P is for Poetry #AtoZChallenge

Today I’m continuing with the Blogging from A-Z Challenge! I’ll be posting every day except Sundays throughout April. This year, my readers voted for the theme “My Favourite Book Quotes”. So I’ve collected together the quotations that move me, inspire me and make me smile. I hope you enjoy them!

For letter P, I’ve compiled some quotes from some of my favourite poets, including Philip Larkin, T. S Eliot, Maya Angelou, Edgar Allen Poe and Spike Milligan.

My Favourite Quotes from Poetry

“They f**k you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.”

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

 Philip Larkin, High Windows

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.”

Jenny Joseph

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise”

“Do I dare Disturb the universe?”

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table”

“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening”

“For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock”

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”

Edgar Allen Poe , “The Raven”

“A young spring-tender girl
combed her joyous hair
‘You are very ugly’ said the mirror.
But,
on her lips hung
a smile of dove-secret loveliness,
for only that morning had not
the blind boy said,
‘You are beautiful’?”

“I will not bend and grovel
When I die. If He says my sins are myriad
I will ask why He made me so imperfect
And he will say ‘My chisels were blunt’
I will say ‘Then why did you make so
many of me’.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Get it out with Optrex”

Spike Milligan

Are you a fan of poetry? Do you have a favourite quote from a poem? Let me know in the comments!