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 […]
All Poems
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 […]
August 7 Alfred Lord Tennyson
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 […]
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 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, […]