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Despite studying his poem My Last Duchess for O-level, Robert Browning (1812-1889) has never been a poet who spoke to me as directly as many other poets, including other Victorian poets. His poems are often tricky and require untangling (a pleasure with Donne’s poems but somehow irritating with Browning’s) but some poems are simple and…
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Anonymous has written many wonderful poems. Indeed, anonymous is possibly our greatest poet. I’m reading my way for the second time through The Rattle Bag, an anthology of poems collected by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and anonymous has more poems than anybody else and some of the best poems. Anonymous like Homer is not…
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The first poem in my Cairn of Poems was In Praise of Marriage by Judith Wright (1915-2000). https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/05/28/in-praise-of-marriage/ I spent a year reading through her collected poems, and I must have encountered this short, simple and beautiful poem. But I didn’t remember it when I encountered it again in 100 Poems on the Underground. The…
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I’m reading my way through “Voice at 3:00 am,” a collection of poems by Charles Simic (1938-2023), the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate. The collection was given to me by an American friend. (What better present can there be than a collection of poetry?) Simic’s poems have been called “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes,” and…
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Once a week I cycle down a road in Stockwell past a house with a blue plaque for Edward Thomas (1878-1917). He’s sometimes known as a war poet—because he was killed at the Battle of Arras—but few of his poems are about war. His best known poem is Adlestrop, a poem about the stillness of…
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I spent some 11 years travelling to and from Bangladesh, came to love the country, and have many Bangladeshi friends. One friend gave me a 1971 copy of “Gitanjali,” a collection of Indian songs by Rabindranath Tagore with an introduction by W B Yeats. I have the thin book in front of me now. Tagore…
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Love and freedom by Thomas Campbell: an anti-marriage, pro-adultery poem from the early 19th century
I came across the last four lines of this poem in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” the most anti-marriage novel I know. Or was it in a book about the 150 poems Hardy wrote about his wife, 149 of them after she’d died. It doesn’t matter. Hardy had a very unhappy marriage, and there’s a…
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At the moment our daughter is 36 weeks pregnant, and I inevitably thought of her when this morning I read this poem by Silvia Plath (1932-1962) describing the fetus in her womb. I find it an arresting poem with wonderful images: “Wrapped up in yourself like a spool”; “Snug as a bud and at home”;…
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I read this poem by Alastair Reid (1926-2014) in 20th Century Scottish Poems selected by Douglas Dunn, and it made me laugh. It captures two of the cardinal features of Scotland: it’s beautiful landscape, and the sometimes gloomy outlook of its natives. On a lovely sunny say, the poet walks into town and meets “the…
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I first came across Paul Durcan (born 1944) at a dinner at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in Dublin. (Odd that it’s still royal in a republic). I had been given a talk—on what, I have no memory—and after the dinner we had a reading from Durcan. We were all dressed in dinner…
A Cairn of Poems 