The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Was a great favourite and is still evocative .
There is another three pages of it .
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Poems on Love
Love adorns itself;
it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty.
~
Love does not claim possession,
but gives freedom.
~
Love is an endless mystery,
for it has nothing else to explain it.
~
Love’s gift cannot be given,
it waits to be accepted.
Rabindranath Tagore
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@Last_Tango I too loved Masefield’s Cargoes, and we sang it at school - to the same tune that @Fruitcake linked. Gosh that brought back memories!!
I couldn’t choose a favourite poem, because as soon as I did so, others would come crowding in. There are many I love, and this is just one of my favourites - Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice:
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
A sad one
Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead.
Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
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Clive James wrote Japanese Maple, a farewell poem, after being diagnosed with leukaemia and emphysema.
Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:
Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?
Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.
My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:
Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.
I only know one poem from years ago … and I’ve forgotten the ending. It goes something like this:
As I was in the village, walking down the lane
I met the Vicar’s son - he said ‘Good Morning Jane. May I come walking with you?’
He really was polite and as he was the Vicar’s son, I thought it was alright.
He put his hand upon my knee, he really was polite.
And as he was the Vicar’s son, I thought it was alright…
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You have me so curious about how that ends. I went to look it up on google but couldn’t find anything. Was it a happy ending?
I learnt that when I was a teenager, butterscotch… 
Methinks it was a rude ending… 
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Aww, disappointing. It started off so promising.
Thanks for letting me know.
I always had a love/hate relationship with ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
Apart from that there two that really love - and can still recite:-
Silver
by Walter de la Mare
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
…
…
Sea-Fever
By [John Masefield
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trip’s over.
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Iron Maiden do a very atmospheric version of" The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".I don’t think it would be your taste in music though.
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Will have a look and listen, Smiffy. It must be a long track - it goes on forever!
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Its not the Cough
That carries you off
Its the Coffin
They carry you off in. 
I think it’s good to see that so many young people knew the words.
I don’t think Coleridge would have recognised all of them! Great beat though!
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You mean apart from “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Caroll?
I have always had a soft spot for Banjo Patterson and my favourite is " Clancy of The Overflow*
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just “on spec”, addressed as follows: “Clancy, of The Overflow”.
And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written in a thumbnail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”
In my wild erratic fancy visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving “down the Cooper” where the western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.
And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.
I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.
And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.
And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.
And I somehow fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal -
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy, of “The Overflow”.
The Bulletin, 21 December 1889.
It’s even been put to music by many people.
I’ve not seen that afore. I only knew of Clancy from the poem, The Man from Snowy River, and of course the Aussie unofficial National Anthem, I am Australian.
@butterscotch I love ‘The Road Not Taken’ too.
Robert Frost one of the Dymock poets and wrote the poem while staying in a cottage there Little Iddens.
I once lived very near Dymock and walked the woods and paths there famous for Daffodils and Snowdrops and I wondered did Frost get his inspiration for the poem walking the same paths…
I can’t really choose a 'favourite ’ poem I have too many…
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