Quotations and Literature Forum

Hello, I'm new to this and was wondering if anyone had any poems that a 16 year old girl might like to memorize. I'm more into the classic poetry like Frost, Poe, Longfellow, and Tennyson. Any help would be greatly appriated. Thank you.

This poem is by Robert Frost, one of my favorites from him, a very good poem in my opinion


Bond and Free

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about--
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turn, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

_________________
I don't want it.
I just need it.
To feel, to breathe, to know I'm alive

There is an anthology by Oscar Williams--Immortal Poems of the English Language, that is available at most bookstores. The collection includes 447 British and American Masterpieces by 150 poets. You can own the collection for under $10.00 and get exposure. It is difficult to determine what a person would want to commit to memory.

A Shropshire Lad by A E Housman, published in 1896

You can buy the Dover edition of A Shropshire Lad for $1.50, an absolute bargain! You can also find it on the internet.

It contains a collection of 63 individual poems, often quite short, linked by their common themes of love and death and, of course, Housman's vision of Shropshire on the border between England and Wales.

Lots of simple but elegant poems to choose from - most do not have titles but are usually identified by their first lines. You could look at Loveliest of trees, When I was one-and-twenty, When smoke stood up from Ludlow,
The lads in their hundreds, Farewell to barn and stack and tree and With rue my heart is laden.

I hope you find something you like, from Henry

Thank you guys so much for all the sugestions. I already have a book called The Top 500 Poems that has the top 500 poems in the English language that people have consistently said are the best, and I've found it very helpful. I'll have to look up A Stropshire Lad and Immortal Poems of the English Language. Marian, does that poem have a title? Thanks again.

On a leaf as white as snow,
Stands an Archer with his bow.
With arrow nocked, the string is drawn--
His aim is true and his arm is strong--
A flock of geese is flying low.
What famous Archer draws this bow?

Phantom Delta
Riddle #2 of The Crucible