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I came across the first four lines of this poem and hymn this morning while reading Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens (1812-1870). I was sufficiently taken by the simple words and admirable sentiment to look for the poem. I discovered that it was written by Isaac Watts (1664-1748) an English minister, hymn writer, theologian,…
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Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), the great Chilean poet, wrote this poem in 1936 as the Spanish Civil War began and Madrid moved from peace to war, from “the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,/wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea” to “the blood of children ran through the streets/without fuss.” Something similar happened in Chile…
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A friend who died a year ago pointed me towards the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), America’s best-selling poet in 2007. My friend had chosen Oliver poems to be read at her funeral. She recommended me to buy Oliver’s collected poems, but I was put off by the price of the book. But my friend…
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A death is one of the events that prompts those for whom poetry is only an occasional habit to reach for a poem. This may be especially the case if the person has to speak at a funeral. Here’s a poem by James Fenton (1949–) that s good for a funeral and tries to answer…
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Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH is to the 19th century what Eliot’s Waste Land was for the 20th century. (We still await the 21st century version.) In Memoriam AHH took Tennyson 17 years to write and is perhaps best thought of as a collection of linked poems rather than a single poem. AHH was Arthur Henry…
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Tithonus was the son of Laomedon, the king of Troy, and the lover of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tennyson wrote his poem Tithonus a month or two after the unexpected and sudden death of his 22-year-old friend Arthur Henry Hallam.…
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Tennyson (1809-1892) wrote The Kraken (1830) when he was 20 and an undergraduate at Trinity College Cambridge. Although it caused a stir at the time, the poem disappeared for some 40 years. It’s now seen as a major poem of Tennyson’s, and an account of the poem forms most of the first chapter of The Boundless Deep: Young…
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I came across this poem in Ever After by Graham Swift. He omitted the last two lines, a cut that makes a lot of sense to me, avoiding the belief in God and the repetition of grave and dust. Indeed, it makes so much sense to me that the poem below is the cut poem,…
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In Memoriam: MEE by RS Thomas The ashes of Mildred Elsi Thomas, an artist whose great talent still has to be appreciated and wife of the poet RS Thomas, lie in a graveyard above the cliffs at Llanfaelrhys on the Llyn Peninsula. The stone says just “Mildred Elsi Thomas, 1909-191.” But this is the poem…
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I’m reading The Man Who Went Into The West, Byron Rogers’s hugely enjoyable and funny biography of R S Thomas, a poet I greatly admire and who seems to me a greater poet than the other great Welsh poet of the 20thcentury, Dylan Thomas. I came across this poem in the biography. RST is the…
A Cairn of Poems 