Your favourite poems

[Patf]

Sorry if that sounds rather corny. I tried to find a thread which was on here some time ago and it seems to have gone, or I was imagining it (very likely.) Started by an old literary.member who doesn't post any more.

Anyway: I was reminded of this one when reading about the plans to commemorate the start of WW1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Meeting_%28poem%29

It was one of the poems we learnt about when I was doing A level english, and left a lasting impression on me.

[NormanH]

I have to cite the one from which my signature is taken:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172062

[pitway]

the boy stood on the burning deck

his pocket full of crackers

one went off between his legs

and blew off both his knac*** :) , I'll get may coat!

[Patf]

That's an old one pitway [:D]

In the same class as :

"Life presents a gloomy picture......."

[Pommier]

I`ve always liked a lot of the WW1 poets and Dolce et Decorum est has to be one of my favourites.

[mint]

Pommier, I have an anthology of war poems which I treasure.

Can't help but love the well-known ones:  Grey's "Elergy", McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" ( which I found very touching writ large on the wall in the war museum at Ypres) but here is my favourite for the word pictures:

Arthur Graeme West "Night Patrol"......oops, sorry, can't post it.  Clearly must get the new computer working!

Someone, please post it; just the words because I don't really like anyone else reading it aloud other than myself......[geek]

 

[YCCMB]

Beasley Street. John Cooper Clarke

[mint]

Oh Betty, that's a bit too ...REAL [:(]

Now I shall always think of it as "Beastly Street"!

[Loiseau]

Gosh, Sweets, I just looked up the Arthur Graeme West poem. It illuminates the horror of carrying out those night patrols - about which I have read in battalion war diaries. As a result I also looked up Arthur Graeme West's own war diary, which is very interesting. He was very disillusioned with religion, and with cheerfully gung-ho attitudes of some fellow officers.

I am currently reading "Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man" by Siegfried Sassoon, another whose war poetry would include my favourite pieces.

Angela

[YCCMB]

[quote user="sweet 17"]

Oh Betty, that's a bit too ...REAL [:(]

Now I shall always think of it as "Beastly Street"!

[/quote]

You'll be grateful, Sweets, that I didn't cite some of his other poems as among my favourites..which they are, but Beasley Street is a classic.

"I wanna be yours"...is on the GCSE syllabus. I suppose the Keats lovers among the forum's readership will have attacks of the vapours  but JCC's poems - especially as recited by the man himself - are as clever an insight into life in the 20th century as much that has gone before. I think.

[mint]

[quote user="Loiseau"]Gosh, Sweets, I just looked up the Arthur Graeme West poem. It illuminates the horror of carrying out those night patrols - about which I have read in battalion war diaries. As a result I also looked up Arthur Graeme West's own war diary, which is very interesting. He was very disillusioned with religion, and with cheerfully gung-ho attitudes of some fellow officers. I am currently reading "Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man" by Siegfried Sassoon, another whose war poetry would include my favourite pieces. Angela[/quote]

Angela, I am so glad the poem "speaks" to you.  It's just so graphic and engages all your senses, your sight, your smell, your touch, your hearing and even your taste when it finishes in that unexpected, banal and matter-of-fact way about the rum ration.  After all the horrors, normality of a sort?

I particularly like the description of the corn stalks because, of course, the crops were unharvested during the war as the men were away fighting.

I expect you have visited the war museum in Ypres.  The reconstruction there of No Man's Land gives such shock to the senses of the desolation.  When I visited, there was a special exhibition of water-colours done by a German officer.  He was capturing in his notebooks the scenes, often of destruction, that lay before his eyes.  He was no mean artist and it gave me a sense, as nothing else had done, of war being cruel to both sides; no winners, only losers. 

[Loiseau]

Yes, i had never thought about the corn being unharvested till I read this. Having to find your way back by picking certain remains to recognise.... How could anybody return to normal civilian life after that kind of experience.

Yes, I have visited the museums in Ypres and Zonnebecke, but also the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne where there is a horrific series of engravings by Otto Dix depicting very much what the poet is saying. Some of the older WW1 museums in France and Belgium still have the stereoscopic viewers that include some truly ghastly photographic images.

Angela

[YCCMB]

[quote user="sweet 17"]

I particularly like the description of the corn stalks because, of course, the crops were unharvested during the war as the men were away fighting.

[/quote]

I've been thinking about this all night. If the crops were unharvested because all the men were away at war, who planted them?

[Patf]

Betty - the poem says the cornstalks were 2 years old, so planted before the farmers went off to war.

What a tragic poem, never heard of West before, but I have read some of Seigfried Sassoon's poetry.

[Clarkkent]

John Keats, when facing death from consumption:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

And also, la Belle Dame sans merci  - The beautiful woman who doesn't say "Thank you" (Flanders & Swann)

[YCCMB]

[quote user="Patf"]Betty - the poem says the cornstalks were 2 years old, so planted before the farmers went off to war.

What a tragic poem, never heard of West before, but I have read some of Seigfried Sassoon's poetry.

[/quote]

D'oh... Of course.

[NormanH]

Another sort of grim reality:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058

[dwmcn]

the boy stood on the burning deck
his feet were full of blisters
he climbed aloft, his pants burned off
and now he wears his sisters

[dwmcn]

My grandfather is buried in an American WW1 cemetery near Verdun in France.

David

[Patf]

More romantic: Someone gave me a book of Shakespeare's sonnets as a wedding present, with this one marked:

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/116.html

[NormanH]

There is a wide range of attitudes expressed in the Sonnets:

I am glad that this one wasn't bookmarked (although it has always been a favourite of mine for its honest acceptance that all isn't always perfect)

"O, love's best habit is in seeming trust"

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-138-when-my-love-swears-that-she-is-made/

[Pommier]

[quote user="NormanH"]Another sort of grim reality:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058

[/quote]

Although I enjoyed reading this poem, it's a bit depressing - not one to dwell on if alone.

I liked Betty's `I wanna be yours` I bet that's popular with kids studying GCSE and better/more relevant than the poetry studied when I was at school.

[Pommier]

[quote user="NormanH"]Another sort of grim reality:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058

[/quote]

Although I enjoyed reading this poem, it's a bit depressing - not one to dwell on if alone.

I liked Betty's `I wanna be yours` I bet that's popular with kids studying GCSE and better/more relevant than the poetry studied when I was at school.

[mint]

[quote user="NormanH"]Another sort of grim reality:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178058
[/quote]

Strangely enough, I don't find that grim at all.

I'm much more aghast at living forever than at dying.

Pommier, tell me how you have managed to write on the Forum using your new computer?

Mine seems to let me "read only", no replying to anybody's post and certainly no email account sorted out as yet.

[powerdesal]

Not a poem related to WW1 but 'High Flight' does it for me.