by Laura Barber
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.
Selected with a Preface by
LAURA BARBER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
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
Contents
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
Preface
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 swirli
ng 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.
Poems by Heart
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The Eagle
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.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Kubla Khan
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
W. B. YEATS
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name;
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
‘Daffodils’
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
LEWIS CARROLL
Jabberwocky
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!’
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought –
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,<
br />
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
‘And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’
He chortled in his joy.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
MATTHEW ARNOLD
Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray