Ask HN: What are your favorite poems? - ntumlin
======
vijayr
If - Rudyard Kipling
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost,
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-
woo...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-
snowy-evening)

Emily Dickinson!

Here is one

 _I’m Nobody! Who are you?_

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

------
Jemaclus
I don't really "get" poetry. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent
and well-read, but I've just had a hard time wrapping my head around poetry as
a medium.

That said, I do enjoy Robert Frost (cliche, I know). The only poem I can
recite in totality is "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe, and part of why I
really liked that one is that it tells a short story, and a vivid one at that.

Beyond that, I'm not sure. I'd be interested in a "Understanding Poetry's
Awesomeness for Dummies" course, though...

~~~
nxsynonym
Poetry is like visual art or music, sometimes there is nothing to "get". Of
course there are ways to approach analytically, but I don't believe that's
where the awesomeness can be found.

To me its about connecting to a particular phrase, image, perspective, or
description. Once you feel that connection to a certain poem its a lot easier
to feel like you understand it.

The poem I always go back to when people say they don't get poetry is: " so
much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens. " \- William Carlos Williams

It's simple and effective. A single image, a specific point in time and place,
are being described with only a few lines and yet you can almost reach onto
the page and touch it. You can try to see it as an extended metaphor, or take
it completely at face value. Either way - it's beautiful.

~~~
hood_syntax
I love William Carlos Williams. I'm not an avid poetry reader, but I always
loved going through his work. Another favorite is Alfred Tennyson.

------
bmomb
I'm Brazilian, so my poem favorite poem is in portuguese, its called A Máquina
do Mundo (The World's Machine).

Wikipedia as an assert about it: _The most prominent of these later
metaphysical poems is A Máquina do Mundo (The World 's Machine). The poem
deals with an anti-Faust referred to in the first person, who receives the
visit of the aforementioned Machine, which stands for all possible knowledge,
and the sum of the answers for all the questions which afflict men; in highly
dramatic and baroque versification the poem develops only for the anonymous
subject to decline the offer of endless knowledge and proceed his gloomy path
in the solitary road. It takes the renaissance allegory of the Machine of the
World from Portugal's most esteemed poet, Luís de Camões, more precisely, from
a canto at the end of his epic masterpiece Os Lusíadas.[0]_

[0] Wikipedia about Drummond,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Drummond_de_Andrade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Drummond_de_Andrade)

------
seeyes
The Frog and the Nightingale (Vikram Seth) -
[https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-frog-and-the-
nightingale...](https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-frog-and-the-nightingale/)

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-
woo...](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-
snowy-evening)

Mending Wall - Robert Frost
[https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-
wall](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall)

The Second Coming - W.B.Yeats
[http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html](http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html)

The Mountain and the Squirrel - Emerson
[https://sites.google.com/site/rainydaypoems/poems-for-
kids/c...](https://sites.google.com/site/rainydaypoems/poems-for-kids/classic-
poems-for-kids/the-mountain-and-the-squirrel-by-ralph-waldo-emerson)

------
krapp

       pity this busy monster, manunkind,
    
       not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
       your victim (death and life safely beyond)
    
       plays with the bigness of his littleness
       --- electrons deify one razorblade
       into a mountainrange; lenses extend
       unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
       returns on its unself.
                                  A world of made
       is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh
    
       and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
       fine specimen of hypermagical
    
       ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
    
       a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
       of a good universe next door; let's go.
    

E. E. Cummings

------
danm07
There are the rushing waves mountains of molecules each stupidly minding its
own business trillions apart yet forming white surf in unison

Ages on ages before any eyes could see year after year thunderously pounding
the shore as now. For whom, for what? On a dead planet with no life to
entertain.

Never at rest tortured by energy wasted prodigiously by the Sun poured into
space. A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea all molecules repeat the patterns of one another till complex
new ones are formed. They make others like themselves and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity living things masses of atoms DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto dry land here it is standing: atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea, wonders at wondering: I a universe of atoms an atom in the
Universe.

Feynman

~~~
mbrock
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,

Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed
wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,

Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive,

Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,

From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,

From the myriad thence-arous’d words,

From the word stronger and more delicious than any,

From such as now they start the scene revisiting,

As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,

Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,

A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,

Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,

I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,

Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,

A reminiscence sing.

(First verse of Whitman's _Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking_ )

------
yung_endian

        They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    
            They may not mean to, but they do.   
    
        They fill you with the faults they had
    
            And add some extra, just for you.
    
    
        But they were fucked up in their turn
    
            By fools in old-style hats and coats,  
     
        Who half the time were soppy-stern
    
            And half at one another’s throats.
    
    
        Man hands on misery to man.
            
            It deepens like a coastal shelf.
    
        Get out as early as you can,
    
            And don’t have any kids yourself.

------
PaulHoule
I like this guy

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski#Poetry_collec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski#Poetry_collections)

"War all the time" is a good place to start.

------
david927
Lost

by Carl Sandburg

Desolate and lone

All night long on the lake

Where fog trails and mist creeps,

The whistle of a boat

Calls and cries unendingly,

Like some lost child

In tears and trouble

Hunting the harbor's breast

And the harbor's eyes.

------
kleer001
Anything by Shel Silverstein, it's all gold.

------
mrdependable
Pathedy of Manners - Ellen Kay

Curiosity - Alistair Reid

------
wu-ikkyu
The long night;

The sound of the water

Says what I think.

-Gochiku

------
cmoney
"Cynthia" -Jonah Hill

