Share a poem that changed something for you: your desert island verse

[BankHolidayBlues87]

Not your favourite poem necessarily, though it might be the same thing. The poem that when you first read it, something shifted. Either in how you read poetry after that, or in how you understood something about yourself, or just in a way that is hard to name precisely but unmistakable.

I am curious about the variety here. Poetry functions differently for different people and the poem that cracked something open for one person can leave another completely cold. That range is part of what I love about this form.

Include as much context as you want about when you encountered it and what it did. The story of reading a poem is sometimes as interesting as the poem itself.

[Di46]

Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse. I was 17 and it articulated something about family and inheritance that I had felt but could not say. The ferocity of it was a permission slip.