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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…
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I’ve been reading my way through the collected poems of Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) every other morning for nearly two years. I’ve read all of the several hundred poems at least twice, and as poetry comes from our soul I fee I’ve come close to Raine. Along the way I’ve read a novel about her relationship…
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Anybody who thinks poetry “difficult and dull” should read the poems of Ogden Nash (1902-1971). His poems are usually short, easily understood, funny, quirky, and often have unusual rhymes. After a brief career as a teacher and copy writer for an advertising company, Nash made his living through writing and performing. Many of his poems…
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Might this be the most beautiful of all love poems? Our daughter had it read at her wedding by a friend, and when she read “they were married next day by the turkey who lives on the hill,” she gave the vicar a sly look. Edward Lear (1812-1888) was gay and had an unrequited love for…
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Poems with their rhythms and rhymes are impossible to translate. Rather they must be recreated by another poet. Some of my favourite poems—for example, Ithaca by C P Cavafy—I can read only in translation. The Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, The Nature of Things, and Dante’s Inferno would all be lost to me without translations. Nor,…
A Cairn of Poems 