While checking out Twitter today I discovered that today is World Poetry Day, and I saw that @PenguinUKBooks is retweeting tweets mentioning people’s favorite poems, so of course I started thinking of mine, of which there are many. It seemed a shame to limit it to a single poem in a world filled with wonderful poetry so here, where I am not constrained by a mere 140 characters, I present a list of my favorite poems.
Some of my favorite poems, but not all
- The Tyger -William Blake
- Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey -William Wordworth
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and
- Kubla Khan -Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- The Lady of Shalott and
- The Charge of the Light Brigade -Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám -Edward Fitzgerald
- Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came -Robert Browning (I was introduced to this marvelous poem by a favorite author, Stephen King)
- Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse and
- The Scholar Gypsy -Matthew Arnold
- Jabberwocky -Lewis Carroll
- The Walk -Thomas Hardy
- Apologia Pro Pemate Meo and
- Dulce Et Decorum Est -Wilfred Owen
- If -Rudyard Kipling
- The Waste Land -TS Eliot
- Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself -Walt Whitman
- The Red Wheelbarrow, and
- This is Just to Say, and
- A sort of a Song -William Carlos Willaims
- In a Station of the Metro -Ezra Pound
- anyone lived in a pretty how town and
- in Just -EE Cummings
- Persimmons -Li-Young Lee
- Instructions -Neil Gaiman
Two of my favorite haiku, which are without titles
In this hush profound,
Into the very rocks it seeps–
The cicada sound.
-Basho
Death Poem
Leaves of words:
autumn colors
a still mountain.
Jomei