Browse this list of first lines and see what catches your ear or eye. Sometimes it is the unfamiliar poem that sparks the brain. Your best starting line may be one you have not run into before.
2 am: moonlight. The train has stopped
Tomas Tranströmer, Tracks
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –
Ted Hughes – Full Moon and Little Frieda
All day, day after day, they’re bringing them home
Bruce Dawe, Homecoming
A little learning is a dangerous thing
Alexander Pope – A Little Learning
Among twenty snowy mountains
Wallace Stevens – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
WH. Auden Their Lonely Betters
As you set out for Ithaka
C.P. Cavafy Ithaka
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
Wendy Cope – The Orange
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Wilfred Owen – Dulce Et Decorum Est
Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Kingsley Amis – Something Nasty In The Bookshop
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
Paul Celan, Death Fugue
Bloody men are like bloody buses
Wendy Cope – Bloody Men
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Edwin Markham – The Man with the Hoe
Come live with me and be my love
Christopher Marlowe – The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Dark cedars of dark lebanon
Rachel Tziva Back – Three Love Chants
Daybreak: the household slept
Gwen Harwood – Barn Owl
Did the people of Viet Nam use lanterns of stone?
Denise Levertov – What Were They Like?
Do you think your suffering is exceptional?
Diane Seuss – Cowpunk
Earth has not anything to show more fair
William Wordsworth – Upon Westminster Bridge
Even so distant, I can taste the grief
Philip Larkin – Deceptions
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Sylvia Plath – Poppies in October
Faster than fairies, faster than witches
Robert Louis Stevenson – From a Railway Carriage
Forgive me that I pitch your praise too low
John Wain – Apology for Understatement
From time to time our love is like a sail
Alice Oswald – Wedding
Glory be to God for dappled things
Gerard Manley Hopkins – Pied Beauty
Go and open the door. (Ian Milner and George Theiner translation)
Miroslav Holub, The Door
Good morning; good morning the General said
Siegfried Sassoon – The General
Green is the plane-tree in the square
Amy Levy – A London PlaneTree
He came home. Said nothing
Wisława Szymborska – Going Home
He disappeared in the dead of winter
WH Auden – In Memory of WB Yeats
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – How Do I Love Thee
I am spending my time imagining the worst that could happen
Jackie Kay – Dusting the Phone
I can’t sleep in case a few things you said
Alice Oswald – Sonnet
I celebrate myself, and sing myself
Walt Whitman – Song of Myself
I couldn’t do it again, I can hardly bear to look at it
Louise Glück – The Garden
I have reached a time when words no longer
Thom Gunn – For a Birthday
I love to see, when leaves depart,
Roy Campbell – Autumn
I loved the north. I remember that.
Diane Seuss – Allegory
I met a man a dying man and I said me too.
Diane Seuss – [I met a man a dying man]
I met a traveler from an antique land
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandias
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
John Masefield – Sea-Fever
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead
Sylvia Plath – Mad Girls Love Song
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street
WH Auden – September 1, 1939
I sit on a hard bench in the park
Vernon Scannell – Spot-check at Fifty
I think you’re wonderful and so does everyone else.
Frank O’Hara – Lines For The Fortune Cookies
I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer
Rudyard Kipling – Tommy
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree
WB Yeats – The Lake Isle of Innisfree
In a dream I meet
Wendell Berry – A Meeting
In a solitude of the sea
Thomas Hardy – The Convergence of the Twain
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day
Cecil Day-Lewis – Walking Away
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Wilfred Owen – Strange Meeting
It’s all I have to bring today
Emily Dickinson – It’s all I have to bring today
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
Seamus Heaney – Blackberry Picking
Lay your sleeping head, my love
WH Auden – Lullaby
Let the dry savannah air
Nii Ayikwei Parkes – Ghana by Air
Listen, Daisy: Be sure when I die
Álvaro de Campos. (Fernando Pessoa) Sonnet III
Listen to the reed how it tells a tale
Rumi, The Song of the Reed
Living is no laughing matter
Nâzım Hikmet, On Living
Love is like the wild rose-briar
Emily Bronte – Love and Friendship
Love set you going like a fat gold watch
Sylvia Plath – Morning Song
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold
John Keats – On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
My father built a great worry around me like a dock
Yehuda Amichai – Autobiography in the Year 1952
My poor friend, I have no compassion to offer you.
Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)
My heart has made its mind up
Wendy Cope – Valentine
My mother’s old leather handbag
Ruth Fainlight – Handbag
no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark
Warsan Shire – Home
Nobody heard him, the dead man
Stevie Smith – Not Waving But Drowning
Not there, on the tight bend of the paved highway,
Krisztina Tóth – Where
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary
Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
Rabindranath Tagore – On the Seashore
Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive
Wilfred Owen – Exposure
Out of every hundred people
Wislawa Szymborska – A Word on Statistics (trs. by Joanna Trzeciak)
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
John Keats – To Autumn
Stop if the car is going “clunk”
Wendy Cope – Some Rules
Sundays too my father got up early
Robert Hayden – Those Winter Sundays
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Ezra Pound – In a Station of the Metro
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
Robert Frost – Out Out
The crowd at the ball game
William Carlos Williams – The Crowd at the Ball Game
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
Thomas Gray – Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The darkness crumbles away
Isaac Rosenberg – Break of Day in the Trenches
The day he moved out was terrible
Wendy Cope – Loss
The deafening street was roaring all around me
Charles Baudelaire, À une passante/ To a passer-by
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimetres
Yehuda Amichai – The Diameter of the Bomb
The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill
Audre Lorde – Power
The eager note on my door said “Call me,
Frank O’Hara – Poem [“The eager note on my door said, ‘Call me,’”]
The end of the affair is always death.
Anne Sexton – The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator
The growing idleness of summer grass
Derek Walcott – A Lesson for this Sunday
The highway is full of big cars going nowhere fast
Maya Angelou – Come and be my baby
The instructor said
Langston Hughes – Theme for English B
The king sits in Dunfermline town
Anon – Sir Patrick Spens
The months and days are the travellers of eternity
Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The country is broken, though mountains and rivers remain
Du Fu, Spring View
The neighbors’ dog will not stop barking.
Billy Collins – Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep A Gun In The House
The people upstairs all practise ballet
Ogden Nash – The People Upstairs
The poet is a faker
Fernando Pessoa, Autopsychography
The price seemed reasonable, location
Wole Soyinka, Telephone Conversation
The school-bell is a call to battle
Imtiaz Dharker – A century later
The sea is calm to-night.
Matthew Arnold – Dover Beach
The sun was shining on the sea
Lewis Carroll – The Walrus and the Carpenter
The sunlight on the garden
Louis MacNeice – The Sunlight on the Garden
The things about you I appreciate
John Fuller – Valentine
The time will come
Derek Walcott – Love After Love
The widest prairies have electric fences
Philip Larkin – Wires
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees
Alfred Noyes – The Highwayman
The winter evening settles down
TS Eliot – Preludes
There in the attic of forgotten shapes
AE Stallings – The Doll House
There once was a country… I left it as a child
Carol Rumens – The Emigree
There was movement at the station
Banjo Paterson, The Man from Snowy River
There were never strawberries
Edwin Morgan – Strawberries
There’s a book called “A Dictionary of Angels.”
Charles Simic – In the Library
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock
Charles Causley – Eden Rock
They knew not her name
Makhosazana Xaba – Brakpan 2002
They shut the road through the woods
Rudyard Kipling – The Way Through the Woods
This house has been far out at sea all night
Ted Hughes – Wind
This is the night mail crossing the Border
WH Auden – Night Mail
This is the world we wanted
Louise Glück – Gretel in Darkness
To begin at the beginning
Dylan Thomas – Under Milk Wood
Tonight there’s a crowd in my head
Helen Dunmore – All The Things You Are Not Yet
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
Guillaume Apollinaire, Le Pont Mirabeau
Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie
Louise Bennett, Colonization in Reverse
We don’t like your white cottage
R.S.Thomas The Strangers
We hid the moon in the silent river
Abhijit Sarmah – On Asking My Mother about Winter 1990
Well son, I’ll tell you
Langston Hughes – Mother to Son
We were driving through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn
Czesław Miłosz, Encounter
What happens to a dream deferred?
Langston Hughes – Harlem
What in our lives is burnt
Isaac Rosenberg, August 1914
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
Jenny Joseph – Warning
When I have fears that I may cease to be
John Keats – When I have fears that I may cease to be
When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes
William Shakespeare – Sonnet 29
When I return home tired you should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Shakunt Mathur – You should be beautiful, the house should be beautiful
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Rabindranath Tagore – Where the Mind Is Without Fear
Whose woods these are I think I know
Robert Frost – Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening
With yellow pears and full of wild roses
Friedrich Hölderlin, Half of Life
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model
Lucille Clifton – won’t you celebrate with me
Yes, I remember Adlestrop
Edward Thomas – Adlestrop
you are the one i am lit for
Lucille Clifton – To a Dark Moses
You begin this way
Margaret Atwood – You Begin
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco
Naomi Shihab Nye – Valentine for Ernest Mann
You can’t say it that way any more
John Ashbery – And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name
You do not have to be good
Mary Oliver – Wild Geese
You may write me down in history
Maya Angelou – Still I Rise
Your absence has gone through me
WS Merwin – Separation
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