It may be everyone's least favorite unit in high school English class but it was worth it. Poetry consists of the words we never thought we needed, until we hear them.
1. “My friend, would you not tell in such high jest / To children ardent for some desperate glory / The old lie; dulce et decorum est / Pro patria morti” (Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen)
2. “Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die / Into the valley of Death / Road the six hundred” (Charge of the Light Brigade, Lord Alfred Tennyson)
3. “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect life / I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night” (The Old Astronomer to His Pupil, Sarah Williams)
4. “Do not go gentle into that good night / Old rage should burn and rave at close of day / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Do not go gentle into that good night, Dylan Thomas)
5. “I have you fast in my fortress, / And will not let you depart, / But put you down into the dungeon / In the round-tower of my heart. / And there will I keep you forever, / Yes, forever and a day” “The Children’s Hour, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
6. “I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep” (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Robert Frost)
7. “Some reckon their age by years / Some measure their life by art / But some tell their days by flood of their tears / And their lives by the moans of their heart” (The Rosary of My Tears, Abram Joseph Ryan)
8. “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed in seaweed in red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown” (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot)
9. “It matter not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll / I am the master of my fate / I am the captain of my soul” (Invictus, W.E. Henley).
10. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost)
