The gold of the corn, and the brilliance of Summer light finds a chivalric setting in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. Here Sir Lancelot rides through a harvest field: A bow-shot from her bower eaves, He rode between the barley sheaves, The sun came dazzling through the leaves, And flamed upon the brazen greaves Of […]
Author: Peter Wood
August 6 Edmund Spenser
Spenser, three hundred years before Housman, already felt that man’s highest ideals had left the Earth, but he was echoing the much older legend of Astraea, goddess of Justice, who was said to have left the world at the end of the Golden Age: The sixth was August, being rich arrayed In garment all of […]
August 5 A E Housman
Since the World War of 1914-1918 the idea has spread that patriotism, Whether felt for one’s own country or for another, is not enough. A.E.Housman, 1859-1936, sardonically sees human valour as a salable commodity; yet even so it remains admirable. The economy of this poem is modelled on the epitaphs of the Praise Singers of […]
August 4 Lord Byron
Ostracised by contemporary English society, Lord Byron transferred his patriotic feeling to the cause of Greek independence, and its genuineness is still evidenced by the preservation of his name on a column in the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, and by a statue in Athens. Byron stereotyped himself as a romantic exile whom he at […]
August 3 Lord Macaulay
Lord Macaulay’s flair for rendering the patriotic spirit produced a description of ‘Fire over England’ in his poem ‘ The Armada’, for which he uses the old ballad metre of ‘Chevy Chase’. He thus describes the signal beacons that, by night, mustered the English defence: From Eddystone to Berwick bounds, from Lynn to Milford bay, […]
August 1 Anonymous
It fell about the Lammas tide, When the muir men win their hay, The doughty Earl of Douglas rode Into England, to catch a prey. Lammas tide is the 1st.August. So opens the Scottish version of a famous Border foray, also narrated in the fifteenth century English Ballad of Chevy Chase. Here the emotions are […]
August 2 Lord Macaulay
Admiration of prowess in battle, and of exploits motivated by patriotism is one of the oldest sources of poetry: one such poem is “Horatius”, the best known of Lord Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome”. Horatius, with two comrades, has successfully defended a narrow pass to the bridge across the river Tiber that would give the […]
July Poems Index
Title/From Begins Poet The Faerie Queene Then came hot July, boiling like to fire Edmund Spenser The Lion Strange spirit with inky hair, W J Turner Mowing There was never a sound beside the wood but one, Robert Frost The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, Samuel Taylor […]
July 8 Percy Bysshe Shelley
OZYMANDIAS I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ….. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, […]
July 7 Roy Campbell
THE ZEBRAS From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers, This poem is still protected by copyright. Read the rest of The Zebras. Next: Ozymandias Percy Bysshe Shelley