My favorite line:

cosmonaut · Joined: 22 Jan 2008 Posts: 5

I'm sure that it's been quoted here already, but this line is the most ethereal verse I've ever read:

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

T.S. Eliot was brilliant.

mojave8 · Joined: 27 Aug 2005 Posts: 1195

C---

from the same poem:

the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.

bernie

qbone20 · Posted: Sat Mar 22, 2008 9:44 pm Post subject:

I love "Prufrock", but in my opinion, there's so many more immortal or ethereal lines than those. The most chilling, to me, is Plotinus' "a flight of the alone to the alone". And George Meredith in modern love, "Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul/when hot for certainties in this our life!" Just sums up the human experience of questioning the universe.
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"Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be. ~Don Quixote"

GrecianUrn · Joined: 24 Jun 2008 Posts: 3 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio

I have two excerpts that struck me:

from "Sonnet 30" by Edmund Spenser
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

from "When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be" by John Keats
- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
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"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

DayzDream · Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 9:57 pm Post subject: My favorite line...

From Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

"two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

Lifes true truth.. the choices we make, make us as individuals.

karidrgn · Joined: 05 Jul 2008 Posts: 2

I agree - I love Frost's Road Not taken is one of my favorites. I also fell in love with this from Rilke. There are other variations because it is translated, but this is my favorite. Probably because I have a recording of it being read from the Beauty and the Beast TV series soundtrack.

This is the creature that has never been.
They never knew, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reated its head, with scarce a trace

of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
but only the the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer

such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitley it stole up to a maid - to be
within the silver mirror and in her.

thelema12 · Joined: 23 May 2005 Posts: 266

pallid the leash-men!

is a line that sticks, and one I have to say out loud or at least mouth when I think of it. It's the last line of Pound's "The Return."

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/836/

michael68 · Joined: 01 Feb 2009 Posts: 10

favorite phrases and lines in poetry:

hydrogen jukebox
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.
The ladies talk of Michaelangelo
You must rearrange your life

Favorite lines in song lyrics

No direction home
Maybellene, why can't you be true?
How do your pistol and your Bible and your sleeping pills go?
I wanna be sedated

Shocked

BradGad · Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 8:53 pm Post subject:

O, most wicked speed, to post / With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

Phlegethon · Joined: 11 Mar 2008 Posts: 1

Actually from last year's Poetry Month mailings:

"God help us we tried to stay shattered but we just got better.

We grew adept, we caught the fish as they fled.

We skinned the fish, our knife clicked like an edict.

We were harmed, and then we healed."

-Assault to Abjury, Raymond McDaniel

aalbaugh · Joined: 25 Apr 2007 Posts: 6

Little Soul
by Hadrian

now where will you stay
all pale and all alone
after the way
you used to make fun of things

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177889

A personal fav, the guy's roman emperor on his deathbed!

SodineÜe · Joined: 26 Aug 2009 Posts: 3

"Always in my love the night breaks
Always inside me my enemy
And always inside me the same loneliness"

Carlos Drummond de Andrade (in “Buried Alive”)

tromby24 · Joined: 23 Oct 2009 Posts: 1

Prufrock is one of the best.
what i adore most are the ethereal lines.
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Kaltica · Posted: Mon Oct 26, 2009 12:40 pm Post subject:

From the classics, I've always had a soft spot for these lines, and not only because John Stewart paraphrased them in "The Last Hurrah", his elegeic song to his friend, Bobby Kennedy (i.e. "The saddest words I've ever spoken were the words 'It might have been!'"):

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

- John Greenleaf Whittier, (1807-12-17 to 1892-09-07), from "Maud Muller" (1856)

Among our contemporaries, it's hard to beat these lines from "Sunflowers in Italy" by Didi Menendez, as the narrator describes the execution of her poet mentor:

You wrote your verses
with your veins,
cold against the wall.

-o-

archy · Joined: 14 May 2006 Posts: 569 Location: San Angelo, Texas

"If way to the better there be,
it exacts a full look at the worst."

........In Tenebris II, Thomas Hardy
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archy

The Imagination is evidence of the Divine.
--William Blake