...and while we're at it:

Dylan Thomas' poem was written as part of a competition with Theodore Roethke to create a villanelle.
villanelles are an archaic rhyme scheme

The Waking starts...

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

When I was very young and I first read it I thought it was great. Later I learned it was famous.
William Carlos Williams' unnamed poem numbered as XXII and commonly known as "The Red Wheelbarrow". It's Imagist, free form haiku, Pantheistic, objective correlative and much more.

XXII

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Whitsun

This is not what I meant:
Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,
Bald eyes or petrified eggs,
Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,
Lard-pale, sipping the thin
Air like a medicine.

The stopped horse on his chromium pole
Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze.
Your shirt of crisp linen
Bloats like a spinnaker. Hat brims
Deflect the watery dazzle; the people idle
As if in hospital.

I can smell the salt, all right.
At our feet, the weed-moustachioed sea
Exhibits its glaucous silks,
Bowing and truckling like an old-school oriental.
You're no happier than I about it.
A policeman points out a vacant cliff

Green as a pool table, where cabbage butterflies
Peel off to sea as gulls do,
And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn.
The waves pulse like hearts.
Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie
Sea-sick and fever-dry.

Sylvia Plath

Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Anthem For Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Melville was a fine and prolific poet. Any thoughts on this line?
It’s from one of his poems, “The Conflict of Convictions”: “I know a wind in purpose strong, it spins against the way it drives."

.

It is a lively and lovely line. Note especially the force of "purpose strong," how it slightly works against the iambic pattern, but only slightly, and how "wind" and "spins" work together. I love how "spins" sounds and how long it goes on for such a short word.

I appreciate the scansion...I hadn't looked at it from that angle.

Damn, that is a really good line. To add to what JC said, even the use of "drives" at the end goes forcefully in the face of what's come before. It seems like most of the emphasis is placed the words "wind" and "strong" and "spins", telling you what, how, and where. Then "drives" comes in with its somewhat hard "dr" leading to the long "i" sound, and forces the issue back in the reader's face, perfectly blending meaning with execution.

Hardly looked at poetry since like high school. But I still remember Walt Whitman's "I Sing The Body Electric." Long, but here's a sample:

What a pimp

My favorite Bukowski.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/let-it-enfold-you/

I wanted to post it directly but it's too large of a wall of text.

Failed Thanks (2005)


I wanted to say a prayer for you tonight
but I didn't know quite what to say
it seemed like every time I opened my mouth the thoughts just drifted away.
The same old routine and tired cliches were the furtherest thing from my mind.
So I stood there,
water hitting my back,
wondering what it was I had to find.
My mind was tired but I was able to persist,
focusing on you and the reasons we exist.
I didn't pray for you to escape the trials we all go through and love to hate,
because those times seem to help us learn things at a smooth and steady rate.
I didn't pray for you to experience only joy,
because life isn't so simple as a marketed children's toy.
The only thing I concluded was that you were on my mind,
and that I was attempting to talk to God, even though my thoughts were so confined.
So the attempted prayer for your wellbeing never came to be,
as it ended in a simple comment of thanksgiving that there is a you and me.




I wrote it