The Poem You Like the Most Yet It Drives You to Despair

[Todd]

There are some poems I read where I think wtf am I doing writing poetry. The poem is so good and there's so much in it that I feel like I'm just playing games with this writing thing. Now I'm still going to write, but I wondered which poems do you like that at the same time drive you to despair (you connect to the poem like Salieri connected to Mozart and his music in Amadeus)...

Here's mine:

THE SEASONLESS by James Wright

When snows begin to fill the park,
It is not hard to keep the eyes
Secure against the flickering dark,
Aware of summer ghosts that rise.
The blistered trellis seems to move
The memory toward root and rose,
The empty fountain fills the air
With spray that spangled women’s hair;
And men who walk this park in love
May bide the time of falling snows.

The trees recall their greatness now;
they were not always vague and bowed
With loads that build the slender bough
Till branches bear a tasteless fruit.
A month ago they rose and bore
Fleshes of berry, leaf, and shade:
How painlessly a man recalls
The stain of green on crooked walls,
The summer never known before,
The garden heaped to bloom and fade.

Beyond the holly bush and path
The city lies to meet the night
And also there the quiet earth
Relies upon the lost delight
To rise again and fill the dark
With waterfalls and swallows sound.
Beyond the city’s lazy fume,
The sea repeats the fall of spume,
And gulls remember cries they made
When lovers fed them off the ground.

But lonely underneath a heap
Of overcoat and crusted ice,
A man goes by, and looks for sleep.
The spring of everlastingness.
Nothing about his face revives
A longing to evade the cold.
The night returns to keep him old,
And why should he, the lost and lulled,
Pray for the night of vanished lives,
The day of girls blown green and gold?