The Words That Move Me

Poetry is without any doubt one of my favourite pastimes - I enjoy dabbling, and writing my own poor stuff, but I live to read the works of the Masters. Reading the words that were brought forth by them stir emotion deep within me. When I am brooding, or feeling reflective, I grab my grandfathers' "Oxford Book of English Verse", which contain works from the 1200's-1900's. This book, a very tattered, dog eared collection has travelled with me twice, crossing the Atlantic ocean four times, and has opened my eyes to the beauty of the world's I was seing for the first time.
It is Jeremy's 29th today. Not only is he my elder brother, and my very best friend, but he is also my true and stalwart travelling companion, a person with who I have shared the road, and with whom I long to share it again. I miss our Season in Exile. It was over far too soon, and the mundane has again taken hold of both of our lives. And so, I turn to poetry. It has preserved me before, and will do so again. So, Happy Birthday brother. Here is to trips taken, and pilgrimages yet to be made! Let us hope "that the way is long"....
I would also like to relay exactly which poems move me the most:
1) The Rubaiyat - Omar Khayyam (First Fitzgerald Trans.)
2) Ulysses - Lord Alfred Tennyson
3) Ode to a Grecian Urn - John Keats
4) Sailing to Byzantium - W.B. Yeats
5) Sensation - Arthur Rimbaud
6) Ithaca - Cavafy
If you have never read them, treat yourself; they may change the way you live. Indeed, that is the effect they had upon me. I have been altered by the word's those men put to paper. Odd? No, nothing is more powerful than words, nothing more beautiful.