Share your favourite poems

[Róisín]

I sing that one sometimes. It’s very fine. There are some excellent Ben Hall ballads. People found him a heroic figure, because he dealt bravely with a situation he couldn’t avoid. He was a farmer, not a bushranger, until a crooked cop who fancied Hall’s wife set him up.

The song about Hall that I like best is the one that starts: ‘Ben Hall was out on the Lachlan side/ With a thousand pound on his head./ A score of troopers were scattered wide/ With a hundred more all ready to ride/ Wherever a rumour led.’. It’s a fine dark song and it suits my voice.

[Keep Looking]

That's an excellent ballad. It's also interesting to hear some of its history.

[thegreyarea]

I

We pass and dream. Earth smiles. Virtue is rare.
Age, duty, gods weigh on our conscious bliss.
Hope for the best and for the worst prepare.
The sum of purposed wisdom speaks in this.

Fernando Pessoa, Inscriptions

[Róisín]

Exactly that, Grey! Wise words indeed.

[Yastreb]

THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

[JoB]

... I forget, did someone list The Chaos already?

[Róisín]

JoB, what a delight! I love poems that play with pronunciation.
And Yastreb, that whole sequence around ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is amazing.