Favorite Poem 3 - Success!

It's an overcast Saturday morning, and I really would rather be doing something else right now, but, I'm the one who procrastinated! Okay here's yet another of my favorite poems. I have one favorite poetry book, and all my favorites are marked. I read them in the bathtub. Way too much information.

Emily Dickinson's, Success is counted sweetest:

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a necter
Requires sorest need.

Not one of the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated - dying -
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

I always wondered why she capitalized Host, Flag, and Victory in the second stanza.

Favorite Poem 2

I know there can technically be only one favorite, but I don't care... I'm breaking the rules. Here's Tennyson's, The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls :

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story:
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying.
Blow, bugle, answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar
The horns of elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying.
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

Favorite Poem 1

I think for the purposes of this blog, every week I'll post on a different poem that I really enjoy. I hope it doesn't have to be British and from the early 1900's, because I'm pretty random. So until I hear different, I'm just going to do what I like. One of my favorites is Keats, "When I Have Fears".

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleamed my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the nights starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And I think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

I love to get lost in the words and then pull back and think about how it makes me feel. I know, totally geeky, but who cares.