March 21, was declared World Poetry Day by UNESCO in 1999. Eversince, the day is marked as a celebration of reading, writing, and sharing poems. Poems are manifestations of thoughts, questions and feelings of individuals across the world.
I’ve chosen some of my favorite lines that have shaped my thinking and serve as constant reminders of the creative spirit of the mind.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
~
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Pablo Neruda, Tonight I Can Write
~
We look before and after
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought
Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark
~
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
~
He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest
W H Auden, Funeral Blues
~
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all
Emily Dickinson, Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
~
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above –
Know that you aren’t alone
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
Vikram Seth, All You Who Sleep Tonight
~
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of me
Charles Bukowski, Raw With Love
~
There will be time, there will be time
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse
T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
~
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and wherever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
E. E. Cummings, i carry your heart with me (i carry it in)
~
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
~
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to then: ‘Hold on!’
Rudyard Kipling, If –
~
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday
~
She had
A heart – how shall I say? – too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she likes whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
~
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
Pablo Neruda, If You Forget Me
~
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and if their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
Andover the sorrows of your changing face
William Butler Yeats, When You Are Old
~
When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She’s like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn’t want the day to end.
When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep,
thinking:
as midnight is to the moon is sleep to the beloved.
David Lehman, When A Woman Loves A Man
~
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol
~
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that ensures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And Life, the shadow of death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Atlanta in Calydon
~
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
William Butler Yeats, The Stolen Child
~
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rise is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Music, When Soft Voices Die
~
Though they go mad they shall be sane.
Though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again.
Though lovers be lost, love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas, And Death Shall Have No Dominion
unwinding epiphanies 