h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

[Dylan Thomas ]

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art -

[Keats]

OK, OK...steadfast

I'm a bad-ass motherf'cker in a candy-ass school
The rules are all crazy, what's a guy gonna do?
Shake it, shake it up, that's what I'm gonna do
Yeah, give me some slack on the rope, yo whoo


[Yo Whoo, orig.]

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left's marked F**K, one right's marked S**T

[Tony Harrison: 'V']

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
(Gray's Elegy)

still aing-oh

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

[Sylvia Plath - The Moon and the Yew Tree]

But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!'


Edgar Allen Poe, The Raven

...the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassianato....

(Piano - D H Lawrence RIP 1930)

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that loured upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths,
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?


[Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen.]

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...
(John Donne)
Apologies in advance - this isn't strictly poetry but I believe it IS poetic.

Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.

[John Dunne Meditation XVII from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions]

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat.

Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

[Keats: Ode to a Nightingale]

My love has left me behind
I have yet to peel the rind
I wish i were a little kittie cat
so i could go chase a big black bat

[An original kitush]

Post 34 was, of course, by John Donne

The soul has bandaged moments -

[Emily Dickinson]

'What looked like a slug, black, soft, wrinkled,
Was wrestling, somehow, with the fallen
Brown, crumpled lobe of a chestnut leaf.
Suddenly, plainly, it was a bat.'


Ted Hughes (I think)