Poetry and Lyrics

[Selah]

Well then... A search of the general chit-chat forum did not produce any extant thread similar to the one I am about to begin. If there is one, and I happened to miss it by accident, I do apologize. Anyhow, here goes.

Do you have a favourite poem, or some favourite line or verse from a poem? Song lyrics count too.

I enjoy reading poetry, and over the course of my perusals have discovered various lines, verses, and entire poems that I really like. Many were written by John Keats, Alexander Pope, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. A complete litany of my favourites would be somewhat taxing on both my fingers and the reader's eyes, and so I'll just give a sample.

From Keats, I love 'Lamia', and 'Ode to A Nightingale' - the first tells an excellent story that hinges on a creature from mythology, I believe, and the imagery and description in the second is enrapturing; near deliciously tangible. From Shelley, I love the poem 'Alastor'. My favourite verse:

There was a Poet whose untimely tomb
No human hands with pious reverence reared,
But the charmed eddies of autumnal winds
Built o'er his mouldering bones a pyramid
Of mouldering leaves in the waste wilderness:--
A lovely youth,--no mourning maiden decked
With weeping flowers, or votive cypress wreath,
The lone couch of his everlasting sleep:--
Gentle, and brave, and generous,--no lorn bard
Breathed o'er his dark fate one melodious sigh:
He lives, he died, he sung, in solitude.
Strangers have wept to hear his passionate notes,
And virgins, as unknown he passed, have pined
And wasted for fond love of his wild eyes.
And fire of those soft orbs have ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice,
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.

(50-65)

I also put several favourite lines from 'Alastor' in my Twilight Princess signature picture. As for Pope, my selection comes from canto II of his 'The Rape of the Lock':

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,
Wafr of the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;
Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light.
Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,
Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,
Dipt in the richest tincture of the skies,
Where light disports in ever mingling dyes,
While ev'ry beam new translucent colour flings,
Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

(59-68)

Though I'm not overly fond of rhyming poetry, I liked this last selection because of the description: I love vivid imagery in poetry.

Another favourite poem of mine is from Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene', called 'The Garden of Adonis'.

Concerning song lyrics, most of my favourites come from Sixpence None the Richer's album Divine Discontent: I like the lyrics of 'Don't Dream it's Over', because I find them very inspirational (the chorus and first verse, at least); 'Melody of You' (the lyrics here are very, very beautiful); and 'Eyes Wide Open' (the song is rather melancholy, O.o). I also like 'Never Alone', by BarlowGirl, because they're very relevant to me.

So, to reiterate: do you have any favourite poems or lyrics? Post them here, and give a sentence or two on why you like them. I hope you hear from you all. ^^

- Selah

[Erik]

Well, this is about Art and writing, so I'll move it there. And seeing as it's not what we write, I'll leave it in the main area.

And, as a matter of fact, I have a favorite poem. We had it in school, and I liked it.

"I'm nobody! Who are you?" by Emily Dickinson

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!

[Ket]

My favorite humorous poem is "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man," by Ogden Nash:

Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission
and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha.
I might as well give you my opinion of these two kinds of sin as long as,
in a way, against each other we are pitting them,
And that is, don't bother your head about the sins of commission because
however sinful, they must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be
committing them.
It is the sin of omission, the second kind of sin,
That lays eggs under your skin.
The way you really get painfully bitten
Is by the insurance you haven't taken out and the checks you haven't added up
the stubs of and the appointments you haven't kept and the bills you
haven't paid and the letters you haven't written.
Also, about sins of omission there is one particularly painful lack of beauty,
Namely, it isn't as though it had been a riotous red-letter day or night every
time you neglected to do your duty;
You didn't get a wicked forbidden thrill
Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to pay a bill;
You didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry Whee,
Let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home, and this round
of unwritten letters is on me.
No, you never get any fun
Out of things you haven't done,
But they are the things that I do not like to be amid,
Because the suitable things you didn't do give you a lot more trouble than the
unsuitable things you did.
The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of
sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing.

-Ogden Nash

Favorite line?

"They must at least be fun or else you wouldn't be committing them."

[Spazzie]

Ummmm....Hmm.I had a poem copied but I must've deleted it.
Here's some Lyrics:
Clip the wings that get you high,Just leave them where they lie,And tell yourself You'll be the death of me. -By Seether
What you see's not what you get. -By Kelly Clarkson