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Favorite poem meme, from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jonquil
Aug. 24th, 2005 08:09 pmPick your favorite poem and reproduce it or link to it.
a) Why do you like this poem?
b) What is your favorite part of the poem?
c) How did you first run across this poem?
Call me unoriginal, but I adore The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
It's one of the first poems I got to pick apart, in high school, examining its insides and rolling all those gorgeous phrases over my tongue again and again. It's also a poem I was asked to work on with a friend, who hated poetry, didn't "get it," and by the time we were done, she liked this poem very much. I also turned her on to Sylvia Plath, so go me.
My favorite part of the poem is the end, although it was hard to choose:
"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
It's a lovely sounding poem, for one, because of the sheet repetition and rhyme, but it cries out with a kind of joyful mournfulness, a bittersweet nostalgia for something that isn't yet over. It's about life and risk and beauty and aging and death, and the dreams we have of what life could be, might be, and what we can make it. It's about how painful life is, and how gorgeous that pain can be.
a) Why do you like this poem?
b) What is your favorite part of the poem?
c) How did you first run across this poem?
Call me unoriginal, but I adore The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
It's one of the first poems I got to pick apart, in high school, examining its insides and rolling all those gorgeous phrases over my tongue again and again. It's also a poem I was asked to work on with a friend, who hated poetry, didn't "get it," and by the time we were done, she liked this poem very much. I also turned her on to Sylvia Plath, so go me.
My favorite part of the poem is the end, although it was hard to choose:
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."
It's a lovely sounding poem, for one, because of the sheet repetition and rhyme, but it cries out with a kind of joyful mournfulness, a bittersweet nostalgia for something that isn't yet over. It's about life and risk and beauty and aging and death, and the dreams we have of what life could be, might be, and what we can make it. It's about how painful life is, and how gorgeous that pain can be.
