The perfect poem
 

In my relentless quest for the perfect poem (and some sense of the criteria for same) I have so far discovered in umpteen years of disappointment about half a dozen that fit the bill for me.

I wanted to share one here to see if others see it the same way I do (unlikely, but still...) and maybe pick it apart some, or offer other poems for the title?

This one is probably top of my shortlist

The Eyes of the Drowned Watch Keels Going Over
(William Merwin)

Where the light has no horizons we lie.
It dims into depth not distance. It sways
Like hair, then we shift and turn over slightly.
As once on the long swing under the trees
In the drowse of summer we slid to and fro
Slowly in the soft wash of the air, looking
Upward through the leaves that turned over and back
Like hands, through the birds, the fathomless light,
Upward. They go over us swinging
Jaggedly, laboring between our eyes
And the light. Churning their wrought courses
Between the sailing birds and the awed eyes
Of the fish, with the grace of neither, nor with
The stars' serenity that they follow.
Yet the light shakes around them as they go.
Why? And why should we, rocking on shoal-pillow,
With our eyes cling to them, and their wakes follow,
Who follow nothing? If we could remember
The stars in their clarity, we might understand now
Why we pursued stars, to what end our eyes
Fastened upon stars, how it was that we traced
In their remote courses not their own fates but ours

Apart from saying that the sharp-eyed will spot the reference to Dante I will say nothing more at this stage pending any responses from others.

Philip

Philip,

I suspect the silence that has followed upon your posting is due to puzzlement. Quite simply, what is a "perfect poem"?

This one by Merwin is definitely intriguing. It reminds me of "Full fathom five..." - but I haven't the faintest idea why you would consider it "perfect".

Hoping for further elucidation...

Gregory

There are many, many poems that I wouldn't change a word of, and which satisfy me entirely. If that's what you mean by "perfect," there are plenty of perfect poems. If that's not what you mean, you need to explain.

One time I tried to write the perfect poem. I went about it by taking a sheet of paper and then, using an X-acto knife, cut out the word "poem" in big letters. What was leftover was a big space in the shape of "poem" and it constantly changed based on what was on the other side of the paper, so it was never finished and in a way, perfect. It was like the 4'33" of poems, if you could count 4'33" as being perfect (I think it is, or at least, most perfectly embodies the idea of perfection).

So the perfect poem would be one that wasn't finished. Just like the "perfect" Saturday night is the one that hasn't started, because it could be perfect, you know? As soon as you write a word, as soon as a single note is played, as soon as you try to translate whatever's in your head to an expressible form, you've already compromised and you've already marred. The perfect poem would have no words.

My poem idea was either really dumb or really clever. It's always a fine line between those two.

Phillip,

First, a disclaimer: I consider Merwin the most admirable living american poet. It's not a contest, but he has no competition. If the works of only two poets from the second half of the 20th century survive, those poets should be James Wright and Merwin.

But I'm not sure I would ever attempt to apply the word 'perfection' to any of his works. It makes me think of what W.C. Williams said when Ginsberg presented him with a sonnet: "In this form, perfection is basic." Merwin seems to be interested in something wholly different.

It's easy to see the influences of three mentors here (Blackmur, Berryman, and Auden). But beyond that, most of his pieces resist analysis. Some cliches apply: early religious influence transmuted into a later interest in myth. Early work in form which later informs the more open verse. But beyond that, it's hard to discern any formulas, algorithms, or plans, except in their absence. There is no sophomoric concern with 'voice', no highlighting of the craft. What we do have is passion, and interest in the eternal, and an almost visionary intensity.

So what do we have? The voices of the drowned, who spend their time looking up from the sea bottom, at the light in the water and the ships going by above them. There's no 'I', but there is a collective 'we', and the 'we' is understandable enough that 'it could be us.' In other words, if you and I were in this position, and were conditions like this, it 'is' what we would do.

This is because Merwin is able to fully see and feel it. The ground swells moving us about, the way the light comes down through the water, the forms of the ships still going by. He even feels the loss of memory we'd experience.

And he does it without error, without abstractions, without missteps, and without conventional sentimentality. For Merwin has an incredible, almost unfair, advantage: he spent years as a translator, in various languages, and his knowledge of those other languages informs the clarity and purity of his use of english. And he spent years translating poets from distant cultures, and has an extremely nuanced view of poetics. He is the antithesis of parochialism, as universal a poet as we've ever known. And it shows here: the piece is informed by greek myth, italian epic, english drama, 20th century american verse, but doesn't belong to any of them. It's hard to even call it american, except by the accident of his birth.

What it does have is intensity, passion, vision and dexterity. Maybe it *is* a production of its time, but it's also eternal. I'm gushing here, and I don't want to gush. There's no need. But I will say this: woodworkers, seeing a piece approaching this level, have a tendency to throw down their tools, and say 'that's it, I give up.' But a piece like this has the opposite effect on me. It shows me that it's humanly possible to do better than I'm doing. Much, much better. It helps me keep going in spite of my substantial limitations. And if that's how you wish to define 'perfection', well, the definition is good enough to persuade me.

Thanks,

Bill

Phew

Bill has saved me the task of trying to say why one might consider this poem perfect by saying it in a way I couldn't even begin to.

If I had to clutch at "why"s they would include indeed the poem's sense of faultlessness, and even effortlessness. But this wasn't an exercise in saying "I, PQ, have the secret formula by which I judge this poem to be perfect" (there would be paydirt in that!) nor even an exaggerated way of saying (to borrow Rose's expression) "this one floats my boat" (although it does, bigtime).

Nor is it hero worship. Because, while I admire Merwin's choice to live (rather than just write) poetry, a great deal of his poetry irritates the living **** out of me, and again that isn't because it is impenetrable, but because of the language in many cases.

The "perfect" thing is a sort of gut reaction, the same one I get with say Beethoven or Sibelius. Given a hundred years I wouldn't have come up with even the main opening theme of say the Pastoral Symphony, but when I listen to it I can't help thinking every time "yes, of course that's what you'd do - of course it has to go that way".

So in a muddly way I suppose I'm saying that it's a sort of "rightness" which isn't diminished by "obviousness". It is only obvious once you know. So I suppose the "I wouldn't change a word" criterion is also a bit of it.

There is a poem by Carol Ann Duffy (Valentine) that makes me want to razor out the word "wobbling" and replace it with almost anything else, it is just SO wrong.

In the Merwin poem there is no line or phrase I can point to in isolation and say "how brilliant" or "see what he did there". It is a ribbon of words that leads inexorably (and attractively) to an exactly, but gently stated conclusion.

Inter-alia I should say I agree re: James Wright (who has a similar poetical pedigree).

It may be significant (or not) that on my shortlist of "perfect" poems no two are by the same poet. The ones that come to mind immediately are:

Lawrence Durrell's "Water Music"

Wrap your sulky beauty up,
From sea-fever, from winterfall
Out of the swing of the
Swing of the sea.
Keep safe from noonfall,
Starlight and smokefall where
Waves roll, waves toll but feel
None of our roving fever.

From dayfever and nightsadness
Keep, bless, hold: from cold
Wrap your sulky beauty into sleep
Out of the swing of the
Swing of sea.

(most of Durrell's stuff seems affected to me and too littered with classical references)

Also one by Ted Hughes "October Dawn" (which I can't lay my hands on electronically).

Perhaps I have a particular penchant for "purity" of language, or language without jagged edges, I don't know. But I go back to this one of Merwin's more than any other.

I'd be interested to know whether anyone else has such a poem lodged in their brain.

No biggy

Philip

Seems kind of pointless, "perfection" being so much in the eye of beholder, except, of course, that anything which reminds us of good poems serves a good purpose. To me perfection implies a kind of formal symmetry probably found only in short poems--Nothing Gold Can Stay; Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall; Museum Piece; Diffugere Nives. The thing is, "most perfect" doesn't necessarily mean "best." Frost wrote better poems than Nothing Gold Can Stay or Fire and Ice, but nothing closer to "perfect."

RHE

I loved the Merwin poem, which was new to me. But then I also love "Billy in the Darbies" at the end of Melville's Billy Budd, which has a similar vision of the drowned man.

Etymologically, "perfect" means "finished, completed," so Orwn's idea is actually the opposite of perfect, at least in its Latin sense.

I like the Merwin poem, but don't really get what it means to call it "perfect." More perfect than "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," or "Ode on a Grecian Urn," or "Among School Children," or "The Whitsun Weddings," etc.? Maybe, but I still prefer the ones I listed. The Merwin is very fine, however.

Chris

A good list, Chris, though I would substitute "Ode to Autumn" for "Grecian Urn". It's a rare example of a poem that strikes me as having all those qualities of exquisite formal symmetry, as Richard calls it, superb suggestive power and total appropriateness of diction, imagery, sensuality and sense. So maybe that's English literature's perfect poem. It's tragic but maybe also inevitable that it was (with one or two minor exceptions) Keats's last poem. Where do you go after perfection?

But then again maybe perfection is the wrong thing to be looking for in a poem.

I've always liked this imperfect poem for its demonstration that it's the imperfect human element that makes art attractive. Here, the oxymorons and imperfect meter and rhyme:

DELIGHT IN DISORDER.
by Robert Herrick

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness :
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction :
An erring lace which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher :
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbons to flow confusedly :
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat :
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility :
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

Ralph's post makes me think of Alicia's fabulous "Antiblurb," on the back of Hapax. I feel like it's been posted at some point before, but what the hell, I'll paste it in:

Antiblurb

This is not necessary. This is neither
Crucial nor salvation. It is no hymn
To harmonize the choirs of seraphim,
Nor any generation's bold bellwether
Leading the flock, no iridescent feather
Dropped from the Muse's wing. It does not limn,
Or speak in tongues, or voice the mute, or dim
Outmoded theories with its fireworks. Rather

This is flawed and mortal, and its stains
Bear the evidence of taking pains.
It did not have to happen, won't illumine
The smirch of history, the future's omen.
Necessity is merely what sustains —
It's what we do not need that makes us human.

I love how the enjambment from octave to sestet enacts the sort of flaw the poem admits to having. Is it really a flaw if it helps make the point? Does that make the poem perfect or imperfect? I don't know, but I like it.

Chris

PS., Gregory, Okay, To Autumn it is. Actually, I love all Keats' major odes. My favorite part from Grecian Urn is the beginning of the last stanza, down to "as doth eternity." And the part about the sacrifice. And the beginning. And the whole thing. Actually, surely that's an "imperfect" poem, in the sense of "incomplete," since we have no idea how the end is to be punctuated--where do the quotes start and stop?

Ralph,

I love the Herrick. The brilliant start, the hopeless middle, the distracted end. Alas, everything I love about Herrick, and all of his faults, displayed in a single piece!

Phillip, I've chucked the whole idea of perfect, and replaced it with "lovely little piece of work." My problem is that I agree with Henry: "Literature bores me, especially great literature..."

It's a sign of my bad character that I have a fondness for small medallions. So I prefer things like J. V. Cunningham:

*********************

For My Contemporaries


How time reverses
The proud in heart!
I now make verses
Who aimed at art.

But I sleep well.
Ambitious boys
Whose big lines swell
With spiritual noise,

Despise me not!
And be not queasy
To praise somewhat:
Verse is not easy.

But rage who will.
Time that procured me
Good sense and skill
Of madness cured me.

*************************

Now, there's a pretty little thing. Gorgeous. And every time we go over the George Washington Bridge, my wife insists I recite Paul Goodman's little ditty to her:

*************************

The Lordly Hudson

"Driver, what stream is it?" I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.
"It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,"
he said, under the green-grown cliffs."

Be still, heart! No one needs
your passionate suffrage to select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.

"Driver, has this a peer in Europe or the East?"
"No, no!" he said. Home! Home!
Be quiet, heart! This is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the east.

This is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! Home! Home!

*****************************

It's funny what sticks in our heads. Little medallions, silly small things. Charming.

Thanks,

Bill

I've always loved that Goodman poem, though I'm hard pressed to say why.

Another poem that praises the perfection of imperfection is Gerard Manley Hopkin's
"Pied Beauty"; probably it's so well known that everyone is sick of it, but just in
case that is not the case, here it is (despite it's religious professions, I've always
considered it a poem in praise of anarchy):

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.

Here's a poem that I'm sure 100% of us know well. Certainly a candidate for the perfect poem.


Western Wind

Oh western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain.
Christ! That my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

Earlier version:

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow,
The small raine down can raine.
Chryste, that my love were in my armes
And I in my bedde againe.

Ted Hughes referred to this as "that flawless poem from his sixteenth year":

Encounter with a God

Ono-no-komache the poetess
sat on the ground among her flowers,
sat in her delicate-patterned dress
thinking of the rowers,
thinking of the god Daikoku.

Thinking of the rock pool
and carp in the waterfall at night.
Daikoku in accordance with the rule
is beautiful, she said, with a slight
tendency to angles.

But Daikoku came
who had been drinking all night
with the greenish gods of chance and fame.
He was rotund standing in the moonlight,
with a round, white paunch.

Who said
I am not beautiful,
I do not wish to be wonderfully made,
I am intoxicated dutiful daughter,
and I will not be in a poem.

But the poetess sat still
holding her head and making verses:
'How intricate and peculiarly well-
arranged the symmetrical belly-purses
of lord Daikoku.'

Keith Douglas

For myself, I'd pick M.Moore's The Steeple Jack, a poem from which you could, if necessary, re-constitute the universe, just add water. It is perfect in the sense that it says what needs to be said, with nothing extra.

If I maybe candid, I don't especially like the Merwin. The first few lines sound a bit sententious to me -- something to do with the alliteration and the anapestic rhythm. And there's something odd about the phrasing "and turn over slightly". But I like the part where he compares looking upward through the water to leaning back on a tree-swing. Sorry, I feel quite disgusted with how very little poetry I honestly like. I don't get most of it.

Heck, I think I'll just post one of my all-time favorites:

American Primitive
by William Jay Smith


Look at him there in his stovepipe hat,
His high-top shoes, and his handsome collar;
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.

The screen door bangs, and it sounds so funny -
There he is in a shower of gold;
His pockets are stuffed with folding money,
His lips are blue, and his hands feel cold.

He hangs in the hall by his black cravat,
The ladies faint, and the children holler:
Only my Daddy could look like that,
And I love my Daddy like he loves his Dollar.
.

Brian

I think the phrase you quote goes exactly to my liking of the poem for its understatement, but chacun à son goût.

Your second statement I totally agree with, personally. That's some of the point of this thread. So much poetry that is out there I find disappointing too.

But I'm eternally in love with the idea of poetry and its possibilities, which in themselves seem endless.

Best

Philip

Philip,
I find poetry harder to enjoy than music or painting. It's impossible to quantify breadth, but I wonder if most people's tastes are wider in the other arts than in poetry.

Petra,
that's cool, I was just reading a review of William Jay Smith the other day, by Merrill. It flashed such tantalizing excerpts as:

Waking below the level of the sea,
You wake in peace; the gardens look
Like roofs of palaces beneath the water,
And into the sea the land hooks...

rgrds,
B.

Here is the perfect poem. If you know a better one then tell me what it is.

On My First Son by: Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy;

Seven yeeres tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I loose all father, now. For why

Will man lament the state he should envie?

To have so soon scap'd worlds and fleshes rage,

And, if no other miserie, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask'd, say here doth lye

Ben. Johnson his best piece of poetrie.

For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.

.

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 dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
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.
.

Hi Petra

Yes, of course, it's like "Desert Island Discs" - Shakespeare and the (King James) Bible are a given! Flawless but not sterile, intelligent but full of humanity and down to earth too.

John W

I hereby add your poem (the Jonson, which I had forgotten) to my personal list.

PQ

This one by Yeats is maybe not "great" but I do think it's "perfect":


Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.

If we're going to take blind stabs at the perfect poem, I'll throw in this one:

the Ballad of Persse O'Reilly

Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
How he fell with a roll and a rumble
And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple
By the butt of the Magazine Wall,

Of the Magazine Wall,
Hump, helmet and all?

He was one time our King of the Castle
Now he's kicked about like a rotten old parsnip.
And from Green street he'll be sent by order of His Worship
To the penal jail of Mountjoy

To the jail of Mountjoy!
Jail him and joy.

He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother us
Slow coaches and immaculate contraceptives for the populace,
Mare's milk for the sick, seven dry Sundays a week,
Openair love and religion's reform,

And religious reform,
Hideous in form.

Arrah, why, says you, couldn't he manage it?
I'll go bail, my fine dairyman darling,
Like the bumping bull of the Cassidys
All your butter is in your horns.

His butter is in his horns.
Butter his horns!

Hurrah there, Hosty, frosty Hosty, change that shirt on ye,
Rhyme the rann, the king of all ranns!

Balbaccio, balbuccio!

We had chaw chaw chops, chairs, chewing gum, the chicken-pox and china chambers
Universally provided by this soffsoaping salesman.
Small wonder He'll Cheat E'erawan our local lads nicknamed him.
When Chimpden first took the floor

With his bucketshop store
Down Bargainweg, Lower.

So snug he was in his hotel premises sumptuous
But soon we'll bonfire all his trash, tricks and trumpery
And 'tis short till sheriff Clancy'll be winding up his unlimited company
With the bailiff's bom at the door,

Bimbam at the door.
Then he'll bum no more.

Sweet bad luck on the waves washed to our island
The hooker of that hammerfast viking
And Gall's curse on the day when Eblana bay
Saw his black and tan man-o'-war.

Saw his man-o'-war
On the harbour bar.

Where from? roars Poolbeg. Cookingha'pence, he bawls
Donnez-moi scampitle, wick an wipin'fampiny
Fingal Mac Oscar Onesine Bargearse Boniface
Thok's min gammelhole Norveegickers moniker
Og as ay are at gammelhore Norveegickers cod.

A Norwegian camel old cod.
He is, begod.

Lift it, Hosty, lift it, ye devil, ye! up with the rann, the rhyming rann!

It was during some fresh water garden pumping
Or, according to the Nursing Mirror, while admiring the monkeys
That our heavyweight heathen Humpharey
Made bold a maid to woo

Woohoo, what'll she doo!
The general lost her maidenloo!

He ought to blush for himself, the old hayheaded philosopher,
For to go and shove himself that way on top of her.
Begob, he's the crux of the catalogue
Of our antediluvial zoo,

Messrs Billing and Coo.
Noah's larks, good as noo.

He was joulting by Wellinton's monument
Our rotorious hippopopotamuns
When some bugger let down the backtrap of the omnibus
And he caught his death of fusiliers,

With his rent in his rears.
Give him six years.

'Tis sore pity for his innocent poor children
But look out for his missus legitimate!
When that frew gets a grip of old Earwicker
Won't there be earwigs on the green?

Big earwigs on the green,
The largest ever you seen.

Suffoclose! Shikespower! Seudodanto! Anonymoses!

Then we'll have a free trade Gael's band and mass meeting
For to sod him the brave son of Scandiknavery
And we'll bury him down in Oxmanstown
Along with the devil and the Danes,

With the deaf and dumb Danes,
And all their remains.

And not all the king's men nor his horses
Will resurrect his corpus
For there's no true spell in Connacht or hell
That's able to raise a Cain.

--James Joyce

Would you change a word of it? No, because it makes no sense! But I could read it again and again and never get bored because it's practically gibberish.

I'll buy that. The whole of Finnegans Wake with none of the pain, Orwn.

Thanks, John. I really want to like Finnegans Wake but I just can't do it. The idea behind it sounds spectacular, an infinite onion where I can peel away as many layers of language as I like and still never get to the center of it. Endless entertainment! But I quit after 10 pages.

Finnegans Wake is a great book to dip into, though - for inspiration or off-beat quotes.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A.E. Housman

This must be one of the saddest poems ever written. It's interesting that in such a short poem both 'blue remembered hills' and 'land of lost content' have become (relatively) common phrases.

Thanks, Holly, this is as close to perfection as one can get.

Oh yes - AE Housman, how could I have forgotten him?

I wrote a poem dedicated to Housman and it was one I read at my first (one and only) public reading - in, of all places, Much Wenlock in the lovely county of Shropshire. Poetic, ye might say!

Another one for my little list!

Philip

It's difficult to discuss the perfect poem without first agreeing on how to define it, which is impossible since poetry is subjective.
However, it's interesting to see people's preferences, and some lovely poems have been posted above.
Here's a favourite of mine:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Angel Shark, by Hailey Leithauser

Wan oxymoron of a fish, dotted
dun and fledge winged, mud-feathered when
it glides through silt, by nature bottom fed.

Whoever named it named himself a man
of undisputed Christian eye,
who saw in mortal depths a guardian

and humblest trumpeter. God tongue to cry,
it haunts an earth too dread for dread-
filled man til rapture calls: Arise and fly.



Just one possible choice. I could select any number of poems from this list. This one has many of the qualities that float my boat: compression, layers, contrast, physicality, rhythm, rhyme.

Rose

A new name for me and a great discovery.

Has something of the Ted Hughes about it - the shark that hungers down the blood smell even to a leak of its own side...

Your little list of attributes is in itself a masterpiece of compression.

It reminds me somewhat (though I can't say why), also, of W S Merwin's

THE CURRENT

For a long time some of us
lie in the marshes like dark coats
forgetting that we are water

dust gathers all day on our closed lids
weeds grow up through us

but the eels keep trying to tell us
writing over and over in our mud
our heavenly names

and through us a thin cold current
never sleeps

its glassy feet move on until they find stones

then cloud fish call to it again
your heart is safe with us

bright fish flock to it again touch it
with their mouths say yes
have vanished

yes and black flukes wave to it
from the Lethe of the whales

Wow. Thanks for posting that.

Good heavens. There's no argument. "Jabberwocky" is the perfect poem.
http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/j...bberwocky.html





Jabberwocky


'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

'Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!'

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Lewis Carroll


Actually there's no such thing as a perfect poem, thank goodness.

Yes, I think there are just favorite poems. Here's another huge favorite of mine:

Returning Turtle
by Robert Lowell


Weeks hitting the road, one fasting in the bathtub,
raw hamburger mossing in the watery stoppage,
the room drenched with musk like kerosene -
no one shaved, and only the turtle washed.
He was so beautiful when we flipped him over:
greens, reds, yellows, fringe of the faded savage,
the last Sioux, old and worn, saying with weariness,
"Why doesn't the Great White Father put his red
children on wheels, and move us as he will?"
We drove to the Orland River, and watched the turtle
rush for water like rushing into marriage,
swimming in uncontaminated joy,
lovely the flies that fed that sleazy surface,
a turtle looking back at us, and blinking.
.

Yes - Lewis Carrol. Indeed.

And I have finally worked out what the perfect poem is...

...the next one you're (one is) going to write.

P