament to the permanence of nature.
“Mais la nature est là qui t'invite et qui t'aime ;
Plonge-toi dans son sein qu'elle t'ouvre toujours
Quand tout change pour toi, la nature est la même,
Et le même soleil se lève sur tes jours.”
2) I also love La Chanson d’Automne by Paul Verlaine. Interestingly, lines from his poem were used as code for D-day. I write about this: https://anuprabhala.substack.com/p/paul-verlaines-chanson-dautomne-musicality
3) The one that resonates most with my spiritual beliefs that the Self is divine is Love after Love by Walcot. Incidentally Walcot did not write this with the Bhagavad Geeta in mind: https://anuprabhala.substack.com/p/love-after-love
Aha I found it! Verlaine! Great choice - you’ve reminded me I need to read more Verlaine
"Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail.
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my tail."
I think of this whenever I get stuck behind someone & am sometimes sufficiently moved to say it out loud.
"“Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety."
Ash Wednesday
The assonance so cool and carnal.
The bones sang scattered and shining
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Song of the Master and the Boatswain - W. H. Auden
'But I, being poor, have only my dreams.'
W. B. Yeats, 'The Cloths of Heaven'.
I tell why, here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/0xjfnpZVzUxcB2s3Wu5UIT?si=Cv-BRVjkQRyOgMxsPSVxLQ
There are a few:
'She walks in beauty like the night....' Lord Byron
'Whenas in silks my Julia goes...' Robert Herrick
'Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams." WB Yeats
To be honest there are so many, but I'm a BIG Romantic when it comes to poetry.
From The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot:
" Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many."
And thank you for the shout out link today, Mikey.
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams
And
Outflew the Web and floated wide
The mirror crack'd from side to side
The curse has come upon me cried
The lady of Shallot
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ ἔθηκε
Homer Iliad 1:1-2
"Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn."
From "Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day" by Delmore Schwartz. Time is the most precious resource, don't waste it.
Odi et amo.
-Catullus, for all those times in high school I wanted to sound emo but speak nerd. And for all those times as an 30something adult when I've wanted to speak just enough nerd to convince someone that I'm way too boring to appreciate the intricate details of their ex drama and they should just leave me in peace at the bar with my book where I belong.
“This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene III
This was my father’s mantra. And good advice for life. Said more colloquially, it’s important to always be able to look yourself in the mirror without shame.
Great question, Mikey.
"[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
That's the line I think of when trapped in a boring or irritating situation. But then I comfort myself with:
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
From Paradise Lost:
"Others apart sat on a Hill retir'd,
In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate,
Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledg absolute,
And found no end, in wandring mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argu'd then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame,
Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophie:
Yet with a pleasing sorcerie could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th' obdured brest
With stubborn patience as with triple steel."
I don't have it memorized or anything but I think about it often when people talk and talk and talk and talk and talk about finding solutions but don't just make solutions. It's fitting for bureaucracy or politics, intellectual group discussions, business or organizational management, interpersonal dramas...
It's funny because I ultimately ended up not enjoying / appreciating much of Paradise Lost, and I don't like Milton as a person. But this is definitely the lines of poetry I think about the most often, bar none.
I'm normally really not a poetry person so I'll tell you the one poem that's ever got stuck in my head: Adrian Mitchell's Tell Me Lies About Vietnam.
W.H. Auden's "God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would've written had your life been good." It was part of an 8-min monologue I had as the character Butch Honeywell at the end of our end of sixth form play, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. I'll never get it out of my head, nor the next line in my speech... "She was poem..."
The wind through my heart / blows all my candles out. - Deborah Digges
My friend, my friend I was born / doing reference work in sin
and born / confessing it. - Anne Sexton
alitarative magic !
Mine is from Rumi which I share at the end of my post below :)
https://open.substack.com/pub/ranas9/p/why-am-i-on-substack
“My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation, As my two eyes make one in sight.”
I found this line while writing a speech for my graduating class, days before before I flew
off to teach in a conflict zone. It’s been near twenty years since I began to pray said lines, I rarely open my eyes to check the alignment…
Although, I did get some new specs today.
"Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you."
-Whitman, To You
Mine is:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
There was a verse that I only remember the meanings of but not the words: the girl reminds her love not to lose his young heart whenever and no matter what happens.
na tha kuch to khuda tha kuch na hota to khuda hota
duboya mujhko hone ne na hota mai to kya hota
- Ghalib
[when there was nothing, then God was; if nothing were, then God would be
'being' drowned me; if I were not, then what would be?]
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
Frost. “Out, out —“
Morbid, I know, but speaks of the fragility of life with allusion to Macbeth. Many Frost lines live at my fingertips. “Consigned to the moon…” is another (old man’s winter night)
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.
If I can stop one heart from breaking
by
Emily Dickinson
Remembered landscapes are left in me
The way a bee leaves its sting,
hopelessly, passion-placed,
Untranslatable language.
From Charles Wright's All Landscape is Abstract and Tends to Repeat
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30933/pdf
My littlest one and I recite “Happy Thought” by Robert Louis Stevenson to calm her down when she doesn’t get her way.
I can't go past the first few couplets of Rumi's Masnavi, translated here by Alan Williams:
Listen to this reed as it is grieving;
it tells the story of our separations.
'Since I was severed from the bed of reeds,
in my cry men and women have lamented.'
On a side note, this has been the best comment section I have ever read.
Bukowski:
people are worn away with
striving,
they hide in common
habits.
their concerns are herd
concerns.
Emily Dickinson! So many, but let’s go with this:
I never saw a moor;
I never saw the sea,
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a billow be.
Sorry, really didn’t mean to post that comment three times ! A substack gremlin, I think.