Poetry That Actually Hit You: What Lines Do You Still Carry?

[Inland Renegade]

Some lines of poetry stick. You read them once and they're with you permanently. They come back at unexpected moments. In the middle of something else a line arrives and suddenly the feeling you're having has language.

This isn't about favourite poems or most critically acclaimed. It's about the specific lines that lodged somewhere and didn't leave. Could be from an obvious canonical poet. Could be from something obscure. Could be from a song which is also poetry. What lines do you carry and what was the moment they got in?

[RomoneyWalters]

Philip Larkin's "They fuck you up your mum and dad / They may not mean to but they do" lands differently at different ages. At twenty it's funny. At forty it's devastating

[ElectricPilgrim]

Mary Oliver: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" A question that doesn't let you look away

[Policy Wizard]

"After great pain a formal feeling comes" from Emily Dickinson. The word formal is doing extraordinary work. Grief as numbness as structure as the body protecting itself

[SerialScroller60]

Seamus Heaney's "Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun" is perfection of image. Everything about that man's relationship with writing and his father in two lines

[LogicWitch]

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage." Not a poem but from Letters to a Young Poet and it works like one

[Coastal Estuary]

Wisława Szymborska's "I prefer movies / I prefer cats / I prefer the oaks along the Warta" from Possibilities. A poem entirely made of preferences that becomes a self-portrait. Deceptively simple

[EventHorizon55]

The last lines of Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us and we drown." First read them at seventeen. Never left