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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…
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I took this poem from “The Man Who Went Into The West,” Byron Rogers’s marvellous and funny biography of the Welsh poet R S Thomas, a man so curmudgeonly that when asked by English tourists for directions he, one of the greatest lyrical poets writing in English, would reply “no English.” He preferred solitude to…
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Adders which bite when provoked Narrow paths near sheer drops Trees and branches which can fall at any time Sand which can collapse and suffocate Ponies which can bite. Enjoy your walk.
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Yesterday I stepped down after six years as the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. The Alliance brings together 54 organisations of health professionals, including most of the royal colleges, to do what we can to counter the climate and nature crisis. We work to mitigate the crisis, promote adaptation, and explain…
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You’ll Never Walk Alone is more a song than a poem. What I mean by that is that there are many recorded versions of the song, but you won’t encounter it in an anthology of poems. The words are anaemic read on the page, but most of us hear the tune as we read the poem—and…
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This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me…
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I found this poem in Robert A Caro’s massive biography of Robert Moses, “the man who built New York.” The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York, tells how Moses, without ever being elected, achieved remarkable power that allowed him to shape New York according to his vision over 40 years. The chapter…
A Cairn of Poems 