What is the shortest poem you have read that stayed with you and why - worth a look

[Gareth_11]

Q: What short poem has stuck with you longest and what makes it work?

A: Not asking for obscure points. Asking what actually lives in your head rent free and why you think it does.

Mine is a two line poem by Sappho in Anne Carson's translation: Some say an army of horsemen, some infantry, / some say a fleet of ships is the finest thing on the dark earth, but I say it's whatever you love. The compression of what you love against the entire apparatus of war and public glory as a claim about value is the kind of thing I think about in arguments I am not even having

[HiggsField29]

William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say. The plums poem. It works because it is entirely surface and the emotional depth is entirely constructed by the reader. Nothing is described. Everything is implied

[Leo29]

The plums poem is divisive in a productive way. Half the people who encounter it feel genuine warmth and half feel it is a trick. That division is its content

[Coder53]

Basho's frog haiku. Old pond / a frog jumps in / sound of water. Every word is doing two things simultaneously. The pond is temporal and physical. The sound arrives before the frog does in the mind

[Cole_25]

The Basho frog poem is the one I return to when I think my own work is too complex. It is the argument that compression is the opposite of loss

[KnotKnull]

Mary Oliver's Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Three lines that contain an entire poetics

[Harry64]

The Oliver lines are frequently misattributed and decontextualised from the longer poem but the three instructions survive the decontextualisation which is itself a test of whether something is good

[Sega26]

Emily Dickinson: I'm Nobody! Who are you? / Are you Nobody too? It works because it makes the reader feel found by the poem rather than observed by it

[Gareth5]

Dickinson understood that the second person pronoun is the most intimate move a poem can make. The reader becomes the you and the conspiracy is formed immediately

[StoneCold]

Philip Larkin: In everyone there sleeps / a sense of life lived according to love. The rest of the poem earns the opening but those two lines alone have done damage to my sleep on multiple occasions