Great first or last lines of poems

The Frost performs its secret ministry

and then realised that the last line is pretty shivery too

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon

- Ken Maher

from Richard Meltzer's "Shit is the one with flies on it."

- Philip Larkin, last 2 lines of Water

'let us go then you and i
when the evening is stretched out against the sky
like a patient etherised upon a table...'

"Will the rain never stop?"

First notable closer that came to mind was

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Gerald Manley rather than Tim Manlier.

Her body is not so white as/
anemone petals nor so smooth
wcw

There is a girl inside.
She is randy as a wolf.
Lucile Clifton

Say shit, say death, say fuck the father
Sharon Olds

Poetry is the Supreme Fiction, madame
Wallace Stevens

soft rainsqaulls on the swells
Gary Synder

For love-I would
split open your head...
Creeley

Having A Coke With You
is even more fun than going top San Sebastain, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
Frank O Hara

(various)

I just don't know where to begin....

(Elvis Costello)

And her voice coming softly over the meadow
Was the mist becoming rain.

Austin Clarke

Rage works if reason won't.
When locked up, bear down. - May Swenson

The quiet that comes to a house
where nobody can sleep.- Raymond Carver

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix

(first two lines of "Howl" by Ginsberg)

-E.E. Cummings

...

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough, to get it ready for the plough. The cabbages are coming now; The earth exhales.

- e.e. cummings

Damn I love that one, I'm such a sap.

Fernando Pessoa

Emily Dickinson

"after a time the grave got up and went away"

Roy Fisher

"I said you've still got your earrings on
she said I know it's part of the plan"

Cliff Yates

"tonight, he said, tonight I could die
one pound fifty five, I said"

Eric B Rakim

There are any number of first and last lines of Tom Raworth and Rob MacKenzie peoms that rip my guts out but I can't find the texts in the bombsite that is my room. And Bill Griffiths owns everything < /poetry geek>

So here's my other contribution:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun,
By the men who moil for gold.
The arctic trails have their own strange tales,
That would make your blood run cold.
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see...
Was the night on the marge of Lake LeBarge that I cremated Sam McGee.

and as a last line: "love is a growing or full constant light and its short minute after noon is night"

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

- Plath

(not my fave Plath poem by any stretch but a great last line)

People Who Do Things exceed my endurance;
God, for a man that solicits insurance!
-Dorothy Parker

You stay, somehow, my friend
Who grips me tightest in her open hand.
-Michael Donaghy

Glass

This is a cheapjack gift at the years end.
This is a double-glazing hymn for wind.
This is a palm frond held out to a friend
Who holds her lifeline lightly in her hand.

As fine sand filaments the unclenched hand
Or leaves the palm grit-filmed but crazed, lines end
Across prismatic windscreens. Every friend
A meteorologist's diagram of wind.

Blow smoke into the fist of either hand
And pull it tight and loop it round the end
of every night held up by wine and friend,
Sootflecked and leaning on a London wind.

Then say our ribboned smoke's erased by wind,
Our glass is sand. You start, but in the end,
Somehow, I stay. You stay, somehow, my friend
Who grips me tightest in her open hand.

"The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas"

"'Twas brillig and the slivey toves
Did gire and gimble in the wabe..."

"We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown."

I'm by no means a poetry consumer but I recently heard one of Berryman's "Dream Songs" read aloud and " Fancy the brain from hell
/ held out so long. Let go."

Share my harvest and my home

I don't know why I like this poem (Ruth, by Thomas Hardy) so much - it's very plain, and not even particularly 'accomplished'. Does anyone else like Thomas Hardy's poetry?

("...as God may grant you to be loved by another.") - Pushkin

..and thou art distant in humanity

Stanza 39 of "Isabella,or the Pot of Basil" - Keats

Blake, Nurses Song (Experience)

Does it for me, every time.

-Dylan Thomas