Memealicious

[adelynne]

Doctor says I have strep. I seek to console myself in mindless memery.

lareinenoire says to post a favorite poem, and in English, I have two:

If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

What's yours?

Comments

[lunaratu.livejournal.com]

and u of course know "if" is one of my favorites too ^_~

[adelynne.livejournal.com]

I'm actually not sure if it's the poem itself, or the memory of first hearing it. My sister and I were still sharing a room, before she went to college and we got a house, and we were lying on our beds. She was reading the Reader's Digest and I was probably reading something like Encyclopedia Brown 'cause she kept getting them for me.

Anyway, she suddenly sits up and says "Listen to this" (except in Russian), and reads the poem (in English ;). It's one of those sisterly-bonding things.

[nuhiep.livejournal.com]

Ah . . . Sonnet 116. One of my favorites. Favorite English-language poem has to be "The Phenomenology of Anger" by Adrienne Rich for me.

[adelynne.livejournal.com]

When I first got my Complete Works copy, I went through and read all the Sonnets. This one really spoke to me, and for a while whenever I started seeing anyone new I would ask myself whether it was "a marriage of true minds."