Favorite Lines

I love asking for feedback on Twitter – it's an instant way to connect with lovers of poetry from all over the world! Here at the @Poetry_Society, we're rounding-out week one of National Poetry Month, so today we asked our followers to share the "line of poetry that made you fall in love with the art". With close to 200 replies, it's safe to say #Poetry has its nook in social media. So celebrate #NationalPoetryMonth, get a jump start on your #FollowFriday, and enjoy the poetry that some of us have fallen in love with!

– @Laurel_Crosby
(Membership Coordinator)

@hellohelpful: "Glory be to God for dappled things."

@TheFrankieJones: "Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright / In the forests of the night"

@lewiscook: "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul" – Invictus by Henley

@allingameyo: "She sang beyond the genius of the sea."

@sarahchurchwell: since feeling is first /who pays any attention /to the syntax of things /will never wholly kiss you.

@Miranda_RM: Yeats, The Tower - "being dead, we rise / Dream and so create / Translunar paradise"

@bryantunick: LET us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table

@iansmiller: When you start on your journey to Ithaca, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge.

@zmccune: "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo..." – Ginsberg (also loved by @ciggy_lighter)

@askjohnabout: Fly, mares! Scatter the milky stars, or the tiger sun will leap upon you and destroy you w one lick of his vermilion tongue!

@randomsalt: "...I refuse you / Sleep again / If I cannot have you." —Louise Glück, "Circe's Torment"

@RFL52: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..

@VanAlstAve: "I wished to be like bread" in English translation of a Neruda poem read in a library book, forgot to note title, now lost

@Victorias_View: " I stuck my toes in my nose to see if they could fit" - Sheree Fitch

@LKennedyHughes: It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster. -Elizabeth Bishop

@sidney_jones: And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise

@albanystreet: 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas'

@Leach_Juice: "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge"

@GapMash: "There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground..."

@ltrgoddard: "Pacify rag hands attachment in for muted", J.H. Prynne, Biting the Air (2003)

@politicgame: From what I've tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favour fire. From Frost's "Fire and Ice"

@Ratrage: I wandered lonely as a cloud, That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

@homebtwnpages: "I wish/What I wished you before, but harder." The Writer, Richard Wilbur

@jjabe: "annihilating all that's made / to a green thought in a green shade."

@sarabethw: You fit into me / like a hook into an eye / a fish hook / an open eye by @MargaretAtwood

@larallo: Whose woods these are I think I know

@MareeJHamilton: "Let be be finale of seem. / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

@brothmaker: "Airports need each other."

@pchuan: The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/ Pro patria mori.

@WriteLife3: "Body my house / my horse my hound / what will I do / when you are fallen / " -May Swenson

@CrystalChaseN: that would be both going and coming back / One could do worse than being a swinger of birches

@erinflorence: "I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference" Robert Frost (The Road Not Taken)

@andreasomberg: "I grow old I grow old...I grow old....I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled

@LitJrzyGrl: TIGER, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night

@hermanywong: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" Dylan Thomas

@adamlcox: "Just as my fingers on these keys/Make music, so the self-same sounds/On my spirit make a music, too." -Wallace Stevens

@LadyAstoria: "April is the cruelest month".

@calderinv: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / Midway in the journey of our life" from Dante's Inferno started it all for me.

@Flamenkers: I would spread the cloths under your feet:/ But I being poor, have only my dreams;/ I have spread my dreams under your feet,

@amberlynneoshea: "And I-/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference." (Road Less Traveled ~ Robert Frost)

@taramaylyn: "Thirteen's no age at all. Thirteen is nothing."

@CaseyGuerin: "Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just press on/No feeling is final" -Rilke

@jacqua83: "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands" (e. e. cummings)

@andrewmarvell: "Disgusted Strephon stole away/Repeating in his amorous Fits,/Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!" #swift

@varvaraephemera: Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. To his Coy Mistress, Marvell

@Flamenkers: Cont) Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Yeats from "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven"

@Ratrage: Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Admit impediments

@PratikPrakash86: "Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink." - Coleridge

@ijclark: "Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number"

@lmwh50: I am in need of music that would flow over my fretful,feeling fingertips.... Elizabeth Bishop 1928

@ConstablePR: 'A voice across the coughing brine has sewn your spirit into mine' Mervyn Peake

@cassandraneace: "there I was without a face / and it touched me" - Pablo Neruda (writing about his first experience with poetry)

@natemarkelliott: "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness" -John Keats

@istareatglobes: "Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;/ Who cried 'La belle Dame sans Merci/ Hath thee in thrall!"

@alszambrano: Morning and evening Maids hear the goblins cry Come buy our orchard fruits, come buy come buy #Rossetti #GoblinMarket

@kishmot: The ant's a centaur in his dragon-world/Pull down thy vanity (Ezra Pound)

@harryrutter: Let us go then, you and I

@hmhbooks: If you have formed a circle to go into, Go into yourself and see how you would do

@nellcoinc: -The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. Roethke

@rd_morgan: "these hips are big hips./they need space to/move around in." frm Clifton's Homage to My Hips-1st time I connected w/a poem

@vivislot: "Of failure spreading back up the arm/ Earlier and earlier, the unraised hand calm,/ The apple unbitten in the palm"

@jlobbs: "for the right way had been lost" third line from the first canto of Dante

@BluetifulHadeel: "shall I compare thee to a summer's day... thou art more lovely and more temperate."

@zmccune: "Filling her compact & delicious body with chicken páprika, / she glanced at me / twice." – Berryman

@jacqua83: And since @Poetry_Society got me in the mood: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia... One of my fave poems, ever

@WillWiles: "postal districts packed like squares of wheat"

@ensable: "It was many and many a year ago/in a kingdom by the sea..."

@slyyake: "like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew" Anne Sexton

@TheFebrileMuse: not sure of the line, but it was Ogden Nash...my first read in poetry as kid

@bohubbard: This living hand, now warm and capable...

@charjojones: Yeats, The Second Coming: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

@KitsuneBooks: Fave line: "But answer came there none/And this was scarcely odd, because/They'd eaten every one." Walrus & Carpenter, LC

@thetearooms: 'What mighty contests rise from trivial things.' (Pope, 'The Rape of the Lock')

@tonchi: The Lord is my shepherd but I want. -Franz Arcellana

@simjalon: Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream? - Edgar Allan Poe

@SheilaNumber1: "Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air." Sylvia Plath

@TimmerPe: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by And that has made all the difference

@BillStroup: "For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." WBY

@spookyreads: I can't fit any of my favourite lines from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in without butchering them, but that's the poem.

@bellafranco: "Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups made by some giant scissors, I do not know" Anne Sexton

@cariadmartin: "Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" Howl

@mymacabrekind: She walks in beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies

@CLH003: 'Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?' from Keats' Ode to a Nightingale

@CrackintheLens: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--

@CrackintheLens: While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As if someone gently rapping, rapping on my chamber door.

@CrackintheLens: "'Tis some visitor," I mutter, "tapping at my chamber door-- ...Only this and nothing more."

@RachaelNevins: "you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them. / Why should you be one, too?" — "In the Waiting Room," Bishop

@wrobertswriter: My soul has grown deep like the rivers. Langston Hughes

@Worrals: "one day anyone died i guess / (and noone stooped to kiss his face)"

@YaelBorofsky: "Face it. Curiosity/will not cause us to die--/only lack of it will."//Alastair Reid

@LeOneAndOnly: Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I'll draw a sketch of thee, What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?

@susanwyler: When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read...

@markpatton1: If any so by love refined, That he soul's language understood, And by good love were grown all mind

@littlestarheim: "from a bottom of a pool, stars govern a life" - Sylvia Plath, "Words"

@whn1nc: "Do not go gentle into that good night."

@CrackintheLens: No one has ever written a better poem than Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. Consonance, assonance, alliteration, mid-line rhymes

@angcameron: The buzz-saw whine of righteous anger rose murderously in his throat throughout the night

@MultipleMiss: Have you seen my MS/poetry blog documenting Gilenya?

@NishSwish: 'the rose cannot last long parted from the thorn' amir khusrau

@decalino: "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea." Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

@MrPatOButter: "You are the hottest one for years of night / Henry's dazed eyes / have enjoyed, Brilliance"

@technictrainer: I was caught when I read, "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe."

@mightyravendark: doesn't fit... the carbuncular in the waste land.

@tnrbooks: "I dwell in possibility..."

@wordwhacker: . "Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." #Shakespeare sonnet 73

@joshuastarkey: "yet from those flames/No light, but rather darkness visible." ~ Milton, "Paradise Lost," Book I

@GraciFalabella: I's in spanish Neruda "podria escribir los versos mas tristes esta noche # Veinte poemas de amor....

@BruceRelates: "'Tis better to have tweeted and missed than never to have tweeted at all.'" With apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

@luukimhann: 'nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands' (ee cummings - somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond)

@Periphyseon: I am lost in flesh whose sugared lies/Still mock me + grow bold/Sure thou didst put a mind there if I cd/Find where it lies.

@kaybeepea: Mi ley, la fuerza y el viento, mi única patria, la mar. (My law is might and the wind, my only home, the sea) - Espronceda

@ErnestoPaniagua: my mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun

@BwanaJim: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree" - Yeats

@hotAndSunny: To paint a bird's portrait First of all, paint a cage with an opened little door

@evo3X3: so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

@outfieldrambler: "or does it explode?" 'a dream deferred' - Langston Hughes

@charleslinehan: "And now we stare astonished at the sea,/ And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us."

@mintsniff: Tomorrow we enter the town of my birth. I want to be ready (Jim Morrison 'The celebration...')

@mataharikrishna: But I love yr feet only because they walked upon the earth & upon the wind & upon the waters until they found me. Pablo Neruda

@betttthlyne: As virtuous men pass mildly away,/And whisper to their souls to go.

@PrufRock23: "these fragments I have shored against my ruin"--eliot, the waste land.

@Serenstupendous: And then my heart with pleasure fills/And dances with the daffodils. -- Wordsworth

@tnyfrontrow: <>

@scottyhj: since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you;

@ficarrotta13: When I consider how my light is spent, E're half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is (cont.)

@ficarrotta13: ...death to hide, Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

@ohashuhlee:...and all dishevelled wandering stars.

@FuzzyDunnlop: "The city is built to music / Therefore never built at all / And therefore built forever" - Tennyson

@pranesh_vm: The woods are lovely, dark and deep; but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep. -Robert Frost

@wilfkell: To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand... Blake Auguries

@mollyjmann: What peaches and what penumbras!

@geekgaltn: . "Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words,

@intermittentlyD: I bring you with reverent hands The books of my numberless dreams --- W.B. Yeats

@SFManeFlame: "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." --"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" T.S. Eliot--so awesome

@kelsypants: Big brown bear, blue bull, beautiful baboon blowing bubbles biking backwards, bump brown bug's banana boxes

@jnicholasgeist: "A poem should not mean, but be." -Archibald MacLeish. (I call BS.)

@bwycz: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/did gyre and gimble in the wabe...

@denselyscribble: "I dwell in Possibility-- A fairer House than Prose-- More numerous of Windows-- Superior--for Doors"...... Emily Dickinson

@angcameron: - which is aust poet Bruce Dawe.

@PubTrendSetter: Louise Glück from "The Wild Iris": "At the end of my suffering there was a door.

@TebeZhdu: "Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea." Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

@sportschick2624: Your eyes smile, invite say everything yes, maybe eyes of honey, fire they seduce - Louis Alberto Ambroggio

@bellasbeach: The Sweeping up the Heart and Putting Love away~Emily Dickinson

@ keatscough: "the heavy limbs climb into the moonlight bearing feathers/I came to watch these" WS Merwin "December Night"

@ReadRichard: 'Sorrio. O som é só de chiar. Bebo a àgua sem ouvrir nada com a minha garganta.' Fernando Pessoa

@BetsyBrownWrite: "We who have changed, & have / No hope of change, must now love / The passage of time." by Jon Anderson

@LauraHopeGill: No one not even the rain has such small hands. e.e.

@nicolleemily: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary- Edgar Allen Poe

@opalfly: "I'll tell you how the sun rose/ a ribbon at a time" - Emily Dickinson

@Gee_Kate: somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond / any experience, your eyes have their silence:

@melani_rae: 'and I eat men like air.'

@speakeasyshe: "I speak what I see. All words and worlds are metaphors of me." -Wine, Saul Williams.

@ hemenwaystreet: "What reinforcement we may gain from hope; If not, what resolution from despair" [Milton]

@IanMartin: 'This is the first thing I have understood: time is the echo of an axe within a wood'. Philip Larkin

@professormungry: all this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. the difference is spreading. -gertrude stein

@wghamlett: I know the truth - forget all other truths!/No need for anyone on this earth to struggle. - Marina Tsvetaeva

@aangelop: Has to be: The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind (Yeats)

@ DJNorcliffe: 'Never to murder the days with presuppostion', a line from 'Proof' by Brendan Kennelly

@ OfficeMike: "SOME say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice." from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken

@ maryfclark: "I am lonely, I am lonely, I am best so." (William Carlos Williams)

@milebanshee: Prufrock, of course: "I've measured my life in coffee spoons."

@SaoirseOKeefe: in Just – spring when the world is mud – luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee (Cummings)

@ribchesapeake: Belinda lived in a little white house, / With a little black kitten and a little gray mouse. (Ogden Nash 'The Tale of Custard the Dragon')

@saveassistants: "And miles to go before we sleep"

@gabberooni: "My friend, you would not tell…The old Lie; Ducle et Decorum est/Pro patria mori." (Wilfred Owen)

@ManonCeirdwen: And what did I want To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

@Emthreadsaneedl: "So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens"

@CrookedKeuroac"your slightest look will easily unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers" -ee cummings

@wuhannibal: "Come to the window, sweet is the night air!"

@trelawneyfulton: since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you

@Esteea: I love you straightforwardly without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way... -Pablo Neruda

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11 Comments for Favorite Lines

Straight, and to the point;
Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought.
Robert Brownning.

—T.A. Dieringer

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:32 pm

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

—David Crosby

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 5:07 pm

It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

—David Crosby

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 5:13 pm

"Je ne peux plus dire mon nom." ("I can no longer say my name.")

-Danielle Collobert

—Karin Stoutenburg

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 5:16 pm

The Sunflowers by Mary Oliver:

the long work of /turning their lives into a celebration/ is not easily done. Come/

—Michelle Bloom

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 10:48 pm

The Sunflowers: /the long work of turning their lives/ into a celebration is not easily done. Come/

- Mary Oliver

—Michelle Bloom

Posted Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 10:51 pm

"The same winds carry the boats. It is the sail that directs them"



<a href=http://pioneeravh.com/pioneer_... avh-p4300dvd</a>

—avh-p4300dvd

Posted Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 11:46 pm

One of my favorite poems of Ukrainian well-known poet Mykola Vorobiov:
"for the lonely a cage
is like liberty for a stranger
a cold wasteland
of flatlands and hills
on the balcony he listens
to the magnificent mystery
of the cascading flowers"

—Alla Vorobjova

Posted Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 10:31 am

"Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought".
Robert Browning.

—T.A. Dieringer

Posted Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 2:49 pm

"To be, or not to be, that is the question..." (Hamlet - William Shakespeare)

—ScarlethB

Posted Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 7:11 pm

Both thou and I are born alike;
Though some may sink and some may soar,
We all are earth and nothing more.

—Shazia Zaman

Posted Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 11:53 am