Prompt #150 – A Line or Phrase

Is there a line (or phrase) from a book, play, poem, movie, or song  that you’ve never forgotten,  a few words from a remembered source that has a special meaning for you?

• Maybe the first line in a novel has stayed with you (for example, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities).

• Or perhaps a line from a song (for example, “All lies and jest, still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest” from  Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”).

• Or a famous line from a poem, such as Tennyson’s “Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all;”  Eliot’s “Not with a bang but a whimper;” or Frost’s “and miles to go before I sleep.” 

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

1. Think about a line from a book, play, poem, movie, or song that means something special to you (that you carry with you) and write a poem based on that line.

2. Often book titles draw inspiration from poems such as Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion (based on a line from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”); Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (from a line in Robert Burns’s “To A Mouse”); and Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Along this line (pun intended), you may want to use a line from a poem (or part of it) as the title for your poem and work from that.

I couldn’t find any great example poems for this week’s prompt, so I hope some of you will post your poems or let me know if you come across any that fit the prompt!