Five Favorite Poems

Started by Florestan, January 22, 2022, 09:13:24 AM

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Florestan

As in the paintings thread, not necessarily the top 5, just 5 favorites.

I'll start, in no particular order.

Written in English

1. Poe - The Raven
2. Byron - When We Two Parted
3. Wordsworth - I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
4. Yeats - When You Are Old
5. Siegfried Sassoon - Strangeness of Heart

Non-English

1. Baudelaire - Correspondences https://fleursdumal.org/poem/103
2. Lermontov - The Angel http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/mdenner/Demo/texts/angel.html
3. Trakl - Winter Evening https://allpoetry.com/poem/6200891-A-Winter-Evening--From-the-German-of-Georg-Trakl--by-Linda-Marshall
4. Ruben Dario - Litany of Our Lord Don Quijote (could not find any complete translation from the original Spanish, sorry - the original is here: https://www.poemas-del-alma.com/letania-de-nuestro.htm)
5. Porfirio Barba Jacob - Song of the Profound Life https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poem/7111/auto/0/0/Porfirio-Barba-Jacob/Song-of-the-Profound-Life/en/tile

"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." — Thomas Beecham

Jo498

English

Shakespeare
Sonnet XVIII (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day)
Sonnet CXVI (Let me not to the marriage of true minds)

Shelley
Ozymandias

W.B. Yeats
The Second Coming

Masefield
Cargoes
https://web.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/cargoes.html

Sea fever
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54932/sea-fever-56d235e0d871e

German

Gryphius:
Es ist alles eitel [vanitas]
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Es_ist_alles_eitel

Goethe:
Wanderers Nachtlied (Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh)

Schiller:
Die Bürgschaft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_B%C3%BCrgschaft

Eichendorff:
Mondnacht (also in Schumann's op.39)

Rilke:
Herbsttag (Autumn day)

I don't really know any other language well enough (I could pretentiously quote the famous Sappho fragment, deduke men a selanna etc. and I also once learned a brief poem or two by Garcia Lorca (that starts "Cordoba - lejana y sola"), I love the sounds of these languages but it would be just pretention and I don't remember anything from translations (I think I had an anthology each of Neruda and Lorca) to have a favorite.

It's all crowded out by fragments I remember from so many German poems in school and later the texts of Lieder (not always the greatest poems per se but often surprisingly good as a Lied)
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Florestan

#2
Thank you, Jo, for your interesting reply.

John Masefield is one of my favorites too:

https://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,19693.msg890418.html#msg890418

Besides English, I can fluently read French and Spanish poetry.

Your post raises two interesting points.

1. I can recite literally hundreds of poems / fragments by Romanian poets, either learned in school or read and memorized in private --- remember what I said in another thread, literature (poetry in particular) was my first love.

I think this is the case with each and every GMGer, whatever their nationality.

2. Ever since I ldiscovered Lieder, I tried to improve my German in autodidact manner --- and currently I can get the gist of any given German song.

Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus
Flog durch die stillen Lande
Als flöge sie nach Haus


Anyway, fwiw here's my favorite German song hands down:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmwTa9qRq0o

and my favorite German strophe:

Ich liebe den Wein,
mein Mädchen vor allem.
Sie tut mir allein
am besten gefallen.
Ich bin nicht alleine
bei meinem Glaß Weine.
Mein Mädchen dabei;
die Gedanken sind frei!


This is a very good English translation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQuF-afPWM












"Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory." — Thomas Beecham

Jo498

In my school time in the 1980s learning poems by heart was fading but not entirely gone. We had to memorize a few but only in German (I know people of my parents generation who had to recite Homer in Greek in the principal's office as punishment but this was probably also fading in the 1950s - sounds more 1850s...). By far the longest (but I am missing a few stanzas and would have to refresh after 35 years) was Goethe's Zauberlehrling (Sorcerer's apprentice). Of "Die Bürgschaft" we had to memorize the first few and last few stanzas; one very industrious girl (not popular...) memorized and recited the whole thing... I don't know many poems enirely but hundreds of lines or stanzas from all kinds, including bits of the famous plays like Faust oder William Tell (both are shock full of verses that became adages in German). And I know probably even more of the ones that became famous Lieder by Schubert, Schumann, Strauss etc.

I don't remember any poems in English class and I was only in the "basic" English class, we didn't do any Shakespeare plays or so either (I read through a few of them later in my 20s, and also so some as movies or on stage). I got a Dover book "Best remembered poems" that has many of the famous English ones. Sea Fever I probably encountered first as song by John Ireland. (I actually had to look up the author, I had not even been aware that both "Cargoes" and "Sea Fever" were by the same guy!)
We did some Ovid, Virgil and Horace in Latin but I only remember a few of the most famous verses like Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes (must be Virgil, Laocoon warns the Trojans  about the Horse). Translating is hard enough, so we were spared memorization.
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Sergeant Rock

#4
T.S. Eliot Burnt Norton from Four Quartets

T.S. Eliot Little Gidding from Four Quartets

Dylan Thomas Fern Hill

Ernest Dowson Envoy

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

John Berryman Sonnet 115

All we were going strong last night this time,
the mots were flying & the frozen daiquiris
were downing, supine on the floor lay Lise
listening to Schubert grievous & sublime,
my head was frantic with a following rime:
it was a good evening, an evening to please,
I kissed her in the kitchen -ecstasies-
among so much good we tamped down the crime.

The weather's changing. This morning was cold,
as I made for the grove, without expectation,
some hundred Sonnets in my pocket, old,
to read her if she came. Presently the sun
yellowed the pines & my lady came not
in blue jeans & a sweater. I sat down & wrote.
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

ritter

Let's see (in chronological order, the first three with strong musical associations).

Charles Baudelaire, L'Invitation au voyage (from Les Fleurs du mal)
Paul Verlaine, Une sainte en son auréole (from La Bonne Chanson)
Stéphane Mallarmé, Remémoration d'amis belges
Constantine Cavafy, The God Abandons Antony
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (the whole thing  ;))




foxandpeng

#6
I spend a fair bit of time with poetry, partly because one of my undergraduate degrees was English, with my dissertation focusing on Philip Larkin. Huge fan. Just like music, my reading habits vary massively, but 5 enduring favourites...

Jared Carter - Labyrinth
Hart Crane - The Bridge
Ted Hughes - The Horses
Norman Nicholson - Rising Five
Clive James - Japanese Maple
"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people ... then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour — such is my idea of happiness"

Tolstoy

ritter

#7
Quote from: foxandpeng on January 30, 2022, 08:48:50 AM
.....

Hart Crane - The Bridge
...
Another favourite of mine (also with a strong musical association, Elliott Carter's A Symphony of Three Orchestras —it was actually thanks to that piece that I discovered Crane).

Good evening, foxandpeng!

foxandpeng

Quote from: ritter on January 30, 2022, 08:55:11 AM
Another favourite of mine (also with a strong musical association, Elliott Carter's A Symphony of Three Orchestras —it was actually thanks to that piece that I discovered Crane).

Good evening, foxandpeg!

Good evening to you too  ritter!

I'll be sure to give that a prod :-)

Crane is great. Good to find a kindred spirit.
"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people ... then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour — such is my idea of happiness"

Tolstoy

Iota

They could easily all be Shakespeare, but these will suffice.

Sonnet 73 - William Shakespeare
The Whitsun Weddings - Philip Larkin
The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy
'my way is in the sand flowing' - Samuel Beckett
Futility - Wilfred Owen



foxandpeng

And more...

James Sheard - Dammtor
W B Yeats - The Wheel
Don Paterson - Rain
Edward Thomas - Rain
Carol Ann Duffy - Prayer


Perhaps a darker, or at least, more pensive set of themes to many of these.
"A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people ... then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbour — such is my idea of happiness"

Tolstoy

Rosalba

Keats - The Eve of St Agnes
Pope - The Rape of the Lock
Gerard Manley Hopkins - As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Thomas The Rhymer - traditional ballad, Child 37
Fleur Adcock - Leaving the Tate

vandermolen

Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
Wordsworth: Upon Westminster Bridge, 1802
Siegfried Sassoon: The General
Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting
Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that goodnight
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Rosalba

Quote from: vandermolen on April 18, 2022, 08:14:12 AM
Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
Wordsworth: Upon Westminster Bridge, 1802
Siegfried Sassoon: The General
Wilfred Owen: Strange Meeting
Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that goodnight

A lovely collection. I know and like them all. :)
The Darkling Thrush was on my O-level syllabus and I can still (just about) recite it, with a few pauses for thought.