National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day so I thought I would share a poem with you, but which one? I could have chosen a poem remembered from school - like Meg Merrilees(John Keats), Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Robert Frost), The Listeners (Walter de la Mare) or The Lady of Shalott (Alfred Lord Tennyson). Maybe I could choose something from the Metaphysicals or the Romantics? Or the so called Cavalier poets - like the naughty Earl of Rochester? Something typically British perhaps? The gentle wistfulness of Thomas Hardy or A. E. Houseman? The humour of John Betjeman? Maybe one of the Liverpudlian poets like Roger McGough? Or one of the war poets the tragic Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke?

I can be slightly maudlin in my choice of poems; favourites being Farewell (Walter de la Mare); Do not go gentle (DylanThomas) and When I am dead (Christina Rossetti) I love The Parting by Michael Drayton but in the end it had to be Will, if in doubt I always turn to him - he never fails me:-

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempest and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare