Question of the Day: What poem do you have committed to memory?
@GaryPoole In spring when maple buds turn red,
We turn the clocks an hour ahead.
Which means each springtime that arrives,
We lose an hour out of our lives.
Who cares?
In autumn when birds in flocks fly southward,
Back we turn the clocks.
And so regain that lovely thing,
The missing hour we lost last spring.
(IDK the poet. Had to memorize it in second grade.)
@GaryPoole and the Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service.
Jabberwocky.
In FRENCH.
Ils brilgue, les tôves lubricilleux
Se gyrent en vrillant dans la guave.
Enmimés sont les gouges-bosqueux,
Et le momerâde hors-gravent.
@GaryPoole
Would that we could at once paint with our eyes.
@GaryPoole Nature's First Green is Gold, Robert Frost; Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
@GaryPoole 🤣 😂 😂 Good one!
@Pat_Walrond I've had that memorized since I was a kid. No idea why it is still permanently in my memory. 😂
@GaryPoole Some things are like that. Mine are
Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore
No doubt you have heard the name before —
Was a boy who never would shut a door!
The wind might whistle, the wind might roar,
And teeth be aching and throats be sore,
But still he never would shut the door.
The rest of it is mostly lost in the mists of time, but those lines I've never forgotten.
@GaryPoole The Canterbury Tales prologue in middle English "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth ...
@GaryPoole Ma Mignonne by Marot
@GaryPoole
A man stood on a precipice
A rope around his throat
A pint of poison he had drunk
For life had got his goat.
He held a pistol to his head
A bomb was in his britches
And sticks of dynamite as well
It nearly bust the stitches
He stepped up to the high cliff edge
And then with bated breath
Jumped onto the rocks below
As he thought, to his death
The rope stopped with a sudden jerk
But not enough to choke
The gun went off, but missed his head
And hit the rope, which broke
...
@GaryPoole
He landed in the ocean
Which at this point was shallow
And there he brought the poison up
As briny he did swallow.
The water put the fuses out
And now for life he craved
He simply wandered to the shore
And thus his life was saved!
I have a few.
"There Once Was a Man from Nantucket"
"Ode to Billie Joe"
"They Said It Could Not Be Done"
Memorized when I was 4. I still have the book.
The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43166/the-swing-56d221dc6ffc4
I don't memorize poems, so the only one is probably the Jabberwocky.
I do, however, regularly read Diving Into The Wreck by Adrienne Rich
@GaryPoole What to Think of, by Mark Strand. And Afternoon on a Hill, by Edna St. Vincent Millay
One fine day
In the middle of the night
Two dead boys
Got up to fight
Back to back
They face each other
Drew their swords
And shot each other
A deaf policeman
Heard the noise
And came and killed
The two dead boys
If you don't believe
This lie is true
Just ask the blind man
For he saw it too