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I encountered this poem by Helen Waddell (1889-1965)  in “Waiting for the Last Bus” by Richard Holloway, who was once Bishop of Edinburgh.https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2022/04/24/an-elegiac-book-filled-with-wisdom-and-poetry-that-gently-teaches-us-about-life-and-death/  The “Last Bus” is death, and Holloway’s book is a meditation on death as well as life. Poetry is hugely important to Holloway, and the book is full of references to poems and poets.…

I’m 72 and this extract from “Little Gidding” by T S Eliot (1888-1965) has lived in my mind for many years. It’s a painful view of old age. Eliot was only about 54 when he published the poem in 1942 during the war. The poem is part of the “Four Quartets,” which can be read…

This poem was written in Gaelic in the 8th century by a student of the monastery of Carinthia, which seems to be in Austria. He wrote the poem on a copy of St Paul’s Epistles. He must have written in Gaelic because he was from Scotland. The poem speaks to me of loneliness rendered bearable and…

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is one of the bad boys of English poetry, promoting atheism and radicalism, abandoning his pregnant teenage wife, enjoying being loathed by the press and establishment, and drowning at sea before his 30th birthday after sailing in a  storm. But his friends found him gentle, urbane, and lovable, and after he…

I read this poem by D H Lawrence (1880-1935) for the first time this morning. In fact I read only the last stanza in The Burning Man by Frances Wilson, a book that after reading 10% of it I don’t hesitate to strongly recommend. I found the rest of the pome later. Lawrence wrote the…

William Henry Davies (1871-1940) was a poet who in his time was ranked alongside W B Yeats and Ezra Pound. His mentor Edward Thomas even compared him with Wordsworth. Davies lived a life as a supertramp, losing a leg when trying to jump on a train in the US. But he returned to Wales and…

It’s a great thing to be able to recite a poem from memory, but sadly there are hardly any I can recite. (In contrast, my brother can recite many; he found it was a powerful way to attract women.) There is, however, one poem I have remembered and can recite since I first encountered it…

This is one of the greatest poems in the English language and can be read again and again with new discoveries each time. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) reinvented English poetry, bringing it down from the high flown to the ordinary and infusing it with romanticism. Wordsworth was one of the…

 Walter Scott, one of the giants of Scottish literature, has a monstrous monument in Princes Streer, Edinburgh, but is largely unread. In contrast, the other giant Robbie Burns (1759-1796), a ploughboy, has an evening every year when people across the world, not just in Scotland, salute his “immortal memory”; and Auld Lang Syne, a song…

D H Lawrence (1885-1930), an unpleasant man in many ways, was perhaps a greater poet than novelist. I read many of his novels before I ever kissed a girl, which seems absurd in retrospect. With some trepidation, I reread Women in Love a few years—and, to my surprise, I was impressed. https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/03/31/rereading-women-in-love-after-45-years-embarrassing-or-transcendent/  I picked out…