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Anybody who has seen somebody die in the open ward of a acute hospital will be able to relate to this poem by Paul Durcan (1944-2025). Most people now die in hospital with staff busy around them and something on the radio, television, or both. People might also be able to relate to the Durcan’s…
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Until I just read about him in Wikipedia I knew only three things about James Hogg (1770-1835): he was called “The Ettrick Shepherd”; a man I worked with and admired, Roger Robinson, was doing a PhD on him after retiring as a professor of paediatrics; and he was somehow linked with Wordsworth. Hogg was much…
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This is a beautifully simple poem of eight lines in two stanzas that is beautifully constructed. The first three lines in each stanza rhyme (and simple rhymes they are: sky, lie, die; and me, be, sea; none more than three letters) and the last lines of each stanza rhyme (will, hill). (There’s probably a name…
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I’ve read The Bell Jar, https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/09/03/sylvia-plaths-the-bell-jar-to-the-person-in-the-bell-jar-blank-and-stopped-as-a-dead-baby-the-world-itself-is-the-bad-dream/ and I admire the poetry of Silvia Plath (1932-63). But I haven’t read all of Ariel, and a series of radio programmes has introduced me to poems that I didn’t know, including Lady Lazarus. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002zghg The radio series concentrates on her writing. Those who made the series worry that…
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Brian Bilston is known as “the Twitter poet.” He’s shared his poems on Twitter and probably on other social media and attracted a large audience. His poems have been gathered together into a book. I’ve come across him not through Twitter but because a literary friend of my wife’s sent her a copy of his…
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T S Eliot, according to Clive James, called Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) “the most gifted and technically perfect poet of his age.” But he seems to be remembered for only two poems and three phrases: Gone with the wind; Days of wine and roses; and I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion (in…
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I’m now reading my way through The Many Days: Selected Poems by Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) and enjoying greatly the directness, simplicity, and thoughtful depth of his poems. This morning I read this poem he wrote on a train from London to Edinburgh. That’s a journey I have done many times but still enjoy. The first…
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I had never heard of Wendell Berry (1934–), the American farmer poet, until recently, but now he’s one of my favourite poets. You can see him enjoying himself in this poem. We all have a contrarian tendency (or at least I do), and I’m not sure whether Berry is exploring his tendency or saying that…
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I have never seen Henry VIII, which William Shakespeare (1564-1616) cowrote with John Fletcher (1579-1626). It is rarely performed, but I encountered some of this speech delivered by Ralph Fiennes playing the great 19th century actor Henry Irving in Grace Pervades, a play by David Hare. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2026/07/14/an-enjoyable-play-that-centres-on-the-great-theatre-that-came-from-the-contrast-between-henry-irving-and-ellen-terry/ The speech is made by Cardinal Wolsey, Henry…
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William Harvey (1578–1657), the first person to describe the circulation of blood, would not think of himself as a poet, but he was a writer, a philosopher (a follower of Aristotle), and a performer, conducting public dissections. But I think that I have found a poem in Harvey’s great work, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis…
