What is the greatest opening line in the history of poetry?

[Violet16]

A truly great opening line can do an enormous amount of work in an incredibly small amount of space, setting tone, hooking attention and sometimes even summarising an entire poem's emotional core before the reader has even reached the second line. Some of literature's most enduring opening lines have become genuinely famous in their own right, quoted and referenced far beyond the poems they actually belong to, from the deceptively simple opening of Dante's Inferno describing waking up lost in a dark wood midway through life's journey, to the sweeping, immediate drama of Homer's invocation of the muse at the very start of the Iliad.

More modern examples carry their own kind of punch, T.S. Eliot's famous opening comparing an evening spread out against the sky to a patient etherised upon a table remains one of the most jarring and genuinely unexpected images ever used to open a major poem, immediately signalling to readers that this was going to be a very different kind of poetic experience to what had come before it. Meanwhile Sylvia Plath's opening lines and Allen Ginsberg's explosive beginning to Howl each demonstrate a completely different but equally effective way of grabbing a reader's attention from the very first breath of the poem.

A genuinely great opening line has to earn its reputation across generations of readers rather than simply being memorable for a moment. So which one do you think actually deserves the title of the single greatest opening line in the history of poetry?