20 poems.

[in_the_blue]

Just like the 20 songs meme, here are 20 lines or bits of verse from poems both old and new, popular and obscure. Some I believe will be easy to identify but others more difficult. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to see which lines you can identify.

Without cheating, because looking them up on the web might be too easy. Or cheat if you have to because this is hard, but if you cheat, you have to read the whole poem. And tell me what you thought of it.

1. Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
   Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.



2. (I measure time by how a body sways).



3. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.



4. A wind is blowing. The book being written
   shifts, halts, pages
   yellow and white drawing apart
   and inching together in new tries.



5. The town does not exist
   except where one black-haired tree slips
   up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.



6. Should I get married? Should I be good?
   Astound the girl next door with velvet suit and faustus hood?



7. Something else is alive
   Beside the clock's loneliness
   And this blank page where my fingers move.



8. and he said: "Hay aquí mucho catolicismo--(sounded catolithismo)
   y muy poco reliHión"



9. For she was the maker of the song she sang.
   The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
   Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.



10. Some say the world will end in fire
    Some say in ice.
    From what I've tasted of desire
    I hold with those who favor fire.



11. I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
    I sought it daily for six weeks or so.



12. Are you the new person drawn toward me?
    To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;



13. I dwell in Possibility--
    A fairer House than Prose--
    More numerous of Windows--
    Superior--for Doors--



14. At ten A.M. the young housewife
    moves about in negligee behind
    the wooden walls of her husband's house.
    I pass solitary in my car.



15. Tell me, tongue of fire
    That you and I are as real
    At least as the people upstairs.



16. The Chippewa young men
    Stab one another shrieking
    Jesus Christ.



17. But--at political rallies when sitters-by thought I was crying
    At the eloquence of Hamilton Greene--
    That was not it.
    No! I wanted to say:
    That's my son! That's my son!



18. In the nightmare of the dark,
    All the dogs of Europe bark,
    And the living nations wait,
    Each sequestered in its hate;



19. At the edge of the Greek world, I think, was a cliff
    To which fallen gods were chained, immortal.



20. ever been kidnapped
    by a poet
    if i were a poet
    i'd kidnap you

Comments

[lvblheron.livejournal.com]

#1 has to be something from TS Eliot: maybe from "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" or his "Preludes"? All those pavements and cats...maybe not.
#3 I know I know this one. **thinks hard** **fails** Crap!
#10 Sh*t! I know this one too. But who the hex wrote it...?

[/airing ignorance] Ah well. I'll be watching for the answer key, because some of these are really striking!

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

#1 - wrong gender.
#3 - think Wales.
#10 - whose woods these are I think I know...

[blanket-cape.livejournal.com]

#3- "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas
#10- Robert Frost (I love this poem!) Umm..."Fire and Ice" for a title? Not sure on that.
#14- "The Young Housewife" by WIlliam Carlos WIlliams

And that's as far as my thousands of dollars of education can take me, though I suspect there is Pablo Neruda in there somewhere...

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

I have to applaud your education.

But no Neruda in this batch. That would have been too obvious.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

3 "do not go gently into that good night' Dylan Thomas. (one of my favourites..I LOVE that-one.
is 6 gregory corso?
10 iknw it ends in'ice wil suffice' is this robert frost? it's claeld 'fire and ice' and it wasi none ofm ytext books.
13 soudns lie kemiily dickinson i mean loks like her poems.
wel that was all. I know ther's two that arej sut guesswork but eh well. I feel so horrible abutthis. I's ben ages icnei read poetry adn what I read has gone miles away. of courese I have numerous collections adn anthologiesso I wil dive into those naturaly (which I plannedalready) butallthese fragment wer liek half-openeddoors whery oucouldn't hear or see the rest.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

You were right on all of them. In a couple days I'll list them all and if I can find links to all of the poems online, I'll link to them. If not, I'll copy the text of the ones that aren't too long and unwieldy.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

wow. corso even? wa there awilliam burrows too /and oen by..the opet spiek loves...lorca(is that his name) or somethig nenidng with ez or az...
adn dang if ifind out that oen about measiring time with abody that sways..byron? i' mgoig nby pure vocabulary/style herand what iknwo aobuthose. i'm jsut glad you picked hat thomas one.
mabyei fy oudon't make itto oeasy onus iwhthe answer key we'll maek effords to google it al lupa nd read and divei nan then......*dreams*

[katieowrites.livejournal.com]

3 is Dylan Thomas, 'Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night' -- or that's what I know it as. For all I know, the real title is something else.

20: put you in my phrases and meter.. This one was on a syllabus of mine last year, but we never actually discussed it and I can't think of the name or author.

18 sounds like Yeats, but it's not Yeats. It's a memorial to him.

14 is a poem that I love, but again, with the not knowing anything about it.

10 is Robert Frost.

[kelleypen.livejournal.com]

I'm brain numb from sleepiness this morning, but #3 is Do Not Fo Gentle by Dylan Thomas, the best poem ever. #13 is Emily Dickinson, and, like all her poems, is untitled.