A question for all the contributing authors: Go back in time and invite one poet to be in your book?

Question

Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Make Bright The Arrows

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Make bright the arrows

Gather the shields:

Conquest narrows

The peaceful fields.

Stock well the quiver

With arrows bright:

The bowman feared

Need never fight.

Make bright the arrows,

O peaceful and wise!

Gather the shields

Against surprise."

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From:

Invocation to a Muse

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

She gave this aloud at Carnegie Hall in 1941.

"O Muses, O immortal Nine!—

Or do ye languish? Can ye die?

Must all go under?—

How shall we heal without your help a world

By these wild horses torn asunder?

How shall we build anew? — How start again?

How cure, how even moderate this pain

Without you, and you strong?

And if ye sleep, then waken!

And if ye sicken and do plan to die,

Do not that now!"

*****

Answer 1

Only one poet...that is so difficult because I need different poets to suit my different needs.

So, I'm going to go for the first one that sprang to mind.

John Betjemann - he encapsulates a kind of Englishness in many of his poems which fills me with nostalgia.

A Subalterns Love-Song, Hunter Trials, Myfanwy, Slough etc.

(although, I still think William Blake's The Tyger is my favourite poem - though I would have difficulty in explaining why)

Edit - Sher ....yep for Free form poetry it's got to be Pablo!

Answer 2

Difficult!  Probably Blake. Possibly Whitman.  Or then again......

Answer 3

This Is Just To Say    

by William Carlos Williams  



I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Answer 4

Time is different to different people.I would choose some of the poetry that I have read right here on Yahoo Answers.Some have been thought provoking,humorous,sad,gut wrenching,light,dark,whimsical,story telling,you name it, it has all been here in the last year.A smorgasbord

of reading to wet the appetite.Thanks everyone who contributes to this site.I have enjoyed your work beyond belief.Keep it coming.

Answer 5

A lesson I need to learn again and again:

Patience Taught by Nature

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

'O dreary life,' we cry, ' O dreary life ! '

And still the generations of the birds

Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds

Serenely live while we are keeping strife

With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife

Against which we may struggle ! Ocean girds

Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards

Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn, and rife

Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees

To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass

In their old glory: O thou God of old,

Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these !--

But so much patience as a blade of grass

Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.

Answer 6

John Donne.  I have loved the Holy Sonnets since discovering them as a teen.  This is such a sonnet and a prayer that it still takes my breath away.      

Holy Sonnet XIV

by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unto your enemy.

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.

Answer 7

Well I only have to go back a few days but she is my favorite poet of any time:

Black and White

by Imtiaz Dharker



All the people are wearing black.

Coming out of stations, scrambling

on buses, crossing the street, stacked

on escalators

they look like letters running away

from words I am struggling to understand.

There is no way to fix them

blurred as they are by movement,

mirrors and cracked glass.

I am trying to write you down

on this white space

in longhand, calm

you, still you,

put my arms around you,

touch your face, trace

the cheekbone,

hold you long enough

for you to read



the  words we have been assembling

... if interested here are two other excellent readings:

http://poetrywriter.org/featured.html

add: I like Buk's choice too, I only read that same poem last week... and saved it.

Answer 8

Now at least

she is past the time of mourning,

now she can say without shame or deceit,

O blessed Solitude.

Excerpt from "A Woman Alone" by Denise Levertov (my favorite poet).

Answer 9

Pablo Neruda - Sonnet IX

There where the waves shatter on the restless rocks

the clear light bursts and enacts its rose,

and the sea-circle shrinks to a cluster of buds,

to one drop of blue salt, falling.

O bright magnolia bursting in the foam,

magnetic transient whose death blooms

and vanishes--being, nothingness--forever:

broken salt, dazzling lurch of the sea.

You & I, Love, together we ratify the silence,

while the sea destroys its perpetual statues,

collapses its towers of wild speed and whiteness:

because in the weavings of those invisible fabrics,

galloping water, incessant sand,

we make the only permanent tenderness.

Answer 10

Rewind 400 years and you might be haling a boat to take you across the Thames. As luck would have it, you end up in the back of John Taylor’s scull and as self-styled “Water-Poet” he would provide you with a satirical look at the days top stories – in verse! Here he is on the burning down of the Globe Theatre in 1613:



“Epigram 33 Upon the burning of the Globe

Aspiring Phaeton with pride inspir’d,

Misguiding Phoebus Carre, the world he fir’d:

But Ovid did with fiction serve his turne,

And I in action sawe the Globe to burne.”