I didn’t expect this question from this week’s Literary Blog Hop. I don’t read enough poetry anymore. For the past couple years, I tend to read novels. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a favourite poem. I heard it first in first year university, an English Narrative class. We studied a couple of the Romantics. I read some great work from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but my favourite was from his contemporary, William Wordsworth. A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal. Why is it my favourite poem? I’m not exactly sure. It’s the words he uses, the meaning behind them, the rhythm they produce when you read the poem out loud.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seem'd a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
I also enjoy Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Do these poems have any similarities? What are your favourite poems?
