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I sang Dear Lord and Father of Mankind many times at school 60 years ago, but I’m not sure that I’ve sung it since then. I loved both the words and the tune without thinking much about what the words meant. I’m not sure why the phrase “Till all our strivings cease” popped into my…
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Paul Durcan, who died in May this year, has been a favourite poet of mine ever since I heard him read his poems after a dinner at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (a ridiculous institution in a country that had spent almost a millennium trying to rid itself of the British crown). https://acairnofpoems.com/2025/03/01/teresas-bar-by-paul-durcan/…
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I find Shakespeare’s sonnets wonderful but tricky. I read them again and again, often out loud, but almost always the full meaning eludes me. Yet there is enough meaning and enough sparkling lines to enchant me William Shakespeare (1564 –1616) wrote 154 sonnets plus a few more in his plays. All sonnets have 14 lines…
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Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is in his novels more a poet and a dramatist than a novelist, a writer friend tells me. As I read Dombey and Son, I reflect on what my friend says and come to see what he means.https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2025/12/13/a-life-enhancing-novel-in-which-pride-comes-before-resounding-crashes/ There are many passages in the book where Dickens writes passage that can be…
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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.…
A Cairn of Poems 