Poetry writing prompts

What was so wrong about asking
About your absence from this world
And trying to grab you back.
holding onto your coat tail?

http://about-poetry.livejournal.com/146136.html

“Mismatched motifs. The form clashes with the topic, the rhythm jangles against the theme, the metaphors are wildly inappropriate, etc.

Misused techniques. Poorly chosen allusions, mixed metaphors, overused similes, awkward alliteration — these are examples of valid techniques gone wrong.

Cliched imagery. Avoid it like the plague! Off with its head!

ZOMG-EMO-DRAMA!!! Bad poetry exaggerates, whines, mopes, capers, and generally makes an embarrassing spectacle of itself. Good poetry delivers emotion softly, like snowfall — or slyly, like a stiletto. If you can see it coming, it’s probably not done right.”

Those little  words invented as we loved
Now have no other speaker but myself.
Lost, unique, the man so well beloved,
Those little words sprang from our deep, sweet love-
In my own speech, these words no longer live
I  cannot use our words,  that loving wealth.
The chosen  words  invented as we loved
Now have no other  listener but myself.

My old blue fountain pen allows
The ink across the page to flow
Like wet paint from an artist’s brush,
And words come in a rush.
Enchanting through the hand which writes,
Bewitched with art, beauty alights.
The script is like a music score
Through which we pass as through a door.
Imagination’s home.

When seven years come round again
My self is liquified.
My skin becomes a holding shell
For my old self has died.
As I dissolve I feel great fear
And yet I trust my soul.
So in the sea I lose my form,
And with the waves I roll.
I am at one with all the world,
And yet I am nothing.
My inner waters rise and fall
What will the high tide bring?
After my drowning I shall rise
And I shall be renewed.
I must submit to that strange Life
With which I am imbued.
I am not mistress of myself,
I am this moment’s flower.
In the deep waters I must trust
To take me to the shore.
Oh hang my arms with grasses green
And dissolve me in your sea.
Thus when the time comes for rebirth
Regenerated I shall be.

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Best%20Symbols%20in%20Poetry%20and%20Literature.htm
Excerpts from “More Poems”
by A. E. Housman

XXIII

Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.

The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave.

Charon’s ferry symbolizes the transition from life to death, or dying. The “one coin” is the obulus, which symbolizes death: the ultimate cost of mortal life. The river Lethe symbolizes forgetfulness, oblivion and concealment, as the dead are concealed from the living, and vice versa. The grave is also symbolic of death. In this poem the river Styx symbolizes death; although it is not explicitly named, we can infer it. In Greek mythology, Charon’s ferry carried the newly dead from the land of the living across the River Styx to Hades, the realm of the dead. It may interest Christians to know that Hades was not “hell,” as Hades incorporated heavenly regions such as the Elysian Fields and the Blessed Isles. Y

 
Sonnet 147
by William Shakespeare

My love is as a fever, longing still [1]
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are, [11]
At random from the truth vainly expressed,
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as Hell, as dark as night. [14]

This is one of Shakespeare’s famous “Dark Lady” sonnets. It employs simile, a type of metaphor in which comparisons are introduced by “like” or “as” (please refer to lines one, eleven and fourteen).