My passion for poetry began when my English teacher Nigel Ballantyne gave me the great gift of introducing me to the Romantic poets. If I had to rank those poets Byron would come below Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, but I have read my way through Don Juan and Childe Harold and exulted in both. Byron (1788-1822) was a rock star in his day and is more of a globally known poet than any other English poet apart from Shakespeare. His poems can seem overwrought, but try abandoning yourself to these three Cantos which I have collected over the years, although I’m not sure from which poems.

Where rose the mountains, there to him were friends;

Where rolled the ocean, thereon was his home;

Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends.

He had the passion and the power to roam;

The desert, forest, cavern, breaker’s foam,

Were unto him companionship; they spake

A mutual language, clearer than the tome

Of his land’s tongue, which he would oft forsake

For nature’s pages glassed by sunbeams on the lake.

Ye stars! Which are the poetry of heaven,

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate

Of men and empires,–‘tis to be forgiven,

That in our aspirations to be great,

Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state,

And claim a kindred with you; for ye are

A beauty and a mystery, and create

In us such love and reverence from afar

That fortune, fame, power, life have named themselves a star/

All heaven and earth are still—though not in sleep,

But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;

And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep:

All heaven and earth are still: from the high host

Of stars, to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,

All is centred in a life intense,

Where not a beam, nor air, nore leaf is lost,

But hath a part of being, and a sense

Of that which is all Creator and defence.