national poetry month

April is National Poetry Month. I've been meaning to post something for the past week but have been a little busy. I grew up on poetry and even though I have no recollection of my first poem, I do remember being little and loving Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere. I've always been a big history nerd, so that was just a great way to combine two things I love: poetry and history. Even though I've read, and written, poetry for as long as I can remember, I wanted to post about one poem I remember falling hard for. It was in my AP English class senior year, which I'm now thankful I took because I don't think the other English classes had an emphasis on poetry.

The poem is A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning by John Donne. This was the first time I'd read Donne but it would instantly catapualt him upon among my ever-growing list of favorite poets. First of all, it was the image of the compass that made it so unique. Love poems generally have similar elements: love, flowers, roses in particular, etc., but what a great image! A connection that is constantly there, even when you're apart, miles away, and how he sees his wife as 'the fixed foot,' that he feels connected to while away and calls him home again. And the fact that he talks of how their love is so strong that absence will not make a distance, they will not grow apart. Going back to the compass analogy, it's made of metal...solid and ever-lasting. That's what their love is.

Secondly the language is just beautiful, calling back to a time where romance really was part of the language. Can you even imagine getting a poem such as this today? It's so...even though the words are very refined and soft, especially when spoken aloud, it's a very passionate poem.

Throughout the rest of April I'm going to try to post links to poems that I love or that have touched me in some way, some I'm sure are very popular and probably have been studied very much in college, but maybe some will be a little less well-known.

What are some of your favorite poems?