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!
