unlike the rose
you have hair imbedded in the nose

It’s interesting that messiness evidently focus groups so well as the thing we fear most that it shows up repeatedly in political attacks.

I think you got the right idea there. I have not yet found a poem that did not cry out to be read aloud… as loud as possible, or as soft and intimate as needed.

A thought there - the best reader of poetry ever recorded would have to be Dylan Thomas.

Favourites? Too many to list. Depends upon the mood. At the moment I am in the Fourth Fit of “Hunting of the Snark” but that is not everyone’s cup of tea. GMH, despite the fact that he was a Jesuit wrote some fantastic and extremely “difficult” verse. And ol’William McGonagal - fantastic as well!!

And, by the way, the poem “If” was one of the many I had to commit to memory in junior high. It’s pretty much with me stil; I could probably recite a significant amount of it from memory.

Now that I think about it, I remember that the military likes the poem, IF.

Google, if you want the poem itself.

I never liked poems much. But some poems catch the soul. IF does that.

This one does as well.

Link

I’m a visual thinker, and at times, I wouldn’t call it dyslexia, I can’t understand some things that are written in ways different than I have learned. Hard and complicated words, different formats. Such as poems are hard to read, and harder to understand. But some poems, the visual ones, are not hard to read or understand.

Link

Other poems like Xanadu were also very nice and serene. Frost is also understandable, although he doesn’t engender the same image and feelings as IF and Xanadu.

I has had a intellectual affinity with Tommy.

I cannot help but think that my way of thinking has impacted the things I have read or are able to read. Some things I cannot read, because it is either boring or extremely hard.

We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints;
While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.

You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

Take up the White man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times mad plain.
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White man’s burden –
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: –
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”

A couple of broken excerpts. I have no difficult understanding the above quoted portions. But I don’t understand 90% of other poems, unless I reread it 5 times, and aloud.

Is there a prose/pentamic perameter difference between the ones that I understand and the ones, like the one you used here, that is hard to understand?

ymarsakar: I do indeed. I don’t know whether you caught this post, but that’s how it seems to work for me. I had to memorize a lot of poetry while growing up, but I loved poetry so much that I naturally read it and learned it, anyway.

sissy: I guess we’re all just right-wing nutcases, as our critics claim :-).

Crazy Sissy talks with the Harvard man”

I love your post. It has everything — man, nature, man’s eternal quest to conquer nature. But, of course, nature always has the last word.