Poetry

From Shakespeare’s Richard II, lines spoken by John of Gaunt.

From ‘Wonder’, by Thomas Traherne How like an angel came I down! How bright are all things here! When first among his works I did appear O how their glory me did crown? The world resembled his eternity In which my soul did walk; And every thing that I did see Did with me talk. The skies in their magnificence The lively, lovely air; Oh how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair! The stars did entertain my sense And all the works of GOD so bright and pure, So rich and great did seem, As if they ever must endure In my esteem. A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all SPIRIT. I within did flow With seas of life, like wine; I nothing in the world did know, But ‘twas divine.

From ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson                                     Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

from The Rape of the Lock And now, unveiled, the toilet stands displayed, Each silver vase in mystic order laid. First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores With head uncovered, the cosmetic powers. A heavenly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears; The inferior priestess, at her altar's side, Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumbered treasures ope at once, and here The various offerings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil, And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil. This casket India's glowing gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise here and elephant unite, Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.

After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the Augustan lyric poet, releasing another repressed Englishman: Harry Eyres, Old Etonian scholar, Cambridge graduate, poet and author of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times. This charming, moving book calls itself ‘Life Lessons’, as if it were a general teaching guide for the reader. Really, though, it’s a personal guide for Eyres — who realises that the poet he first struggled to appreciate at school has valuable lessons to teach about love, wine and friendship.

Francis Quarles, An emblem on books 'The world’s a book, writ by the eternal art Of the great Maker, printed in man’s heart; ‘Tis falsely printed, though divinely penned, And all the erratas will appear at the end.' I like this witty little poem. The idea is simple – just as books have their printing errors listed on the last page, we’ll have all our sins listed to us at the Last Judgement. As a joke, it says a lot about the way seventeenth-century people thought about human nature. Today, I think, the whole Last Judgement thing is a bit off-putting to most people. No-one likes to be told they’re sinful. Except that four hundred year ago it seems they did. Couldn’t get enough of it, in fact.

Andrew Marvell, from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found: Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song. Then worms shall try That long preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace. This is the middle stanza of Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, which I imagine many will know well. The first stanza begins ‘Had we but world enough and time...’ and the third is a plea to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife, / Through the iron gates of life’.

Holy Sonnet 7, John Donne At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go – All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.     But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space For, if above all these my sins abound, ‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace When we are there. Here, on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good As if thou hadst sealed my pardon with thy blood.

Constantine Cavafy was a poet who fascinated English novelists, and remained a presence in English fiction long after his death in 1933. When E.M. Forster lived in Alexandria during the first world war, he got to know Cavafy — and essays, a celebrated exchange of letters and a guidebook by Forster resulted. Cavafy haunts Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which shares with the poet an aesthetic of the transfixed gaze, of remote history running under everything. Robert Liddell wrote a restrained, elegant life of the poet — oddly dismissed by this translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, as ‘workmanlike.

This is the second article in an occasional series by Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library. You can read the first instalment here. By 1814, two years after he awoke to find himself famous, everyone wanted a piece of Byron. Some got jewellery, several got hair and a fair few got a reputation. Among the most prized of trophies, however, was a sample of verse – not printed, mind, but written out with the warm intimacy of the poet’s hand. In a letter of 23 December 1814, the novelist and society gossip Miss Emily Eden described to Lady Buckinghamshire the febrile hunts she had witnessed at Middleton House, seat of the Jerseys and occasional retreat for Byron.

This is a very short book recording two visits to the hills around Chideock in Dorset.In the first Robert Macfarlane and the late Roger Deakin, author of Waterlog, go searching for the ‘holloway’ in which Geoffrey Household’s hero holes up in Rogue Male. A holloway (not to be found in the OED) is, in Macfarlane’s words, ‘a sunken path, a deep & shady lane’ and, according to Household, ‘a lane not marked on the map’. The second trip, made with Macfarlane’s co-authors after Deakin’s death, revisits the holloway, and the hill-fort at the top of Pilsdon Pen.

‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As You Like It It was a lover and his lass With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass In springtime, the only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding Sweet lovers love the spring. Between the acres of the rye, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, These pretty country folks would lie In springtime...etc. This carol they began that hour With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, How that life was but a flower In springtime...etc. And therefore take the present time With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, For love is crowned with the prime In springtime...etc. If you’re reading this on a sunny morning, open the window and listen to the birds singing.

How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs after their lord’s decease. Yet this abundant issue seemed to me But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit, For summer and his pleasures wait on thee And thou away, the very birds are mute: Or if they sing, ‘tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near. Spring is a strange time for a break-up. ‘Rejoice!’ says the earth, ‘the world is full of hope!’.

‘To Oliver Cromwell’ Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud Not of war only, but detractions rude, Guided by faith and matchless fortitude To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed, And on the neck of crowned fortune proud Hast reared God's trophies and his work pursued While Darwen streams with blood of Scots imbrued, And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath; yet much remains To conquer still; peace hath her victories No less than those of war; new foes arise Threatening to bind our souls in secular chains: Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. This sonnet was written in 1652 when Milton was part of Oliver Cromwell’s civil service.

This post is the second half of a list of 21 books that a man might give to his godson on the occasion of his twenty-first birthday.That is novels done. The bespoke bookcase is more than half loaded; 12 slots are full, nine remain. I conceive the selection of other titles as a complement to the novels we have already chosen – an acknowledgement too, if you like, that the novel is the highest of all art, let alone book, forms and other texts should therefore pay homage to it. Having ended prose fiction with a novel that pretended to be a long poem we will now begin the best of the rest with a long poem that pretends to be a novel. Byron’s Don Juan (1819 onwards) is lengthy, unfinished, sprawling and utterly hilarious.

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art?