Out of the night that covers me
Black as a pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul

In the fell clutches of circumstance
I have not winced, nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid

It matters not how straight the gate
How charged with punishments, the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul

-- Henley

I stand amid the roar, of a surf-tormented shore
And clutch within my hand, grains of the golden sand
How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers, to the deep
While I weep, while I weep

(-Poe, excerpt)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

--The first few lines of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"

The boy stood on the burning deck playing a game of cricket
The ball rolled up his trouser leg and stumped his middle wicket ..... a-ha !!

Bunch of shit. "If" - Rudyard Kipling.

'Howl' - Allen Ginsberg.

'Assisi' - Norman MacCaig
The dwarf with his hands on backwards
sat, slumped like a half-filled sack
on tiny twisted legs from which
sawdust might run,
outside the three tiers of churches built
in honour of St Francis, brother
of the poor, talker with birds, over whom
he had the advantage
of not being dead yet.

A priest explained
how clever it was of Giotto
to make his frescoes tell stories
that would reveal to the illiterate the goodness
of God and the suffering
of His Son. I understood
the explanation and
the cleverness.

A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
fluttered after him as he scattered
the grain of the Word. It was they who had passed
the ruined temple outside, whose eyes
wept pus, whose back was higher
than his head, whose lopsided mouth
said Grazie in a voice as sweet
as a child's when she speaks to her mother
or a bird's when it spoke
to St Francis.

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

- Stephen Crane

There was a young girl from Pitlochry
Who tried to make love on a rockery
But when pebbles and grass
Permeated her ass
Said "This isn't a fuck, its a mockery!"

@redhouse:1938 I like the thread and your Hillel quote, but it is grossly mistranslated.

The original is pretty hard to understand, since the dialect hasn't been in use for about 2000 years, and some of the lines mean the opposite of what their English equivalent is trying to convey; that might be intentional, but that depends more on the style of interpretation than anything else.
If you want, I can elucidate a bit (I'm a Hebrew speaker and studied the relevant text).

Hey H.H, I actually have no clue who Hillel is. I do calculations on a computer cluster and whenever a calculation is finished successfully, at the end of the file it prints a quote. I liked this one and decided to build a thread around it :-)
So by all means, elucidate it! It's just that I hope the sense of the poem isn't lost in the updated translation because it's so funny!

Well, the first two lines are about right. From there it's pretty much a freeform of a lot of things ascribed to him, with some parts added in for good measure. So it's more of a lyrical collage than a poem, really.

Or, if you insist, it's based on Hillel but not written by him (he didn't even write the things that are ascribed to him, but only said them, but that's a different matter altogether and is out of the scope of this thread).

That's very kind of you, but as I started the thread I hereby widen its scope to include a discussion on Hillel and whether or not he wrote his own work, on the condition that you add a nice poem to this thread afterward to rerail the thread again. I have no clue who Hillel is by the way. You said "Hebrew"? Is Hillel a jewish poet? It all sounds very interesting and ancient.