Poetry Forum

If you are like me there will be a line of poetry, maybe a couplet, that inspired you to read more poetry and to be engaged by it as a writing form. For me it was

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through. from Daddy by Sylvia Plath.

Yes I had enjoyed other more traditional verse and the War Poets we studied at school but at age 16 (long time ago) that line coming at the end of a very powerful and emotional piece of writing made me realise that poetry could be hugely impactful and inspired me to read more "modern" poetry.

What is the line or couplet that inspired your love of poetry?

elph

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

TS Eliot


Rosemary

"The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas"

The Highwayman - Alfred Noyes, 1906
(Was the only poem that I ever wanted to study whilst I was at school but unfortunately never actually did)

Hopkins:

And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


Inspiring . Arthur

Sir Walter Scott

The Eagle, he was lord above,
And Rob was lord below.

I heard those lines in a film called Restless Natives when I was still at school, those lines did for me what hours of English classes studying the lyrics of Sting could not.

Best rhyming couplet to my mind is:

"Turning over their failures
By some bed of lobelias,"

From - "Toads Revisited" by Philip Larkin

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies

I'm going to be greedy and post a stanza

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!

From the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde - the first poem I really enjoyed when I was very little. It made me realise that poetry didnt have to be Hardyesque. I knew it all by heart at one point

Sharra
xx

I know I came late to the party but oh well
TS Eliot the Waste Land "I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
For me I think it is probably the most menacing line in literature

Also Tennyson from In Memoriam Canto 50: "Be near me when my light is low."

WH Auden Funeral Blues "For nothing no can ever come to any good" and
"He was my North, my South, my East and West
My working week and my Sunday rest."

Philip Larkin High Windows: "And his lot will go down the slide like free bloody birds"
"Rather than words comes the thought of high windows."
This Be The Verse: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

WB Yeats The Stolen Child:
"Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild "

As you can see just too many to chose from
But I love the quote from Daddy as well

Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe



Brillig!

Stuart

A very interesting question. Putting it in the terms set down at the start by Elph, i.e. what started it all off, I think it must have been this:

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,
He rode all unarm'd, and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

Thank you, Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia.

The first poem I remember reading and falling in love with was Carroll's "Jabberwocky"

"All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe."

which taught me that poetry didn't have to be understood to be enjoyed.

The first poem I remember having a real effect on me was Owen's "Dolce et Decorum Est", especially the lines

"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,"

which taught me that poets did more than wander lonely as clouds.

Then my English teacher Mr Wimpenny introduced me to the poetry of The Beatles,

"Quietly turning the backdoor key
Stepping outside she is free."

which taught me that poems didn't only appear in books, and weren't only written for grown-ups.

And then a couple of years later I read

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness"

and that was it ---- I knew poetry was going to be with me for life!

So, that's how i got hooked, but "favourite line or couplet"? That's a far more difficult question . . . .

Fun thread, would love to hear from others!

B

~

Afraid I've absolutely no recollection of what line got me into poetry, in fact I don't think there was one; although I do remember the moment/conversation. I'd been reading poetry as a student for years, but turned round one day to a mate and saw that he had a selection of Keats in his room. This puzzled me, since we weren't studying keats. So I ask him and he tells me he's just reading it for pleasure. This was a sort of revelation, and it made me go and buy Ginsberg's Howl an hour later. So sort of like you Brian, one of my first lines of enjoyment was 'I saw the best minds of my generation...'

Funnily enough, I wrote my first ever poem for a competition where the prize was 250 quid. I didn't win, but promised myself I'd practice for a year so I could win the next £250 (joining PG about half a year through this year). Didn't win that, so kept on plowing through so I could win the next. Didn't win that. I'm ineligible now and can't enter... will I continue writing? Haha

As for favourite lines etc, I've been impressed with the sort of abstract, almost aphoristic singular line which can be dropped into a poem to mix up the pace, meaning and direction. At the moment, I'm constantly wowed by this bolded line in the Heaney poem 'Mint':

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and love:
My last things will be my first things slipping from me.
Yet all things go free that have survived.

Astonishingly good writing.

Dave

Like Brian, I was really struck by Dulce et Decorum Est when I read it in school. I think that may even have been at primary school during a "project" on WWI; if not it must have been when I was 13 or 14. Brilliant poem, and yet still I've only read a smattering of Wilf Owen.

One poem I have loved since I was five or six, and still love just as much as ever, is Sergeant Brown's Parrot (link) by Kit Wright.

Also Jabberwocky, The Walrus and the Carpenter, and The Owl and the Pussycat - the ones I enjoy reading to my kids now.

Then I was really into Dylan Thomas when I was 16/17 - if I had to pick a line I might pick the first two lines of Fern Hill, or these from later on in the same piece:

"...the spellbound horses walking warm / Out of the whinnying green stable..."

At the same time I read a lot of Larkin for school - esp. The Whitsun Weddings some of which I must have read 10 times. Such a contrast with DT, those two poets gave me some idea of the breadth that was out there.

Then at uni - Keats, Holderlin, the Beats and the Mersey poets, WCW and Louis Zukofsky, Peter Reading... learned to loathe Pope and Spenser...

(Sorry for rabbiting on).

The fist time I remember reading a poem was Robert Louis Stephenson's A child's Garden Of Verse, "and high up above and all moving about there where millions and millions of stars," don't know why but that line has always stuck in my mind. Another poem, that gave me inspiration was written in my exercise book by my teacher in 1969. Your life lies before you like a heap of driven snow, be careful how you tread it for every step will show.

I don’t think I have a favourite couplet, stanza or poem – there’s just too many great things to choose from. I agree – all the above are wonderful.

Possibly, if I had to choose, here and now (but my mood might change tomorrow), I’d (yet another vote for Eliot, sorry for being boring) go for:


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky.


Also, one of the poets who got me interested from a young age was Don Marquis and his archy & mehitabel series. They’re all fantastic, but I always particularly liked ”the wail of archy”, from which the following is an extract (for those unfamiliar, probably not many, archy is an ex-vers libre poet – his soul has been transmigrated to a cockroach).



damned be this transmigration
doubledamned be the boob pythagoras
the gink that went and invented it
i hope that his soul for a thousand
turns of the wheel of existence
bides in the shell of a louse
dodging a fine toothed comb

As Arian said really. So much to choose from but one line that really struck me was

And Louise holds a handful of rain tempting you to defy it

Bob Dylan - Visions of Johanna

Gaz

As others, I came to poetry via music/lyrics.

The Wall by Floyd, and Leonard Cohen's I'm your Man albums turned me onto lyrics as poetry, both purchased from Brittania Music club! Barstewards also sent me Bon Jovi and Phil Collins.

Comfortably Numb:

There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon,
You are only coming through in waves,
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying.

FIRST WE TAKE MANHATTAN, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN:

They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
for trying to change the system from within

I was bought my first book of poetry - Seamus Heaney's Death of Naturalist when I was in my early 20's, these lines have always stayed with me:

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.

camus wrote:I was bought my first book of poetry - Seamus Heaney's Death of Naturalist when I was in my early 20's, these lines have always stayed with me:

He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.

They've always stuck in my mind too.

“Step up and play”, each machine seemed to say
as I walked round and round the penny arcade.
“Just ring the bell on the big bagatelle
and you’ll make all the coloured lights cascade”.

And music played in the penny arcade.
Yes, it played and it played, played all the time
“Roll up and spend your last dime!

***

Ok not a couplet or line but can you beat this?

stuart

stuartryder wrote:
Ok not a couplet or line but can you beat this?

stuart

You can't be serious.

brianedwards wrote:

stuartryder wrote:
Ok not a couplet or line but can you beat this?

stuart

You can't be serious.

Why not? It's a great metaphor for the bewilderment of cheap and readily-available sex. And it has the bonus feature of being catchy and singable, and you can't say that about most poetry.

Stuart

That's one of Roy's songs, isn't it? Not one of my favourites, but this is ...

I'm young, I know, but even so
I know a thing or two
I've learned from you
I really learned a lot, I really learned a lot
Love is like a stove
It burns you when it's hot
Love hurts...

If we're talking about the effect that words can have on one, rather than the intrinsic quality of the words themselves - and I think we are, you know - I can see why those, and Stu's choice, would qualify for inclusion here.

Yes, of course they qualify and Roy is a fave of mine too, but the "beat that!" comment struck me as particularly bizarre. . . Sincerely, I wasn't sure if Stu was being serious.

A musician friend of mine once argued that song lyrics are less dependent on intrinsic musicality because they will ultimately be sung to musical accompaniment, whereas lines of poetry must create their own music. Fairly elementary of course, but worth remembering, and with that in mind I'd say the Orbison lines sound less than poetry. Just my ears of course.
On the subject of sex, I was recently stunned by these lines whilst re-reading Anne Sexton:

the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

B.

~

Frost:

The woods are lovely dark and deep
but I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

Heaney:

now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:

Yeats:

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

Wally Stevens:

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Dylan:

I waited for you on the running boards, near the cypress trees, while the
springtime turned
Slowly into autumn


So many many more...