With this note of cautious optimism from Hardy, one ‘who saw life steadily and saw it whole’, let us form a circle to symbolize the circling year and join in Robert Burns’ “Auld Lang Syne.” Old long since – the days of long ago. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind? Should […]
Author: Peter Wood
December 7 Thomas Hardy
And so we come to the last days of the year: Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” was written on 31st December 1900, also the turn of the Century: I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like […]
December 6 T S Elliot
Reality impingeing on Christmas-card stereotypes is also heard in “Journey of the Magi” by T.S.Eliot: one of the Wise Men is speaking: ” A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year This poem is copyright, but you can read it here. […]
December 5 Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Christmas at Sea” is related by by a young deck-hand , who had run away to sea: The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand; The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand; The wind was a nor’wester, blowing squally off the sea; And cliffs […]
December 4 Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy, with characteristic nostalgia for the simple faith of bygone days, recalls a more homely rustic legend of this season in: THE OXEN Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.We pictured the […]
December 3 Alfred Lord Tennyson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who followed Wordsworth as Laureate in 1850 set his description of ‘The Passing of Arthur,’ or ‘Morte D’Arthur,’ as a narrative related on Christmas Eve by a supposed poet, Everard Hall, “ mouthing out his hollow oes and aes”. So all day long the noise of battle roll’d Among the mountains by […]
December 2 Sir Walter Scott
As Sir Walter Scott writes in an introduction to “Marmion” Heap on more wood; the wind is chill, But let it whistle as it will, We’ll keep our Christmas merry still. and later in the same poem he describes an old-world Christmas in detail The fire, with well-dried logs supplied, Went roaring up the chimney […]
December 1 Edmund Spenser
And after him came next the chill December: Yet he, through merry feasting which he made And great bonfires, did not the cold remember; His Saviour’s birth his mind so much did glad. Upon a shaggy-bearded Goat he rode, The same wherewith Dan Jove in tender years, They say, was nourished by th’Idaean maid; And […]
October Poems Index
Title/From Begins Poet The Faerie Queene Then came October full of merry glee Edmund Spenser Antony and Cleopatra Come, thou monarch of the vine, William Shakespeare 17th Century Round Hey nonny, no! Men are fools that wish to die! Anonymous John Barleycorn Willie brew’d a peck o’ malt, Robert Burns The Listeners ‘Is there anybody […]
October 8 Percy Bysshe Shelley
A more powerful and declamatory self-identification with autumnal Nature, proper to a Romantic poet, is heard in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”. In a note to the poem Shelley tells us that it was conceived and chiefly written in a wood skirting The Arno , near Florence, while a West wind was blowing up […]