Favorite Poetry

[Urbane Guerrilla]

How about picking out a few perennials among the great English sonnets?

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies
Whose frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that the sculptor well those passions read,
Stamped on these lifeless things.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'I am Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

--Shelley.

From memory. It's been worth keeping inside, unpapered, to reel it out every once in a while. Two I have not memorized but should are Saul's Death by Saberhagen, and John Evereldown, to which I am composing a pipe tune.