What are some of your favorite small slices from poems, say no more than two lines? Let's change that to four lines to account for those stubby lines in modern poems.

......My heart in hiding stirred
For a bird: the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

from "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

DWill: What a terrific idea, although hard for me not to want to post a few lines from all of my favorite poems.

Here's one --

From Question by May Swenson

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

I wonder about that same question a lot.

Here are two lines I love from a poet I love -- Li-Young Lee, the poem is From Blossoms.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat

It was so hard to choose which two lines from this poem.

And two more lines from Li-Young Lee -- From the poem is "Hold":

So we're dust. In the meantime, my wife and I

make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,

I was thinking that there are many different reasons for liking any two or four lines of poetry. I like these line because of how much Lee is able to say with these few words and the the one image he creates.

I just finished a post on John Updike's book of poetry for Children entitled A Child's Calendar, on the Seasonal Poetry thread. These lines come from the poem for April.

The blushing, girlish
World unfolds

Each flower, leaf,
And blade of turf--
Small love-notes sent
From air to earth.


To my mind calling the spring world girlish captures fully what spring is all about.

Just about any slice from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock would do, such as:

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

or

"Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

or

"I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker"

or

"I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

or my favorite

"If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'”

How about this bit?

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.

And:

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.

("The Waste Land")

DWill wrote:And:

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.

("The Waste Land")

I was lucky enough to have a daughter read me sections of The Waste Land this very evening as I did the dishes.