A Poem For Byzantium

All kinds of great meming going on! I can hardly keep up with the posting. There's the latest Unsconscious Mutterings, there's directions from your childhood home to your current address, and last but certainly not least, from the Emperor Norton, a poetry meme. Hell yeah, I gotta be in on this! Here's how it goes:

Below you will find ten first lines of poems. If you recognize the line, leave it on the list. If you do not recognize the line, then replace it with the first line of a poem that you do know. Highlight your changes in bold.

1. Had we but world enough, and time,
2. I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
3. A sniffle crouches on the terrace
4. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
5. Little poppies, little hell flames,
6. I, too, sing America
7. April is the cruellest month,
8. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
9. Give me hunger,
10. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

The Emperor Norton recommended poets.org to search the lines - I just did Google searches, and I found them all. (Remember to put the whole line into quotation marks so it'll search it as that exact sequence of words.)

This was trickier than I thought. Most of my favorite English-language poems are fairly obscure, I think, and the first lines of poetry that came to mind were all German ... so what am I going to do? Spread this to my German blog, of course. :-)

Comments

[Stu Savory]

I know 1,6,7,8,10 of yours; more than I knew at Joel's place.

An anthology of MY favourites is at http://www.savory.de/poetry.htm

Stu

[Joel]

I got three of Elkit's.

[Joel]

And some of my favorite poems are obscure, too. But I am surprised that neither of you recognized The Purple Cow!

[Elkit]

For me, the term Purple Cow is inextricably bound to the chocolate to which my taste buds are calibrated.