A poem that is my own favorite cool drink of water is Li-young Lee's From Blossoms. It is the last stanza and especially the last two lines that make this a life line poem for me. A sustaining thought for me has always been how amazing, how shockingly beautiful the natural world is. No matter how I feel at any particular moment, the world goes right on being beautiful. In dark moments this thought and these lines of poetry are a comfort to me.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue.
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new. (last two lines of Milton's "Lycidas")

But there may come another day to me--
Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty. (Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence")

By our own spirits are we deified. (Wordsworth, ibid.)

At length the man percieves it die away
And fade into the light of common day.

High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised. (both from Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality")

Those beauteous forms,
Through a long absense, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and amid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration. (Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey")

I can get quite a few of these lifelines from Wordsworth!

DW wrote:Those beauteous forms,
Through a long absense, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and amid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration. (Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey")

I especially like this bit. Thanks, I've not read much Wordsworth; Mr. W may have to be my next project.

Saffron wrote:

DW wrote:Those beauteous forms,
Through a long absense, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and amid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration. (Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey")

I especially like this bit. Thanks, I've not read much Wordsworth; Mr. W may have to be my next project.

Sure. Just watch out for "The Excursion." I know a certain fellow who lost much of his youth and sanity writing a master's thesis on that monumental work.

I must go down to the sea again, the lonely sea and the sky (especially poignant now that I live in the middle where the sea is so far away) John Masefield

....I have promises to keep
and miles to go before I sleep
and miles to go before I sleep

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
· To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Those four are Frost of course

I'm with bleachededen on Jabberwocky too, it has even invaded my dreams

You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!