Favorite lines from favorite poems

Twitter: I was just thinking of this: favorite lines from favorite poems. Here they are:

"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

Had to set down the entire poem. I had such fun with this poem as an English teacher in another life. I used it as a basis for descriptive writing.

"Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" by Walt Whitman
I was mesmerized by the beauty of Whitman's word choice for this poem I read for an assignment in college. That memory is one permanently etched in my mind like the day of JFK's assassination.

OUT of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands, and the fields beyond, where the child, leaving his bed, wander’d alone, bare-headed, barefoot,

Almost any Emily Dickinson poem:
Here's one stanza:

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

"Mending Wall" by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. 


"The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot (my favorite poem)

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Just the first few lines of this long, convoluted, historical, symbolic, archetypal poem will suffice to introduce a rich rich poem in the pantheon of American literature. (although Eliot was an expatriate).

A continuing post...