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16 SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | APRIL 2023 By Clare Mendez, Resident How familiar are you with poetry? I Googled "Famous Poetry Lines" and found this list on www.oxford-royale.com . I wonder how many you know the title of and who wrote them. This list included some I was not familiar with, but now I am, and has inspired me to look some up as reference. 1. "To be or not to be: that is the question." This famous quote came from Hamlet written by William Shakespeare. Spoken by Hamlet himself, these words question whether it's better to live and face one's troubles, or die and rid of them. How dreary! 2. "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem is entitled In Memorandum A.H.H. It took Tennyson 17 years to write revealing how deeply his friend's death had affected him. 3. "Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." By William Butler Yeats, entitled Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. The poem starts off by describing beautiful things such as "embroidered cloths" and "gold and silver light:" the speaker says that if he possessed these things he would spread them beneath the feet of the person to whom the poem is addressed. 4. "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by." This evocative line comes from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Roads are a common metaphor in poetry and usually represent paths in life. As you read on you discover he chooses the one he describes as "having perhaps the better claim" and he "kept the first for perhaps another day." 5. "If I should die, think only this of me." Rupert Brook wrote in The Soldier, which is the final sonnet in a collection entitled 1914. It was written when the true scale of carnage of the First World War had yet to unfold. 6. "Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink." From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is a very, very long ballad told from the point of view of a sailor who just returned from an epic voyage. 7. "Seasons of Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness" is the opening line from Autumn written by John Keats. Keats was a romantic poet and focused his writerly attention on understanding and exploring beauty. 8. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." Written by William Wordsworth in Daffodils. The full stanza is this: "I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o're vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils, Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze." A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose Is A Rose Voluntr Areciati Dner

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