Thank you all for posting such wonderful poems on here. It's very timely for me personally that you've started this thread right now, Peace/Bruce, because I've just gone back to drama school part-time and most of our voice classes (when we are not lying on our backs going haa-hay-hee-hay-haa-haw-hoo or pretending to be seaweed) are spent verse-speaking.

I will second Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 as THE perfect sonnet: the content, the way it is constructed with all those encapsulated clauses, the way the whole thing "travels". Heaven.

Funny that Richard Bridge should mention Rupert Brooke, too. I had only really known his "If I should die, think only this of me..." and the Grantchester one until recently, but my parents were both great Rupert Brooke fans, and after they died and I was sorting out their books, I thought I'd find out what they saw in him....sat down with the book and all my house clearance went out of the window for an afternoon. The one that struck me the most, on first reading, and since, was Day That I Have Loved I will forever associate it with that afternoon in my parents' empty flat, thinking about them, about past memories, about time inevitably passing and how important it is to enjoy every moment we are given.

I first read Philip Larkin's An Arundel Tomb when I was 17 and I loved it so much, I used to practise reading it aloud over and over. It's interesting how the things you notice and love in a poem can change over time. Then, I really latched on to the last line: "What will survive of us is love." Now, I appreciate much more all the subtleties of it.."our almost instinct, almost true", which I didn't really see whan I was younger.

Here is one that I was given to read aloud not long ago, that I'd never come across before, and which I think is a delight:

CAMOMILE TEA by Katherine Mansfield:

Outside the sky is light with stars;
There's a hollow roaring from the sea.
And, alas! for the little almond flowers,
The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago,
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee
That he and I should be sitting so,
And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly,
The horn of the moon is plain to see;
By a firefly under a jonquil flower
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we !
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see.

In the same anthology as An Arundel Tomb that I studied at school, there was a poem about a pomegranate (I think it might even have been called Pomegranate) that I have hunted for ever since (haven't been able to find it on Google) that had a huge impact on me. It was talking about what it was like inside the pomegranate, with all the seeds hidden, before it was opened. I wonder - do any of you poetry lovers recognize that poem ? I'd love to find it again.

Looking forward to reading more poems on this thread. Thanks for starting it.

- jeanie