Favorite Poetry

Someone asked on my favorite board awhile ago what my favorite poem was.
This is a very difficult question for me.
I was a literature major so I have a thing for the written word. My mother would also call me moody, so poetry seems to fit me well. I actually used to write reams of poetry. I haven't written anything in a very long time. Most people that I showed any of them to, didn't like them anyway. They did not have meter and they rarely rhymed. They were sometimes kind of difficult to understand. Yes, I'll admit it.....I was kind of proud of that. As it turned out, my great grandmother also wrote reams of poetry as well. Of course, hers were beautiful, they rhymed and had a meter and a sense of style and orderliness to them.

Anyway, here are three of my favorite poems:

I bet someone who reads this post will not like this one. I love it. I think it is beautiful and very visual.

Seperation
by W. S. Merwin
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.



Sonnet 75 from The Amoretti
by Edmund Spenser

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."

And finally.....
As The Ruin Falls
by C.S. Lewis

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love —a scholar's parrot may talk Greek—
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.