Charles Causley recounts how an earlier Cornish poet, the Reverend R.S.Hawker of “And shall Trelawney die?” fame, sought to cure his parishioners of their superstitions by dressing up as a mermaid. THE MERRYMAID Robert Stephen Hawker, Vicar of Morwenstow, This poem is copyright. Next: Sam Walter de la Mare
Author: Peter Wood
November 6 Edmund Spenser
Spenser’s pageant figure, as you may guess, is lurking not far away: Next was November; he full gross and fat As fed with lard, and that right well might seem; For he had been a-fatting hogs of late, That yet his brows with sweat did reek and steam, And yet the season was full sharp […]
November 5 Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” has a similar touch of the universal, going beyond the formal commemorations of the Cenotaph to find reconciliation between the actualities of war and the realities of grief: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle […]
November 4 Wilfred Owen
Wilfrid Owen, an Infantry Officer in the Artists’ Rifles during the first World War, thus described his own writings: “My subject is War and the pity of War: the poetry is in the pity.” His poem “Futility” pities the dead fellow countrymen, and questions the purpose of life in its cosmic setting: Move him into […]
November 3 Laurence Binyon
November is the month for sad and proud remembrance of the service men who died in the World Wars. Laurence Binyon’s memorable words, so often used, are worth putting in their poetic context: For the Fallen With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea. Flesh of […]
November 2 Cecil Day-Lewis
Flight to Australia A Poet Laureate of the twentieth century, Cecil Day Lewis uses the metaphor of an orchestra to describe the lift-off of a condemned D.H.9 during the “Flight to Australia” of Parer and M’Intosh in l920: an exploit that ended successfully. This verse paragraph too is full of appropriate sound: “Orchestrate this theme, […]
November 1 John Dryden
The close relationship of poetry and music is celebrated by our first officially designated Poet Laureate, John Dryden, in his “Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 22nd November, l687”: St Cecilia is especially associated with the organ. From harmony, from heavenly harmony This universal frame began; When Nature underneath a heap Of jarring atoms lay, And […]
August Poems Index
Title/From Begins Poet The Ballad of Chevy Chase It fell about the Lammas tide, Anonymous Horatius But meanwhile axe and lever Lord Macaulay The Armada From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, Lord Macaulay Don Juan The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece! Lord Byron Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries. These, in the day when […]
August 9 John Keats
John Keats celebrated his joy in discovering Homer through the Elizabethan translation of George Chapman in his sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s ‘Homer’” Much have I travelled in the realms of gold And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft […]
August 8 Alfred Lord Tennyson
The same imagery of a summer night is seen in Tennyson’s lyric from “The Princess”, an early excursion into the world of women’s liberation: Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: The firefly wakens: waken thou with […]