What are your favourite lines of unknown or obscure poetry?

It’s impossible to tell what might be considered obscure by others but one of my favorite not very famous lines is:

“And I walked abroad in a shower of all my days.”

From “Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver. Here’s the whole poem. i cannot cannibalize it.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

@gailcalled How apt for me today!

I am looking for (but unable so far to find) a poem that curses new knees and mature women named Bobbi. We may have to write our own.

A great lad with a beery face
Had tucked himself away beside
A ladle and a tub of beer,
And snored, no phantom by his look.
So with a laugh at his own fear
He crawled into that pleasant nook.
‘Night grows uneasy near the dawn
Till even I sleep light; but who
Has tired of his own company?
What one of Maeve’s nine brawling sons
Sick of his grave has wakened me?
But let him keep his grave for once
That I may find the sleep I have lost.’
What care I if you sleep or wake?
But I’ll have no man call me ghost.’
Say what you please, but from daybreak
I’ll sleep another century.’
And I will talk before I sleep
And drink before I talk.’
And he
Had dipped the wooden ladle deep
Into the sleeper’s tub of beer
Had not the sleeper started up.
Before you have dipped it in the beer
I dragged from Goban’s mountain-top
I’ll have assurance that you are able
To value beer; no half-legged fool
Shall dip his nose into my ladle
Merely for stumbling on this hole
In the bad hour before the dawn.’
Why beer is only beer.’ – William Butler Yeats

Not precisely poetry, but I love this scene from The Wire
BASHIR: Garak?
GARAK: Leave me alone.
BASHIR: I don’t think that would be a good idea right now. Your blood chemistry is severely imbalanced. You need to rest.
GARAK: Don’t touch me.
BASHIR: Just calm down.
GARAK: I don’t want to be calm, Doctor. I’ve been calm long enough. Look at this place. It’s pathetic. To think that this is what my life has been reduced to. This sterile shell, this prison.
(Garak smashes a flower vase)
BASHIR: Take it easy, Garak. Look, you’re obviously experiencing some side effects from the deactivation of the implant.
GARAK: Ridiculous. I feel more clear-headed than I have in the past two years. Two years. What a waste these past two years have been.
(Garak overturns a table)
GARAK: There was a time, Doctor, oh there was a time when I was a power. The protégé of Enabran Tain himself. Do you have any idea what that means?
BASHIR: I’m afraid I don’t.
GARAK: No, you don’t, do you. You don’t know much of anything. Tain was the Obsidian Order. Not even the Central Command dared challenge him. And I was his right hand. My future was limitless until I threw it away.
BASHIR: You mean when you had that shuttle shot down to stop those prisoners from escaping?
GARAK: Stop them? I only wish that I had stopped them.
BASHIR: You didn’t?
GARAK: No, Doctor, my disgrace was worse than that. Unimaginably worse.
BASHIR: What could you have possibly done worse than that?
GARAK: I let them go. It was the eve of the Cardassian withdrawal. Elim and I were interrogating five Bajorans. They were children, Doctor. None of them were older than fourteen years old. They knew nothing. They lived in bombed-out rooms, scrounged for food on the streets. They were filthy and they stank. The room was freezing cold, the air was like ice, and suddenly the whole exercise seemed utterly meaningless. All I wanted was a hot bath and a good meal. So I let them go. I gave them whatever latinum I had in my pockets, and opened the door, and flung them back into the street. Elim couldn’t believe his eyes. He looked at me as if I were insane.
BASHIR: You took pity on those children. There’s nothing wrong with that.
GARAK: No! I was a fool! I should’ve finished the interrogation and turned them over to the troops for execution. But because I was chilly and my stomach was growling, I failed in my duty and destroyed everything I had worked for.
BASHIR: And so they exiled you.
GARAK: That’s right. And left me to live out my days with nothing to look forward to but having lunch with you.
BASHIR: I’m sorry you feel that way. I thought you enjoyed my company.
GARAK: I did. And that’s the worst part. I can’t believe that I actually enjoyed eating mediocre food and staring into at your smug, sanctimonious face. I hate this place and I hate you.

Urdu poetry is simply beautiful. I would love to enlighten fluther with some lines from the subcontinent, however I dont think it would be very fruitful. Not only do I not how to write it here but also I dont think you would understand.

“Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts
With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t!” – Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

Only my own, lol! But I won’t make anyone here suffer through them…

I just discovered this, by one of my favorite contemporary poets.

How It Is with Us, and How It Is with Them

by Mary Oliver

We become religious,
then we turn from it,
then we are in need and maybe we turn back.
We turn to making money,
then we turn to the moral life,
then we think about money again.
We meet wonderful people, but lose them
in our busyness.
We’re, as the saying goes, all over the place.
Steadfastness, it seems,
is more about dogs than about us.
One of the reasons we love them so much. (Emboldening is mine, not Mary’s).

Or, if you prefer, a nice poem about a nice bird.

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

”...what to make of a diminished thing” indeed.

You know, of course, that the nickname of the oven bird is the teacher bird.. His call sounds like ‘Tea CHER, tea CHER, tea CHER. Frost knew that, being a farm boy.

‘pity this busy monster, manunkind’

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
—- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born—- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if—- listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go

E. E. Cummings

Poem of Parting

Too much love
Somehow appears
No love at all

Over a farewell glass
We can’t manage
Even a friendly smile

Only the candle
Is able
To generate feeling

All night
weeping
Little tears of wax.

by Du Mu
(Quite famous in China, not so much here.)

To the Virgins, to make much of Time

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he ‘s a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he ‘s to setting.

That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent,the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry.

Robert Herrick

I couldn’t choose.

To Daffodils

FAIR daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attain’d his noon. Stay, stay Until the hasting day Has run But to the evensong; And, having pray’d together, we Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you, We have as short a spring; As quick a growth to meet decay, As you, or anything. We die As your hours do, and dry Away Like to the summer’s rain; Or as the pearls of morning’s dew, Ne’er to be found again.

Robert Herrick again

This snippet always grabbed me for some reason: “I’d not give way to an Emperor, I’ll hold my road ‘gainst a King. To the Triple Crown I’ll not bow down. but this is a different thing. I’ll not fight ‘gainst the Powers of the Air, sentry pass him thru. Drawbridge let fall, He’s the Lord of us all, the Dreamer whose Dream came true.”