World Poetry Day

... is today.

Do you like poetry, have a favourite Poem/poet?

One of mine is 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 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!

And of course cousin Will's Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

But sadly I rarely member all the lines of either, just the first few of each.