What are your candidates for best ever few lines (maximum 4 lines)?

Mine (after a struggle) - Gerard Manley Hopkins - the last verse of Inversnaid

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness ? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet ;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Over many years a number of poems have
left their mark for the best reasons.
Now - this will take a bit of study
and the exercise of the memory. A
fascinating challenge.
DB's own choice is inspired as it says
so much that is important in a world
under pressure.

I once lived and suffered opposite the church in Liverpool where Hopkins spent a short time and physically walked the same `dusty street`. I found at the time a bleak, yet strengthening, comfort in these concluding lines of one of his `terrible Sonnets` They are great `universal` poetry.

Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: All
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

"Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old but add
Jenny kissed me".
I enter the above excerpt from a
short poem that has given me much
pleasure to read and recite down the years.
These heart-warming lines from the
Leigh Hunt poem "Jenny Kissed Me"
delightfully capture the eternal
pleasure of the unexpected kiss
from a pretty girl.

Some love is fire: some love is rust:But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.From The Wild Party by Joseph Moncure March. I've always liked that line although the rest of the poem doesn't really fulfill the lines promise. Somewhere on WOL you'll find a cheeky poem I wrote called 'Some Love' inspired by this line.

I must go down to the sea again to the lonely sea and sky. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by. The opening lines of Sea Fever by John Masefield, one of my favourite poems ever . .

You've inflated a bubble of a memory for me there, with that last one Steve.

That was one of my dad's favourites and he used to recite it every morning on a caravan holiday we went on in Scotland - one where he spent every morning floating in a very cold sea :)

Memories are made of these...

"Aggie the Elephant" is a Marriot Edgar monologue about a train of elephants passing over a level crossing. The last one, baby Aggie, gets hit by the train.

"Joe thought she were dead when he saw her lyin' there,
With the back of her head on the line
He knelt by her side, put his ear to her chest,
And told her to say " ninety-nine."

She waggled her tail and she twiggled her trunk ;
To show him as she were alive;
She hadn't the strength for to say "ninety-nine,"
She just managed a weak "eighty-five."

Poetry indeed.

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the
scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."
W.E. Henley
or perhaps...
"Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in other's pain,
And perish in our own."
Francis Thompson
And lastly
"The World is too much with us; late
and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is
ours;
We have given our heart away, a
sordid boon."
W. Wordsworth
How then to say which is best? Each has its
timeless lesson to teach.