Guidelines:

1) Please include the lines of the poem.
2) Include the author's name and poem's title (please do not send your own poetry).
3) Include a short paragraph about the situations that summon this poem to mind.
4) Please tell us your name and the city and state where you live.

Send your stories to npm@poets.org.

Your submission may be selected by the Academy of American Poets to appear on Poets.org and in National Poetry Month promotional material alongside other submissions from readers and writers alike.

The Life Lines project was in part inspired by the book Blue Peninsula by Madge McKeithen, which demonstrates precisely how poetry most often visits us – memorable lines float back to us at odd moments. The book begins:

"My son's illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was fourteen. He is now twenty-two. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others."

McKeithen details how she turned to poetry in the midst of all her grief: "collecting, consuming, ripping poems out of magazines, buying slender volumes that would fit in a pocket or pocketbook, stashing them in loose-leaf notebooks, on shelves, stacking them on the floor."

A poem opens each chapter—from W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Marianne Moore, Czeslaw Milosz, and many other poets—and then in the course of each chapter lines from the poems echo against life. Brief sections, or certain words emerge to connect with the particular situations in McKeithen’s life and sustain her.

Read an excerpt.

We each carry lines of poetry with us. Words that others have written float back to us and stay with us, indelibly. We clutch these "Life Lines" like totems, repeat them as mantras, and summon them for comfort and laughter.

For National Poetry Month 2008, The Academy of American Poets asked you to share the lines of poetry that are the most vital to you, along with notes about the precise situation that summoned them to mind. Some of these "life lines" appear, below.

Participants were automatically entered to win a piece of jewelry by San Francisco designer Jeanine Payer. Payer specializes in hand-engraving lines of poetry on earrings, necklaces, and other items. Congratulations to the following entrants who will have their "life line" hand-engraved on a specially chosen necklace: Jennifer Keen, Amanda Hendler-Voss, Amy Keown, Debra Brown, and Marikka Hopkins. A fresh sampling of "life lines" by W. H. Auden, Wendell Berry, Raymond Carver, Leonard Cohen, Frank O'Hara, and Clare Rossini appear below. Thank you to all who entered.

Begun in National Poetry Month 2006, the Life Lines project has been extended thanks to the continued interest and unprecedented participation of the community of readers and writers.

Listen to audio Life Lines featured in recent editions of the Poetcast, the official podcast of the Academy of American Poets.

Anna Akhmatova A. R. Ammons John Ashbery W. H. Auden Wendell Berry John Berryman Frank Bidart Louise Bogan Carlos Bulosan Leonard Cohen Jane Cooper Cid Corman and Robert Duncan Hart Crane E. E. Cummings Roque Dalton Emily Dickinson Paul Lawrence Dunbar T. S. Eliot Robert Frost Allen Ginsberg Nikki Giovanni Linda Gregg George Herbert Homer Gerard Manley Hopkins Langston Hughes

Richard Hugo David Ignatow Issa Randall Jarrell Robinson Jeffers Brigit Pegeen Kelly Miyazawa Kenji Kenneth Koch Philip Larkin Winifred M. Letts John Logan Robert Lowell Heather McHugh W. S. Merwin Edna St. Vincent Millay Czeslaw Milosz John Milton Paul Muldoon Pablo Neruda Naomi Shihab Nye Frank O'Hara Sharon Olds Mary Oliver Sylvia Plath Edgar Allan Poe Ezra Pound

Sir Walter Raleigh Adrienne Rich Theodore Roethke Clare Rossini Sadi Carl Sandburg James Schuyler Anne Sexton William Shakespeare Jason Shinder Charles Simic William Stafford Wallace Stevens Mark Strand Wislawa Szymborska Henry Taylor Lord Alfred Tennyson Dylan Thomas Robert Penn Warren Walt Whitman C. K. Williams William Carlos Williams William Wordsworth James Wright W. B. Yeats Adam Zagajewski

There is a pain – so utter –
It swallows substance up –
Then covers the Abyss with Trance –
So Memory can step
Around – across – opon it –
As one within a Swoon –
Goes safely – where an open eye –
Would drop Him – Bone by Bone.

—from “599” by Emily Dickinson

I thought of this Emily Dickinson poem when I got the news that the husband of a dear friend of mine had committed suicide. I do not know how my friend bears such pain. I believe it’s an act of courage for her to speak to anyone at all, much less at his funeral service in which she gave everyone there the gift of trying through her grief to articulate how much she loved him.

Dickinson’s poem is an argument. The speaker doesn’t tell us what occasioned her pain, but lets us plug in our own. There is no information in the poem that separates her from us. The poem is made to be an experience instead of referring to one, which is precisely how she says she knows poetry in her famous remark to Higginson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”

No, I don’t think there is. Dickinson’s poems have certainly taken the top of my head off and they frequently put it back on when I need it.

Michael Ryan
Irvine, California

To know just how He suffered – would be dear  – 
To know if any Human eyes were near
To whom He could entrust His wavering gaze – 

—from "688" by Emily Dickinson

Read recently at the funeral of a young man who died suddenly, surprisingly, and alone, at the age of twenty-six, with no apparent cause or explanation, and lay for a time undiscovered, this poem by Emily Dickinson named the mystery uncannily and precisely as I believe nothing else could have, and performed a kind of grace.

Jeff Seroy
New York, New York

I felt my life with both my hands
To see if it was there—
I held my spirit to the Glass,
To prove it possibler—

—from "#351" by Emily Dickinson

On days I feel alienated or isolated I recite these lines to myself. The idea that one's existence—which often seems ephemeral, marginal—can be felt like a solid object in one's own hands is very comforting and reassuring. I like to imagine what my life might look like as a weaving or collage, what colors and textures it might contain. I also like Emily's neologism, "possibler." I can't help but wonder what would have happened if she had used this word in an English composition class.

Nancy Gerber
Montclair, NJ

...birds build -- but not I build; no, but strain,
Time's eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

—from "Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

These lines continue to sustain. They admit powerfully to a paralysis--spiritual, but also a paralysis of one's ability to make or nurture art--and yet they yearn, ultimately, in those last lines, for sustenance. This is a very real statement of what it means to be human, to be self-aware, and to struggle--against God, yes, and against oneself and the need to create. The last four words alone have come to mind often, as prayer, as chant, as mantra, as life-saving music: "send my roots rain."

Jeffrey Shotts
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes its self; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

—from"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As someone who has struggled to find my calling, my specific purpose in life, Hopkins reminds me that as a "mortal thing", I can do "one thing and the same". Hopkins asserts that my purpose, what I do, flows out of who I am. Finding my calling in life is intertwined with finding the real me. Contrary to how people define themselves by what they do, Hopkins believes that what one does, flows from who they are. Every time I read "Kingfishers", Hopkins encourages me to continue searching for why I am here and to do that "one thing and the same."

Mike Tillema
Tualatin, Oregon

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

—from "Keeping Things Whole" by Mark Strand

I first encountered this poem buried in the depths of an anthology for a course on Contemporary American Literature. I was never assigned the poem by the professor, but I find myself continually returning to this quatrain because of its utter simplicity and complete transcendence. This poem has altered my perception of the life I act upon each day, reminding me of all that our planet contains within its atmosphere and how desperately everything seeks a feeling of connectedness. Strand acknowledges that separation is unavoidable, that feeling void or isolated occurs around every bend of existence; but, he insists, in a voice that is unimposing, that we have to keep going because absence breeds unity and unity breeds absence. One cannot exist without the other. I remember this poem on those days when I feel ready to give up, to plunge headfirst into complacency. Eventually, Strand's words replay themselves in my mind. I overcome these feelings and, simply put, keep moving.

Megan Summers
Beaufort, South Carolina

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.

—from "Autotomy" by Wislawa Szymborska

These lines, like the primal word "cleave," which means both to cling and to separate, describe each moment of my life, lived and then past, the lost moment having carried me on to the next moment to which it clings, and so the impossible and necessary separation from my young self as I age, and they describe each significant relationship, my children grown who are still my "children," my husband of many years who is their father but is no longer my husband, my father gone from this world twenty years whose grave I don't visit but whose spirit is with me, my mother who shares her coffee with me now that I am long past being a child, my love beside me who goes and comes out my door each day to face his own day, all my selves, each change of name, the lines that mattered then and now and still, my flesh and poetry.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon
Austin, Texas

Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust,
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days,
And from which earth, and grave, and dust
The Lord shall raise me up, I trust.

—"The Author's Epitaph, Made By Himself" by Sir Walter Raleigh

This poem, supposedly copied into Raleigh's Bible the night before his execution in 1628, is talismanic for me because of the way the lines are both an act of contrition and humility before God, as well as a gesture of defiance toward the executioner. No matter the power of King James's state to chop off Raleigh's head, the invisible estate conjured by "the Lord shall raise me up, I trust" is as fierce as it is humble, as poignant as it is confident. I can't characterize myself as a believer, and I seriously doubt that God, for Raleigh, was anything more than a convention: these lines, it turns out, are actually a version of the last stanza of a love poem, "Nature That Washed Her Hands in Milk" written about 1592. But God as a convention that invokes a higher sense of justice becomes for me, through Raleigh's lines, a way of feeling through your own nerve-ends the actual, lived experience of an uncompromised and uncompromising sense of "they may get away with it now, but now won't be always—a reckoning will come."

And equally important to me is how the gravitas and sorrow of the first few lines, as they evolve into the almost jaunty avowal of eventual resurrection in the last line, provide me with a way to feel about such ambivalent events as Saddam Hussein's execution: Saddam dangling from a rope is a complex image to overcome by overt moralizing, judicial justifications, or even an empathetic ear listening in on the hatred and pain that those whom he tortured and killed must feel toward him. At the same time, one can imagine Saddam feeling about his own execution in exactly the same way Raleigh seems to feel about his. And so embedded in that comprehensive and contradictory and ultimately blocked set of intuitions is the reason why I love these lines: they let no one outmaneuver their canny mix of indictment, sorrow, and nearly profane joy.

Tom Sleigh

There are things to be said. No doubt.
And in one way or another
they will be said. But to whom tell

the silences? With whom share them
now? For a moment the sky is
empty and then there was a bird.

—from "There Are Things to be Said" by Cid Corman

There is no life that does not rise
melodic from scales of the marvelous.—

—from "The Venice Poem" by Robert Duncan

When Phoebe, one of our beloved Afghan Hounds died, I wanted to send out a notice, along with pictures, to some of her friends. She had been a commanding presence not only in our home, but in the show ring, where her antics marked her as having the true spirit of the ever-entertaining Afghan. Her elegance, beauty, and idiosyncrasies left us truly bereft. It was only right that I should think of Cid Corman's words when my own failed me. These, along with two lines of the incomparable Robert Duncan, became the epitaph for this lovely being who had dominated our home for fifteen years. Since then, these words have become a kind of mantra, coming to me unbidden, at the times of other losses in our lives.

Fran Claggett
Sebastopol, California

Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

—from "Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law" by Adrienne Rich

In high school my friend Eve and I spent a lazy afternoon lying on the great lawn and reading poems from our Norton Anthology out loud to each other, hungry especially for the voices of women, voices that echoed our own burgeoning feminism and sketched out roads we ourselves might travel. Adrienne Rich's nod to this nervy daughter's journey into the unexpected touched me deeply. As a lesbian, I knew that my life, too, would be full and difficult and uncharted. Rich taught me that I was not alone.

Emily Moore
New York, New York

                                                                 There
Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,
The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother’s call.
Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song
Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.

—from "Song" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

In the early nineties I heard Brigit Pegeen Kelly give the first public reading of her poem "Song," of which these are the last lines. I remember feeling that "something just happened to me": that the poem, and in particular those last lines resonated in me more than any lines ever had—although I couldn’t quite understand why. More than a decade later I still can’t explain—but have come to love that mystery. Not a week goes by that I don’t say those lines to myself—as a celebration, consolation, explanation, or as an "inner song" in moments of utter confusion or doubt.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar
New York, New York

then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

— from "Guilty of Dust" by Frank Bidart

I have been both comforted and frightened by those lines, on countless occasions. To me they are a lasting example of how poetic power does not always depend on image and metaphor; poetic power can come in abstract language if there is enough emotional energy propelling it.

"What you love is your fate"—the central force shaping your life, according to this deeply romantic view, is your love. The idea is attractive, romantically, yet in "Guilty of Dust" there is a fierce sense that we may find ourselves loving in ways not only unwise but desperately troubling. Your love—your deepest and most impassioned desire-ardor-admiration—turns out to be a force controlling you even as you feel you are choosing to be defined by it. A frightening idea, yet preferable to the idea that you are controlled by animal needs, by chemistry, by economics, by tribal politics, or by some imaginary deity.

"What you love is your fate"—the essence of your life will turn out to be a pattern designed by your power to love. But Bidart's lines say that you may rebel against this—with agonizing consequences.

Bidart is interested in people whose deepest desires are transgressive. In my own life, this has not seemed to be the case; but like most of us, I'm very familiar with desires, or kinds of love, that defeat and prevent other conceivable pleasures and satisfactions.

These lines from "Guilty of Dust" have come to me, for instance, when I see myself heading home toward wife and child—or, turning toward a book of poetry—when a beautiful young woman is leaving the room, leaving the building, getting into her car, going away. Or, when I see myself lifting and moving boxes of books from one apartment to another, one house to another, decade after decade. Or, when I imagine all the memorial services, years hence, at which I'll praise the writing of a friend who has died—or I'll be the deceased writer . . .

I once heard Bidart say "You've got to love what you love" (I think he was quoting Robert Lowell who was quoting Van Gogh); and this helped me: the realization that you can at least choose to love with vigor and imagination what you find yourself loving; there is thus some choice involved!

Mark Halliday
Athens, Ohio

Back out of all this now too much for us

—from “Directive” by Robert Frost

I think of this line almost every day—it speaks to my own life (which is always too much for me ) and to our collective American life (we were so busy, we were so tired, we wish we had more time—maybe two weeks from Wednesday?) our dislocation in the midst of absolute overload of information, bereft of truth, impotent, generalized, lonely. Frost bring us back to the road that is not a road, and a house that is no more a house—to the source, a spring, near where the children has their little house of make believe. Their small dishes still strewn about.

Drink and be whole again, Frost writes, beyond confusion.

Within the confines of my own consciousness I try, when I remember the line, to return to that source—to rest there, drink, and return returned to myself.

Marie Howe
Bronxville, New York

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

—from "Reluctance" by Robert Frost

There are some lines of poetry that seem to circle back at unexpected times to comfort but also to disturb us. My 12th grade English teacher presented these words to our class about 30 years ago, as we were about to embark into the big wide world. My teacher had found lines that managed to sum up all I was feeling at the time; I found it nearly impossible to accept that I was having to leave the cocoon of home and the enchantment of that class (and my teacher - oh, it was a monumental crush!). I certainly showed no grace in that leave-taking. Literature became my obsession because of that class, and I went on to major in English in college, and later to change careers from law to teaching high school English. At the end of each school year, when I am feeling particularly wistful about saying goodbye to my students, I hand out this poem, and I manage to pile on to the present wistfulness the longing I feel for those long gone days of my youth. Every ending pulls these words to my mind, and I realize that grace isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Janet Davis Karman
Southborough, Massachusetts

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

—from "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost

One night late on my way home from college for Christmas, I was caught in a blizzard without the company of an intelligent guide (I was driving, instead of a horse, a '62 Buick Special). I had passed through the last small town and was halfway between nowhere and Dodge City, Kansas when the road vanished beneath snow and my little car foundered badly. Realizing that no one was going to be passing by until the next day, I got out and started walking. Nothing. Nobody, no thing anywhere. At last the distant light of a farmhouse appeared, the only one, I discovered later, within miles. And if it hadn't been for the family inside that farmhouse, I might simply have frozen to death. As I was walking toward it, I thought of this poem, and I knew that I would be able to keep my promises, and I felt ecstatically liberated. Never have I seen these last lines in "Stopping by Woods" read as liberating rather than duty-bound. So boring for students: oh, this is a little lesson about obligations and responsibility. No time to ski, you've got chores to do before sleep, and you always will, and that's the way life is, suck it up and live with it. But the misunderstanding here is not in the specific explanation; it's in the very attempt at explanation. I hope they continue to teach in high schools the most over taught poem in America; I just wish they would stop explaining it.

B.H. Fairchild
Claremont, California

Earth's the right place for love.

—from "Birches" by Robert Frost

It is during those moments that I am hiding in my work, those days when I have spent more time writing than talking to people, and especially during those periods when the work is not coming well that I find myself circling back to Frost's line. The lines pop into my head, always taking me by surprise. I never recall the whole poem, or even the latter part of the line, "I don't know where it is likely to go better," but his are the words which remind me that I do need to get outside of myself, my mind, and my work to make a connection with someone—to, perhaps, even find love. My heart drops, into my stomach, at the visceral fear and ache those words inspire. Nevertheless, I need to stop fearing hurt, for "earth's the right place for love."

Rachel A. Wortman
Concord, New Hampshire

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
   madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
   dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
   heavenly connection to the starry dynamo
   in the machinery of night

—from "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

This poem was read to me when I was 19. I was in Paris on leave from a base in England and three of us had been given this guy's name and phone number and told he would let us stay with him for a couple of days. He read the whole poem as we drank wine and sat on the floor of his apartment. It started me on my road to discovery in poetry. I am 68 and still write poetry to this day. It comes to mind often in conversation with people regarding poetry. I have started a poem talking about current generations and "how i have seen the worst minds of current generations assume power in high places"

George Hoerner
Little River, South Carolina

I want to be known as the most brilliant man in America

—from "Ego Confession" by Allen Ginsberg

Sometimes when I feel most down, when I feel most detached and obscure and like I'm doing no good for anybody, I think about this line of poetry and it makes me laugh and gives me guidance. It's a line that on first glance appears to boast the highest form of pomposity. But on closer inspection the line betrays not pretension, but rather what it means to be selfless. After all, what does it mean to be brilliant? To be smart? Nah. To be superior? No. To be brilliant is to glow. To shed light from within. So in my day-to-day I can at least aspire to be remembered as someone who—even if not the "most brilliant"—at least gave some of what was inside and who brought a little more light into the world.

Shelly Blake
Elkridge, Maryland

I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.

Money money money
Water water water

How cool the grass is.
Has the bird left?
The stalk still sways.
Has the worm a shadow?
What do the clouds say?

—from "The Lost Son" by Theodore Roethke

These lines come to me at moments of anxiety and distraction. I think they include a remarkable transition of rhythm and tone, an audible passage from panic to serenity, from the urgent insistence of "Money money money" to the slow counterpoint of "Water water water." They work like a beta blocker on me. They slow my heart rate and calm me down.

Mark Jarman
Nashville, Tennessee

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go

—from "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

I encountered this poem when I lived in Europe and picked up any book I found that was written in English. These words spoke immediately to something deep in me, but I didn't know then that they were a prophecy for my life. Now it is thirty years later, and although I'm in a place I love, I found where I needed to go only by going there. I never had a plan, I never said "in five years I want to be doing this," I just took the next step that led to the next step. So when people ask me how I came to be doing what I do, (I'm a chaplain) I can either tell them a long, involved story or I can say I learned by going where I had to go.

Patricia Lyndale
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

—from "Burnt Norton" (Part 1 of "Four Quartets") by T. S. Eliot

These lines, especially the last two, seem to follow me wherever I go. In a rather sober and heavy poem these lines stand out like cherry blossoms on a leafless tree. They are feathery and joyous, the first delight being a talking bird. I think of these lines when I am walking through a park and see birds chirping in the trees. I imagine them silently urging me on into the realm of unreality.

Herbert Plummer
New York, NY

"How far could you swim, Daddy,
in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam.

—from "With Kit, Age 7, at the Beach" by William Stafford

How often have we stood in life’s storms weathering all that comes our way? I first heard these lines read through the voice of a community member at an annual event put on by friends of William Stafford. In attendance, was my own daughter. Who at the conclusion of the poem said to me, "Mommy, lets go to the beach", I knew then, Stafford’s words transcend age. Although she did not understand how far we swim as parents and adults, she understood Kit's fear and how holding on to Daddy’s hand was security. Often times when I am swimming, I think of William Stafford and his simplistic honesty of life in these lines. I then smile, knowing there were others before me who swam just as far and one day my own daughter will swim.

Neva Winter
Hillsboro, Oregon

My young son lurches halfway down the stair
or shrieks and totters midway through the climb
from the wobbling bookcase to the rocking chair.
I freeze and hold my breath.

—from "Green Springs the Tree" by Henry Taylor

This poem is particularly meaningful to me as older parent of a young child, when I am confronted with the countless times when our own vulnerability is put to test in trying to protect him from harm. How many times I have wished to be endowed with super powers, as the Spider Man or the Incredible Hulk, when attempting to reach out to break the fall of a hair-raising, semi-acrobatic jump of my son from the top of a mango tree to the perilous watery instability of a wading pool! Dr. Spock, the guru of child rearing, didn't offer any help for any of these situations. So, this poem holds a powerful meaning to me now, as I envision many older parents trembling nervously as they witness the fortuitous uncertainties of their kids' daring shenanigans.

Alberto Meza
Miami, Florida

We are poor passing facts…

—from “Epilogue” by Robert Lowell

I think about this line every time I see the news or read about the war.

Henri Cole
Boston, Massachusettes

The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.

—from “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” by Robert Lowell

When my father-in-law, Tom McGraw, who has not smoked in thirty-five years, called last June and told me he has lung cancer, I said to my wife bitterly, “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.” And when Tom, woozy from the chemo, fell and broke his knee last September, I said it again with sorrow: “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.” Eighty-five percent of lung cancer patients are dead in a year and I expected him to be gone by Christmas.

Instead, his knee has healed, he’s back to walking his dog a mile a day, and I say, with something like awe, “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.” I will say it again in grief before too long because he does, good man, have lung cancer after all.

At the same time, I began obsessively mumbling to myself a garbled version of a song I hadn’t thought of in thirty years: “Gonna take a sentimental journey/Gotta take that journey home./Got my bags, got my reservations,/Spent each dime I could afford,/Dum de dum, de dum de dum de dum dum,/I long to hear that ‘all aboard’.” The lyrics express, I suppose, my instinctive desire for a gentle transition into the afterlife for my good father-in-law--a sentimental journey, a journey home. But the famously opaque ending of Robert Lowell’s “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” is the one I chew on: “The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.”

When I was a child sitting in church, the preachers swooned over the goodness and mercy of God’s promise in the rainbow that came after the great flood. The Lord promised us he would never destroy the earth again by water. But even by age twelve, I did not have to tax my ingenuity to list plenty of ways that God could keep his deeply hedged promise and still eradicate the human race every hundred years for a millennium: fire of course, but also plague, drought, famine, hydrogen bombs, radiation, asteroids, volcanic eruption, solar flares, and berserk robots. God, reassuring Noah and his drenched daughters, merely removes one arrow from the apocalyptic quiver. Yet the rainbows do seem like miracles and promises—don’t they?--every time we see one.

Lowell’s oracular and Elizabethan pronunciamento, which is a pleasure just to roll around on your lips, seems to say something profound, but what? It can be read as some sort of affirmation of God: he survives. But another reading is that God is by his nature inimical to humankind, one who has withdrawn his promise. To my understanding, the line captures much of the famous complexity of the Book of Job. God’s majesty, which includes death and suffering and God’s own inscrutability, cannot by circumscribed even by his willed impulse toward mercy. The rainbow is a cloying symbol of a reduced God who, however much he may desire, cannot strip himself of his power and become a one-dimensional God of pity, understanding, compassion. He is so completely other that he cannot be bound or reduced even to his own desire to spare us. It is comfort of a hard sort--and the meaning and the nature of the comfort shifts depending on how you say it, a truth I hear unfolding each time I say, “The Lord survives the rainbow of His will.”

Andrew Hudgins
Columbus, Ohio

Back and forth, back and forth
goes the tock, tock, tock
of the orange, bland,
ambassadorial face of the moon
on the grandfather clock.

—from "Fall 1961" by Robert Lowell

The poem begins with a powerful suspension of detail. Though we might surmise from the first line—"Back and forth, back and forth"—that we are looking at a clock of some sort, Lowell strings out the stanza, deferring the actual mention of the clock until the final line. If we take into consideration the historical context (that America was in a dangerous Cold War stand-off with the Soviet Union) and Lowell’s own personal past (he was manic depressive and was hospitalized on many occasions for breakdowns), then these types of obsessive sound games and suspensions become all the more significant. Lowell is able to dramatize both personal and national fears by reverberating and suspending sound textures in the poem. What's unnerving is how we have all experienced this type of anxiety-ridden fall recurring each year since 2001. I can hardly read the lines anymore without shuddering.

Chad Davidson
Carrollton, Georgia

I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid and
     self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition...

—from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman

Being in prison, I have found that some lines help sustain me. The flow of Whitman’s lines is like elephants marching in a single file. When I was a kid, I used to run with a pack of semi-wild dogs. I'd whistle and the dogs would come out of nowhere. These lines set my spirit free, give it wings to glide beyond prison walls and strength to bear the prison conditions—freedom whenever I sit and watch the birds, ants, or whatever nature I can find.

Spoon Jackson B-92377
New Folsom
Represa, California

Long enough have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer...

—from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman

Truth to tell, I get to swim in the ocean for about a week each summer and it is one of the most ecstatic experiences I know. I love rising up and going down with the wave, just out past where they break—the lift and fall of a rhythm that large—it's like a physical enactment of what happens when you read the greatest poems. But I also like to swim straight out for a while, reciting these lines to myself, feeling the strange way salt water sustains you, holds you up. Of course, I like these lines elsewhere also, since they are about courage and getting courage from great poets—Whitman is a great courage-giver. He wants to live fully and seems to want us to do so also and that's another thing I hear in these lines.

Gregory Orr
Charlottesville, Virginia

Not my hands but green across you now.

—from "The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir" by Richard Hugo

I first read this poem in college, at the University of Utah, and its first line was so mysterious, so full of possibility, and scanned so well that it has stayed with me ever since. I became so fascinated by the line, the poem, and the book that I made two trips to Montana just to visit Kicking Horse Reservoir and some of the other places Hugo wrote about in his fine collection. Now, whenever I sit down to start a poem, that line comes to me almost like a ghost, like Hugo telling me to make every line of my own as powerful as that one of his.

Wyn Cooper
Halifax, Vermont

Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

—from “Dream Song #1” by John Berryman

Some lines come back to comfort us, others to instruct, still others to remind us of those wonders which lie about us everyday. And then there are some which haunt us by the very fact that their insights, dark and unsettling though they are, have been tested on the pulse and proven true. Oddly enough, there’s something in the measure of these two lines, something in the dignity with which they state this elemental fact of nature, that I find has added greatly to my sense of the responsive possibilities the human heart has available to it in moments of sorrow and loss.

Sherod Santos
Columbia, Missouri

What he has not to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

—from "Dream Song 1" by John Berryman

This August, driving on Highway 90 beside the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to Louisiana, I remembered these lines by John Berryman.

My husband, my young daughters and I were heading for New Orleans, where I grew up and where my parents live, because it was the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Along Hurricane Alley, as it's now called, we saw nothing but pure devastation: whole Mississippi towns and communities erased. Empty house foundations threaded with weeds. Buildings scrawled with FEMA numbers, counting the dead. Uprooted trees, a yellowed, salt-bleached landscape.

But also: a single open restaurant in downtown Gulfport, serving po-boys. A woman mowing her grass, tending a tiny rose garden outside her trailer. A sign: We're Coming Home!

And, oddly, Berryman's work provides unexpected solace. I love his refusal of sentimentality here but also his recognition of the need to speak. His lines remind me of the sheer scope of this natural and unnatural disaster that struck the Gulf Coast, my shock that the world continues to churn on in the face of it, and the necessity of bearing witness to what has happened.

Nicole Cooley
Glen Ridge, New Jersey

And then went down to the ship.

—from "Canto I" by Ezra Pound

I think of Pound's line, for reasons that remain obscure to me, whenever I leave a house or building and descend a flight of steps. Perhaps my childhood in a fishing village is at fault—the ships docked by a clapboard wharf, and you had to descend a gangway to a floating raft to reach them.

William Logan
Gainesville, Florida

I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

—from "Bitter-Sweet" by George Herbert

I was twenty-seven years old when I first read these lines on the frail page of an old poetry anthology. For most of my life, especially in my teen and college years, I had struggled with bouts of severe depression. But my chief struggle had been to reconcile my malaise with a strong belief in the redemption of humanity and all of the ugliness that made me sad, by a beauty-loving God. Herbert's words gave me permission to find beauty and even art in the tension rather than the resolution of living. This poem became an umbrella under which I could stand in awe and delight of this world's mystery and still feel sorrow and grief for all of life's pain. Living in that tension keeps my faith honest and the melancholy at bay.

Julia Cho
Brooklyn, New York

Implicitly Thy freedom staying Thee.

—from "To Brooklyn Bridge" by Hart Crane

It's a suspension bridge of course and the engineering feat is to make the bridge surface stable even when it is suspended from cables. (The Millennium Bridge in London failed to manage this when it first opened.) The idea that freedom is a path to stability appeals to my American soul, implying that there is something unstable about servitude. And the reader of a poem should be given the freedom—implicitly—to respond or not. "We do not like poems that have designs on us," said Keats. So browbeating poems have to go or those that so terrorize us we lose the ability to retreat from them.

Alfred Corn
Hudson, New York

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

—from "The World Is Too Much With Us" by William Wordsworth

As I've gotten older, I seem to be turning back to the poetry classics for inspiration. Does that mean I've become conservative? I hope not. But these famous lines seem as appropriate now as when they were written at he beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps the sentiment is more appropriate in light of the Consumer Society, not to mention the fear of ecological disasters like global warming. We should all be planting trees.

Joseph Lewis
Williamsburg, VA

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
            We will grieve not, rather find
            Strength in what remains behind;
            In the primal sympathy
            Which having been must ever be;
            In the soothing thoughts that spring
            Out of human suffering;
            In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

—from "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" by William Wordsworth

When I was in my fifties and still troubled by the things I perceived life had done to me and the things I had done to life and other people, I found these lines spoke to me. I memorized them, and have recited them almost daily during my morning walks. They comforted me, and helped me keep a proper perspective. Now that I have reached sixty- five, and what I consider the "years that bring the philosophic mind," I simply enjoy them.

Carl Slater
Castle Rock, Colorado

O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,
Like forms, are finished, as life has ends!

—from "In Love With You" by Kenneth Koch

In a 1994 short story recently reprinted in Kenneth Koch's Collected Fiction, a gorilla gives the author these rhymed lines in his sleep. That seems like a fair enough way to talk about the strangeness of inspiration, and these lines have always struck me as a very good first introduction to the energy and insight of all the arts only poetry can convey—not a linguistic exercise, but a confusing, exciting experience that makes complete sense at the time, and then makes a different complete sense afterwards.

Jordan Davis
New York, New York

I love your development
From the answer to a simple query to a state of peace
That has the world by the throat…

—from “To ‘Yes’” by Kenneth Koch

My son’s illness is eight years old and has no name. It started when he was 14. He is now 22. It is taking away his ability to walk and to reason. It is getting worse, some years more rapidly than others. Doctors continue to look for a name to call it. Until they find one, it is known to us by the names of its symptoms -- progressive spastic paraparesis, Bence-Jones proteinuria, subcortical dementia – and intimately by its subtle violence, the anonymous thief ravaging our dreams and twisting our son’s life.

He had been healthy and characteristically happy, our firstborn. We had named him Isaac; he chose to be called Ike when he became a teenager. During the second half of 1997, as he approached his fifteenth birthday, his walk became stiff-legged, progressively awkward, lurching. The pediatrician referred us to an orthopedist and he to a neurologist, and we began the leap across the divide from “before” and “normal” with no idea that eight years later we would still be suspended, waiting for an “after,” a diagnosis, a place to land.

Continue reading Life Line >

Madge McKeithen
Adapted from Blue Peninsula

But all of the others got down and they are safe
and this is the only one of the factory girls
who wasn't lucky in making the jump when the fire broke.
It is the hand of God and the lack of fire escapes.

—from "Anna Imroth" by Carl Sandburg

I found this poem a few years ago, and it reminded me vividly of my junior year in high school. That year five people I knew all died within a period of three months. It was the first time I was ever directly affected by death, and it was difficult to accept and understand. I couldn't fully articulate my conclusions about mortality then, but when I found this poem it spoke for me.

Death often feels random and coincidental or you can find practical reasons for its occurrence; such as a lack of fire escapes, icy roads, the wrong medicine. . . but, in every single case there is also a sense of providence. Reasons beyond what we know that seem to better explain what happened. Death still holds mystery like a tragic miracle. This poem said what I couldn't about tragedy.

Heather Spaulding
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name …
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

—from "Easter 1916" W. B. Yeats

On a cool, rainy Sunday in mid-November, these words came to me as I was standing among throngs of protesters at the entrance of Fort Benning, Georgia, home to the School of the Americas (SOA), which has since been recast in a more Orwellian note, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, whose mission, nonetheless, has remained the same in the last several decades: training the Latin American armed forces in military skills and tactics.

One tradition adopted by the annual mid-November gathering against the SOA consists in a procession of hundreds of protesters, each carrying a cross naming an individual killed, tortured, or disappeared by SOA graduates in Latin America over the years. One by one, hundreds of such names would be proclaimed aloud.

From a poem commemorating the Irish compatriots killed during the 1916 Easter uprising against the British Empire to the annual summon of Latin American victims against the American Empire, the act of naming assumes such a central role in bearing witness, for it not only makes real the victims that are the object, but also makes the witnesses that are the subject own those victims. Naming thus gives life to the dead and, in the same breath, transforms the living. A terrible beauty is indeed born.

Victor W. Liu
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—from "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dylan Thomas

At each moment of my life that has required me to summon up more strength than I think I have, these lines have spurred me on. I know that I do not have to accept blindly any of the myriad demands society makes upon me. It is even more meaningful to me now that my father is aging. He, who was once a mountain of a man, as handsome and wild as any movie star of the 50's, is now a graying shadow, smaller than me and unable to protest against any of pills, and creams, and injections which prolong his life. I long to see him angry again and to feel the terror and awe of a little girl who has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

Lavonne Westbrooks
Suwanee, Georgia

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

—from "Separation" by W.S. Merwin

I came across these lines while up late one evening in a library sorting through the detritus of life. I had just finished one of those emotionally absorbing, puppy-dog romances we all have in college. Although relatively brief, it was a very intense time. This poem really stuck to me because I had the experience where, for about a month after the breakup, I couldn't divest myself of her presence. She had influenced my outlook on life, attitudes, speech patterns, and hobbies so deeply that I found myself marveling that everything I did was stitched with her color. This poem perfectly captured what I was feeling at the time and it has been engraved in me ever since.

Jeff Urban
Yorktown Heights, New York

And within me, along
with the garbage, faces, faces
and voices, so many
lives woven into mine,
such improbable quantities
of memory; so much already
forgotten, lost, pruned away—
yet the doves, the doves!

—from "Doves" by C. K. Williams

I first read this poem as the birthday of a dear friend who died in January of 2003 neared in late November. The poem in its entirety says so clearly what my jumbled thoughts about her loss and other losses have meant in my life, but the final stanza is the one that says it all, and reminds me each time I read it that joy underwrites everything.

Nan L. Glass
Hartford, Connecticut

They also serve who only stand and wait

—from “On His Blindness” by John Milton

I know the line is so commonly known as to be a cliche, but the ending of Milton's sonnet on his blindness was something my father said many times under many circumstances. Usually it was in response to my complaint about postponing my own plans because others in the family (there were five of us children) had more immediate needs. And usually I was not trying to "serve" anyway-- but my father would parry my clever "how much longer?" with a brightly quoted "They also serve who only stand and wait," and I would be unamused.

And then one day I read the poem, and having two uncles who were blind, I felt a strange, disturbing reassesment of my father's habit. Waiting could be complicated, nuanced, even noble. My father may or may not have meant anything by quoting the line to me, but the poem was there, behind the single line, waiting for the moment when I would discover it.

Bin Ramke
Denver, Colorado

Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.

—from Paradise Lost, Book 1 by John Milton

If I were stranded on a desert island, I would want Paradise Lost with me. This line is spoken by Lucifer to rouse his companions who lie stunned after their defeat and great fall from Heaven. I love its cadence. Maybe taking words to heart from a fallen angel isn't wise, but this line speaks to me of the necessity of taking action, not simply succumbing to despair. It also rousts me out of bed some mornings, saving me from the other deadly sin of sloth.

Janet Parkinson
Newport, Rhode Island

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

—from “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens

It was 1967, I was 28, and had quit my job in New York and had gone to Spain with my wife to take a chance on becoming a writer. We traveled light, and the only book of poems I took with me was Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems. I didn't know much about poetry, except that I loved it, but I do remember -- two or three times a week -- reciting those lines to her over breakfast. They seemed both exotic and extraordinarily beautiful to me, and they remain so, though perhaps they were even more beautiful when I didn't understand them.

Stephen Dunn
Frostburg, Maryland

He would be the lunatic of one idea
In a world of ideas, who would have all people
Live, work, suffer and die in that idea
In a world of ideas....

—from “Esthetique Du Mal” by Wallace Stevens

I’ve had these lines in my head for many years, which is quite possibly a sad, sad thing. I wish they were inscribed in the marble walls of the congressional chambers and in all the offices of all the scared little people who make terrible, singular decisions for the world.

Matthew Rohrer
New York, New York

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

—from “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens

These last ten lines of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens come back to me again and again, most frequently when I am teaching.  Sometimes I find myself reciting them by heart to students in the fourth grade, and sometimes to my graduate students.  As I recite each line, I move one hand, sweeping it across like a conductor.  I pause at each line break to show how lines calm you with their melody, like a lullaby, how reciting it and hearing it makes you feel as if you are being rocked in a cradle.  I memorized and loved these lines because my teacher Galway Kinnell loved them and recited them by heart to his students.  Once, after I recited them to a 4th grade class and asked them what the lines meant, a student immediately raised his hand and said, “A long time ago, there was a big bang, and the universe came from that.  But our earth is also quiet and beautiful.”

Toi Derricotte
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

—from "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" by Wallace Stevens

Since my husband was diagnosed early in 2005 with an Alzheimers-type dementia, poetry has been more of a lifeline than ever. The Stevens line now means for me, among other things, that one perceives everything newly, and that relations, or resemblances, are both absurd and sustaining. The dementia creates nonsense, but relating things creates sense. In trying to think about the situation, I constantly have recourse to similes; for example, the mental confusion is like a cloudy day where the sun keeps breaking through; I function as a shock absorber (for "the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to"?). Stevens's luminous and mysterious line suggests connections.

Rachel Hadas
New York, New York

The world of dew
is the world of dew.
     And yet, and yet—

—"Haiku" (1819) by Issa

This haiku is by the Japanese poet, Issa, and was written in 1819. I love it for its simplicity, its haunting repetitions. When the image in the first line becomes repeated, in line two, I see the mirror there in the drop of water. The delicacy of that world, those worlds, is reiterated in the final line, where the final repetition sounds to me like a kind of beautiful hopefulness sometimes, a kind of resigned grace at other times. The world is continually new and eternally the same. Does it help to know that Issa wrote this poem shortly after his infant daughter, Sato, died of smallpox? These lines are with me virtually every morning, when I walk outside into the deep old-growth trees behind our house. We live in the country, in rural Ohio, and the rain and snow and dew and frost live there with us, lit by the sun, shadowed by the clouds. Sometimes the news of war limns the branches too, and sometimes the serenity of solitude. It is always the same world. And yet....

David Baker
Granville, Ohio

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, --
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat -- the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

—from "Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I was younger than the poet when I first read this long, bravura poem she had written at nineteen.  I was so enthralled by her immense talent that I gave up writing poetry for good, sparing the world one more low-talent poet but giving it one more devoted reader.  Later, I visited Camden, Maine and stayed at the Whitehall Inn, where Millay had been working when she wrote "Renascence."  The small exhibit of her poems was a shrine for me.  Today I have an immensely talented granddaughter who writes fiction and poetry and advises me on good poetry books.  The generations have closed the gap and I am the instrument.

Alice W. Snyder
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

—from "Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Even before Eliot named April cruel, Millay was there asking questions about the significance of that month's facile promise and eternal return. I admire the bravado with which she parcels out her wildly irregular lines. As well as the way she formally emphasizes April's momentary hope — set against life's continual difficulty and occasional danger — by setting “April” on a line of it's own. That bold gesture also delays ever so slightly the final disquieting image of April as some babbling daffy aunt who runs down a hill throwing flowers onto the new green. When have I thought of these lines? Endless times. And not just in April. Once in March I was in Austin, Texas while back home in Chicago, which was home then, it was still cold and trees were just sticks stuck in the cold ground. In and out of Austin, the highway medians were filled with wildflowers. There have been times since then when, in an icy March, I've thought of that Austin scene; the recollection of those strewn flowers that mark the roadways there takes me straight to the image of Millay's April as one who mindlessly and wantonly makes the moment pretty but delivers no lasting relief to those who feel the world leaning hard against them.

Mary Jo Bang
St. Louis, Missouri

I shut my eyes and there's our living room,
The piano's playing something by Chopin,
And Mother and Father and their little girl

Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
I go over, hold my hands out, play I play—
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers.

—from "The Player Piano" by Randall Jarrell

In Jarrell's poem (of which these are the last lines) a woman old enough to be a grandmother considers the lost opportunities, or simply the years, of her life: the memory on which the poem ends speaks to the ways in which, no matter what we have done with ourselves, we can wish we had done something else, and to the helplessness and loss in even the most assertive and well-enjoyed life. It also speaks to the helplessness of parents, who can save their children from many things, with luck and attention, but not from regret itself. I admired the lines even before we had our first child, Nathan Miles, born in January 2006; now that he's with us, Jarrell's stanzas mean even more.

Stephen Burt
St. Paul, Minnesota