I too like this question and thank you for it. I can be fond of lines that are perverse, like Auden's "and even then if perhaps," from a heptasyllabic masterpiece, "Atlantis," that I've written about elsewhere. But if a poem does not have a high quotient of resonant lines it's not likely to grab me, and I'm often taking private pleasure in little effects that few others will ever notice. I've got a poem called "Home Care" coming out in TLS that begins:
My father says his feet will soon be trees
This is something that my father actually said once. He looked down at his feet and said, "They're gonna be trees." Since his ashes will be scattered in the mountains among stunted firs and heather, he's right in a way. I used that line as the opening because it seemed to have an element of surprise, and it helped me set up a pattern of rhymes.
In "Larking for Larkin" I rather like this one:
Suffering always felt better when it was brief
Because it takes my natural tendency to the maudlin and turns it ironically. And it sounds rather Larkinesque, too.
From a poem called "Nooksack" that appeared in the Formalist I like the ending:
Snow me an island. Rain me a mountain.
Perhaps it's that derrangement of the senses I like there?
From "The Bay of Writing" I like the conclusion:
Music of everything I have not written.
That poem was inspired by a reading of Anne Carson's brilliant early scholarly book called Eros the Bittersweet, but the landscape referred to, Kalamitsi, a diminutive of Kalamus, the reed from which both flutes and pens have been fashioned, was once my home in a happy time, and remains the home of one of my all-time heroes among writers: Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor's tragedy is that his memory is sufficiently shattered that he will never finish the trilogy of books some have called his masterpiece. My poem is dedicated to Fermor, though TLS did not print the dedication for some reason.
I'll finish with two pairs of lines I like:
from "A Thorn in the Paw," a poem about religion that appeared in Poetry a while back:
Birds high up in their summer baldachin
obey the messages of wind and leaves.
I've always tried to imagine bird life, and was happy to get that biblical baldachin in there.
And the end of "New Zealand Letter" I like for its celebratory complexity:
this metamorphic world, tidal and worn,
rooted, adrift, alive, and dying to be born.
One of my students complained that I end with a hexameter in a pentameter poem, but the effect was a deliberate underlining on my part.
No doubt I'll change my favorite lines another day. But here are a few of which I am not ashamed.
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