PENGUIN’S POEMS BY HEART
LAURA BARBER is former editorial director for Penguin Classics and now publishes contemporary literature and writes. She also selected and introduced Penguin’s Poems for Life and Penguin’s Poems for Love.
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This selection first published in Penguin Classics 2009
1
Selection and editorial material copyright © Laura Barber, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor and the copyright-holders has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pages 99–100 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193201-9
Preface
POEMS BY HEART
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Eagle
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Kubla Khan, Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
W. B. Yeats: The Song of Wandering Aengus
William Wordsworth: ‘Daffodils’
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Pied Beauty
Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Ozymandias
Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach
Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth
George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’
Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night
William Shakespeare: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!’, from King Lear
W. E. Henley: Invictus
Sir Walter Scott: Lochinvar
Gerard Manley Hopkins: Inversnaid
Rudyard Kipling: The Way Through the Woods
William Blake: The Tyger
Emily Dickinson: ‘This World is not Conclusion’
John Clare: ‘I Am’
John Masefield: Sea-Fever
John Davidson: Imagination
John Keats: To Autumn
Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christina G. Rossetti: A Birthday
Edward Lear: The Owl and the Pussy-cat
Christopher Smart: ‘My Cat Jeoffry’
Thomas Gray: Ode On the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes
William Shakespeare: ‘Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed’, from Macbeth
Ted Hughes: Wind
Thomas Hardy: The Fallow Deer at the Lonely House
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Frost at Midnight
Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Clement Clarke Moore: The Night Before Christmas
Charlotte Mew: The Call
Louis MacNeice: Snow
William Blake: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand’, from Auguries of Innocence
George Herbert: Love
William Carlos Williams: This Is Just To Say
Christina G. Rossetti: ‘Morning and evening’, from Goblin Market
A. E. Housman: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, from A Shropshire Lad: II
Anonymous: What I Saw
Thomas Hardy: ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’
Robert Louis Stevenson: From a Railway Carriage
Edward Thomas: Adlestrop
Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Windhover
John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Lewis Carroll: The Crocodile
Mary Howitt: The Spider and the Fly
Sir Thomas Wyatt: ‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek’
Christina G. Rossetti: Remember
Thomas Campion: ‘Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air’
William Shakespeare: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’, Sonnet 130
Robert Burns: A Red, Red Rose
Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
Robert Herrick: The Coming of Good Luck
John Donne: The Sun Rising
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’
Robert Browning: Love in a Life
William Shakespeare: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, Sonnet 116
Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Lady of Shalott
Thomas Hardy: The Voice
D. H. Lawrence: Piano
William Shakespeare: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’, Sonnet 30
Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
Edmund Spenser: Sonnet, ‘Oft when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings’
Siegfried Sassoon: Everyone Sang
Acknowledgements
Index of Poets
Index of Titles and First Lines
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake, from
Auguries of Innocence
With a poem in your head, anything can happen. Whether you’re standing at the bus-stop in the pouring rain, or lying warily in the dentist’s chair, the moment you begin to conjure the words from memory, your imagination takes flight and transports you to a different place. Like a magic carpet, a remembered poem can carry you in an instant from your everyday surroundings to faraway lands, where you will find witches cackling over cauldrons and goblins tempting you with dewberries; Jabberwocks whiffling through the undergrowth and pussy-cats dancing by the light of the moon. Or perhaps the words will bring you closer to home, by capturing a feeling, invoking the past, or offering the comfort of familiarity when you suddenly find your world made strange by uncertainty or loss.
As children, we seem to pick up nursery rhymes effortlessly, and the words and rhythms tumble about in our heads as we play. As adults, though, our brains are often teeming with other things and we may feel that we’ve not only forgotten the lines we once knew, we’ve also lost the ability – and the time – to learn afresh. But even busy lives contain poetry-sized moments: as you walk the dog, chop the vegetables for dinner, or join the end of a snaking queue, a few lines of verse might easily be recited and memorized. And poetry is made up of words that actually want to be memorable. The poems you’ll find here all have their own ways of rising from the page and swirling into your mind; and if you are capable of remembering ‘the cat sat on the mat’, then it is perfectly possible to turn that mat into a flying carpet and get that cat dancing.
As with all magic, there are a few tricks that can help. Often the rhymes are irresistible and tug you on towards the end of each line. Or the rhythm gathers its own momentum, forcing you to gallop along with it, or catching you up in an incantation. There are also poems that sweep you away with a story, or immerse you so completely in an emotion that the pulse of it seems as natural as the beat of your blood. Sometimes, when the poem is more abstract, you will be able to follow a thread of sounds or images, and weave your own pattern through the fabric of the language.
Whether you commit a whole epic to memory, a verse or two, or just a line, the presence of these words in your imagination opens up a new galaxy of possibilities. Like William Blake, you might ‘see a World in a Grain of Sand’; or you may catch sight of other wonders: a crocodile lurking beneath the bath-bubbles, a distant voice on the howl of a gale, a field of daffodils in a traffic jam… Wherever the words take you and whatever you glimpse there, a poem remembered will change your world – and stay in your heart – for ever.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.