Immortal Lines

Soon after rousing me from my previously comatose state to a merely partial one, Radio 2, to which our clock radio alarm is tuned (do not ask why) regales me with a spot called Immortal Lines in which listeners 'phone, text or (presumably) email in their favourite immortal song lines. You may have spotted that I have purloined their title for mine own.

It has struck me a couple of times (being still in the semi-comatose condition mentioned above) that it might be interesting, entertaining - or even a giggle - if folk could be persuaded to part with their chosen immortal lines of verse. If so, the comment facility is there for your use. If not, well I have a very broad back and shall perfectly well understand that you did not feel you could indulge, yourselves not being in any sort of comatose condition.

To give you a feel of what I am on about, here are a few examples from recent broadcasts:

Someone left the cake out in the rain.

I'm celebrating my love for you
with a pint of beer and a new tattoo.

Hello lamp-post, what's your name?

Hopefully, they will have given you something of the flavour of what goes on on Radio 2. There are a couple of things to point out about these lines:

They do not have to be lines. They can be phrases, couplets, whatever.
I have not heard any source being given for them and have not recognised one as yet, so I am not willing to swear they are all genuine. Therefore, if you want to make them up or quote an immortal line from your own poetry, that will be fine. Immortal, of course, means immortal to you.

Most importantly, you should not feel it incumbent upon yourself to rise to the heights illustrated above. Something more normal will do very well, as long as it is immortal normality.

For me, the immortality of a line consists in its ability to summon up, and maybe in some sense to sum up, the poem itself.

A couple of examples:
First, from Wordsworth's Ode from his Intimations of Immortality:

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

and one more, this maybe a better example, for it summons up for me, not just the poem, but a whole collection. It is from George Szirtes's The Budapest File
and from a poem entitled: Undersong

I love the city, the way it eats you up
And melts you into walls along with stone

It sends a shiver down my spine now as it did, as the whole book did, when I first read it over a decade ago. He writes hauntingly of the changes that took place both above and below ground in his native Budapest, and this quotation brings it all back for me.

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Another "Haiku form"

Fast-track growing up
that is why they disappeared -
the neanderthals