More for National Poetry Month

William Shakespeare. Great playwright (or was he?) but even better poet. I love many of his sonnets, but my favorite is Sonnet 116 (right? My abilities with Roman numerals are sketchy.), which I memorized in law school, during the morning hours as I got ready for classes. I found that memorizing the sonnet was a great way to relax before the Socratic method took over, and it helped keep my mind and memory sharp for class, too.

Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove;
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

April Is National Poetry Month

I'm not a huge poetry reader (although I was in my college days), but I do have several collections by poets I love: Yeats, Auden, Dorothy Parker. Another of my favorite poets is Robert Louis Stevenson. When I was young, I owned a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses. These poems never cease to remind me of my childhood and, for that reason, they remain some of my favorite poetry to this day. My sister and I had a swingset in our backyard and we loved to repeat this poem while swinging out over the grass:

The Swing
by Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

In Honor of National Poetry Month

This is one of my favorite poems by W.H. Auden:

T.S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas
Crying "What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?"

I figured my fellow literary types would get the joke. Believe me when I say there WERE people in my literature class who didn't get it.