Poems that make you shiver

[John Q. Mayhem]

I'm not talking about scared. When I first read The Tyger aloud, I practically couldn't stand up it was so good. What poems have moved you like this?

As I Walked Out One Morning by Auden, The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot. I'm sure more will come to me.

EDIT: The Second Coming.

 

[Thorntangle]

Many, many poems do this. Whitman always gives me the cosmic shivers. Randal Jarrell gave me the shock shiver when I was 12 or so.


From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

 

[Felix]

Ah, Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. Classic. And I'll be seconding Whitman.

That guy was a bona fide wordsmith, even if he did use "love-root" in one of his works.

 

[Pielorinho]

Each night, father fills me with dread
When he sits at the foot of my bed.
I'd not mind that he speaks
in gibbers and squeaks
But for seventeen years, he's been dead.

Gotta love Ed Gorey.

Serious poems that chill me? There's a poem by e.e. cummings that begins
no time ago
or else a lifetime

I'll let folks look it up.
Daniel

 

[Pielorinho]

Ooh, another e.e. cummings poem:
in a middle of a room
stands a suicide

The final stanza of it--after a suicide discusses the possibility of happiness existing elsewhere--is beautiful and terrible:
(a moon swims out of a cloud
a clock strikes midnight
a finger pulls a trigger
a bird flies into a mirror)
Daniel

 

[nakia]

I'll second Yeats and "The Second Coming". Part of that poem will be an epigram for my dissertation: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

I am also a big fan of Whitman. I love "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."

And poor Mr. Prufrock, as well as "The Waste Land."

Recently, I have been reading some Rita Dove. If you are ever feeling sorry for yourself, check out "Against Self Pity" in On the Bus with Rosa Parks.

 

[Wombat]

Ah, poetry,

When I was a kid, I thought I hated poetry, though I had memorized dozens of them (and song lyrics besides). Even when I started writing poetry, I thought I disliked poetry. Crazy, huh?

Then I went to college. There I met Don Sheehan.

Don taught me that I didn't dislike poetry, but that there were specific poems I didn't like. This allowed me to turn my thoughts around. I came to love Langston Hughs, Carl Sandburg, Geoffrey Chaucer, Margaret Atwood, and many, many others. And I learned to like my own writing and churn out quite a bit (although most of it is so personal/self-referential that they make no sense to anyone except me).

Don had a simple rule for poetry. "Read it. Do you like it? If so, it is a good poem. If you don't like it, it isn't. Of course, your opinion may change over time..." Thanks, Don

Poems that make me shivver? How about "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden? "I Sing The Body Electric" by Walt Whitman. The slowly building and sad splendour of "Spoon River Antholgy" by Edgar Lee Masters. "The Raven" and "The Bells" by Poe.

Ooo... gotta go read more poems!

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

"The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men", Eliot
"Ozymandias", Shelley
"Annabelle Lee", "The Raven", Poe
"Rime of the Ancient Mariner", "Kubla Khan", Coleridge

 

[Hypersmurf]

Blake, from the Prologue for King Edward the Fourth:
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
and sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
and fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand?

Blake, Jerusalem:
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Brig me my spear - O, clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

Noyes, The Highwayman:
Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs in the golden noon, wine-red was his velvet coat
When they shot him down in the highway,
Down like a dog in the highway,
And he lay in his blood in the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

-Hyp.

 

[Pielorinho]

Margaret Atwood!

Around the time I started dating the woman that would become my wife, I got a book of Atwood poetry and was reading it. Partly, of course, I was reading it to find gooey romantic poems with which to woo this wonderful woman.

Atwood's the wrong place to look for that sort of thing.

There's one poem in particular that I remember from that collection. Not because it was relevant to the situation, but because it's short and sweet, almost Hallmarkian in its elegance:

We fit together
like hook and eye.
A fish hook
An open eye.

Daniel