Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Here is my favorite poem.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-- Robert Frost

Theresa,
Thank you - Frost is way coool. Pity that both he and Whitman are presented to students at the worst possible time for guys to have any benefit from them.
This is one of my favorite poems in English, from Edna St. Vincent Millay:
When we are old and these rejoicing veins
Are frosty channels to a muted stream, And out of all our burning their remains
No feeblest spark to fire us, even in dream, This be our solace: that it was not said
When we were young and warm and in our prime, Upon our couch we lay as lie the dead, Sleeping away the unreturning time.
O sweet, O heavy-lidded, O my love, When morning strikes her spear upon the land, And we must rise and arm us and reprove
The insolent daylight with a steady hand, Be not discountenanced if the knowing know
We rose from rapture but an hour ago."

Poetry commands attention and a willingness to accept other perspectives, a reality outside of us.