Favorite Poem Project

The 39th Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, began the Favorite Poem Project in 1997. He asked Americans to submit their favorite poems and, in the course of one year, received over 18,000 submissions.

I find this concept delightful and charming, like sending messages with pigeons or planting a sapling on a birthday. Still, I don't often read poems; they seem melodramatic and self-important. And too many bad poets try to do with poetry what prose can accomplish with greater economy. I do have some favorites -- Alexander Pushkin's I Loved You Once, ee cumings' i carry your heart, Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred -- but I like them because of what they say, not how they choose to say it (though I must concede that, due of the very nature of poetry, it's never entirely possible to divorce the content of a poem from its form).

But here's a poem -- a saccharine and painfully earnest poem -- that I love for its grandeur, for how beautifully it reads:

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or so softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

-- Lord Byron, She Walks in Beauty

For more on the Favorite Poem Project, click here.