Please tell me what poem most influenced you

I decided to ask my Facebook friends to nominate poems that had influenced them and suggested Belloc's B is for Bear had most influenced me. This was a gag though, as I said in an earlier post, B is for Bear does seem apposite to the Ukrainian crisis.


I invite my readers to tell me poems that have influenced or deeply moved them.


I am not sure any poem has influenced me very much but when I was asked in Vivid magazine back in 2002 I quoted two poems.


The beginning of a famous poem by Louis MacNeice:

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

And Horace - Odes, Book 3, Ode 29: Happy the Man - trans. Dryden. Like all poems in translation it is really a poem by the translator.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Here's another of my very favourite poems - a lament for Catholic England.

FAREWELL, rewards and fairies,
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?

Lament, lament, old Abbeys,
The Fairies’ lost command!
They did but change Priests’ babies,
But some have changed your land.
And all your children, sprung from thence,
Are now grown Puritans,
Who live as Changelings ever since
For love of your demains.

At morning and at evening both
You merry were and glad,
So little care of sleep or sloth
These pretty ladies had;
When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cis to milking rose,
Then merrily went their tabor,
And nimbly went their toes.

Witness those rings and roundelays
Of theirs, which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary’s days
On many a grassy plain;
But since of late, Elizabeth,
And later, James came in,
They never danced on any heath
As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies
Were of the old Profession.
Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’,
Their dances were Procession.
But now, alas, they all are dead;
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for Religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

A tell-tale in their company
They never could endure!
And whoso kept not secretly
Their mirth, was punished, sure;
It was a just and Christian deed
To pinch such black and blue.
Oh how the commonwealth doth want
Such Justices as you!

For those who have forgotten it:

B
STANDS FOR BEAR.

When Bears are seen

Approaching in the distance,
Make up your mind at once between

Retreat and Armed Resistance.


A Gentleman remained to fight—
With what result for him?
The Bear, with ill-concealed delight,
Devoured him
Limb by Limb.


Another Person turned and ran;

He ran extremely hard:
The Bear was faster than the Man,

And beat him by a yard.

MORAL

Decisive action in the hour of need

Denotes the Hero, but does not succeed.

Matt Williams chose this 'Next, Please' by Philip Larkin

Always too eager for the future, we

Pick up bad habits of expectancy.

Something is always approaching; every day

Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear

Sparkling armada of promises draw near.

How slow they are!

And how much time they waste,

Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks

Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks

Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead wit golden tits

Arching our way, it never anchors; it's

No sooner present than it turns to past.

Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload

All good into our lives, all we are owed

For waiting so devoutly and so long.But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-

Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back

A huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.

Martin Robb chose "this beautiful short poem by John Riley, the Yorkshire-born poet and editor who was murdered by muggers in 1978. It's one I keep coming back to."

Poem for Rilke in Switzerland

I have brought it to my heart to be a still point

Of praise for the powers which move towards me as I

To them, through the dimensions a tree opens up,

Or a window, or a mirror. Creatures fell

Silent, then returned my stare.

Or a window, or a mirror. The shock of re-

Turning to myself after a long journey,

With music, has made me cry, cry out — angels

And history through the heart's attention grow transparent.

Rebecca Bista chose this, by Rilke:

The Eighth Elegy

  The Eighth Elegy

   

The creature gazes into openness with all

its eyes. But our eyes are

as if they were reversed, and surround it,

everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.

We know what is outside us from the animal’s

face alone: since we already turn

the young child round and make it look

backwards at what is settled, not that openness

that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.

We alone see that: the free creature

has its progress always behind it,

and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

in eternity, as streams do.

We never have pure space in front of us,

not for a single day, such as flowers open

endlessly into. Always there is world,

and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,

unwatched-over, that one breathes and

endlessly knows, without craving. As a child

loses itself sometimes, one with the stillness, and

is jolted back. Or someone dies and is it.

Since near to death one no longer sees death,

and stares ahead, perhaps with the large gaze of the creature.

Lovers are close to it, in wonder, if

the other were not always there closing off the view.....

As if through an oversight it opens out

behind the other......But there is no

way past it, and it turns to world again.

Always turned towards creation, we see

only a mirroring of freedom

dimmed by us. Or that an animal

mutely, calmly is looking through and through us.

This is what fate means: to be opposite,

and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever.

If there was consciousness like ours

in the sure creature, that moves towards us

on a different track – it would drag us

round in its wake. But its own being

is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view

of its condition, pure as its outward gaze.

And where we see future it sees everything,

and itself in everything, and is healed for ever.

And yet in the warm waking creature

is the care and burden of a great sadness.

Since it too always has within it what often

overwhelms us – a memory,

as if what one is pursuing now was once

nearer, truer, and joined to us

with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,

there it was breath. Compared to that first home

the second one seems ambiguous and uncertain.

O bliss of little creatures

that stay in the womb that carried them forever:

O joy of the midge that can still leap within,

even when it is wed: since womb is all.

And see the half-assurance of the bird,

almost aware of both from its inception,

as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

born of a dead man in a space

with his reclining figure as the lid.

And how dismayed anything is that has to fly,

and leave the womb. As if it were

terrified of itself, zig-zagging through the air, as a crack

runs through a cup. As the track

of a bat rends the porcelain of evening.

And we: onlookers, always, everywhere,

always looking into, never out of, everything.

It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.

We arrange it again, and collapse ourselves.

Who has turned us round like this, so that,

whatever we do, we always have the aspect

of one who leaves? Just as they

will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,

on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,

so we live, and are always taking leave.