I'll match that Keats with a Frost and I'm sure Bereft is a replay as well.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

Ah! You got me, Saffron. Now I have to post this one:

My November Guest

My sorrow when she's here with me
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be.
She loves the bare, the withered tree,
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list.
She's glad the birds have gone away.
She's glad her simple, worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy skies,
These beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these
And pesters me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare, November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost.

(This is typed from memory, so it may have some inaccuracies, but this is how I remember it. I may even be missing a stanza. If I am and someone knows the stanza, it's always interesting to see what my mind has "lost.")

GentleReader9 wrote: (This is typed from memory, so it may have some inaccuracies, but this is how I remember it. I may even be missing a stanza. If I am and someone knows the stanza, it's always interesting to see what my mind has "lost.")

GR9: I am quite impressed that you typed the poem from memory. I'll give someone else a chance to report if you've missed a line or two, but I feel like we are playing at a game of tag-your-it!

Saffron

Saffron wrote:

I feel like we are playing at a game of tag-your-it!

Now I want to write you a poem about playing tag-you're-it. When/if I get it finished, I will post it on the "Original Poetry" thread and dedicate it to you.

Saffron,
I read the thread from the bottom up, and after reading GR9's post of the great Frost poem, was thinking of posting "Bereft," and wondering if I already had (segue to the Montaigne essay!). Then I saw that you'd thought of it, beat me to it. I don't mind losing.
Will

GR9,
Well, you used a few commas where my edition has semicolons; you have "pester" in place of "vex." You came close to getting it perfect! Do you have many others in the memory banks? I have a store of them, too, but except for the shortest, they require some regular maintenance.
DWill

Thanks for looking it up for me, DWill. I am so lazy. But I am grateful, which causes others to forgive me, more often than not. I have a few things in my memory. It's wierd what they are and where the memory breaks down. Frequently I can't quite remember my own poems that I have actually written and re-written, and you would think one would remember how they go after that. Then there are others I haven't even read very many times that just stick.

Many of T.S. Eliot's Practical Cats poems, zillions of nursery rhymes, the stray Bible verse, lots of raving maniacal nonsense. Once I tried to memorize the entire "The Hunting of the Snark" by Lewis Carroll and I got pretty far, too. And I did memorize this long poem we had on an LP, back when they had 78 RPM records about "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" by Paul Ducas (sp?) which used to crack my mother up because I recited it imitating the British accent and crafty manner of the narrator who read it on the album:

So. He's gone, the wise, old wizard.
And for once alone I find me.
And I feel it in my gizzard
I can make his spirits mind me.
Each look, each word he muttered,
I marked. With much ado,
With spirits nicely buttered,
I'll make magic, too!
Wander, wander, faster, faster,
Fetch your master
Water gushing from the fountain!
Let it thunder down the bath in torrents rushing!
Now come, old broom.
Stop acting surly.
Wrap the ragged ragmops round you.
You've served him late and early.
To my bidding now I've bound you.
With two legs for prancing,
A head, and arms galore,
Quick! Some necromancing!
Make that bucket pour.
Wander, wander, faster, faster....

I will spare you the entire thing. But I do think I still have most of it, prancing in pretentious and overly animated tones through my head like "Carlos Among the Candles."

Once in a rare while I have something really good like a Shakespeare sonnet or soliloquy, Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Spring and Fall to a Young Child," Dylan Thomas' "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower," or "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," or an Emily Dickinson poem or two. Usually it's just a lot of sounds that might as well be "Fox in Socks," which I do love to read aloud, fast because of how it feels in your mouth. Just like a wonderful caramel dessert. Or chanting really fast bhajans, "Shiva-sharavanabhava-subramanyam, Guru-sharavanabhava-subramanyam...."

And then of course the inadvertently memorized prose passages beginning with things like, "Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path..." or "If we are painstaking in this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are halfway through..." or "Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize that we know only a little...." etc., etc. What kinds of things stick in your memory?

For a long time I had the first stanza to this poem written down not realizing where it came from. I love the picture that this poem produces in my mind.



The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love,

-- Christopher Marlowe

Realiz: I really like the first stanza of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and what a first line!

Come live with me and be my love


Isn't that what every girl wants to hear?

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