Extracts from Poetry
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Poetry’
A kind of Aesop’s Fable in verse, about mutual respect among those with different talents.
This Aesop-style fable was composed in Latin by schoolmaster Vincent Bourne (1695-1747) and later translated by his pupil William Cowper (pronounced ‘cooper’), one of Jane Austen’s favourite poets, and a devout Christian remembered for his tireless campaign against slavery. A rather self-important nightingale is taught a lesson in humility and mutual respect by a little glow-worm.
For Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christmas was a time to let the dead past bury its dead.
The death of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Henry Hallam left familiar Christmas Eve customs such as the holly and the music and the dancing full of sad memories for him. He responded positively, however, embracing the deeper message of Christmas Day: a new beginning, a New Year.
The sounds of an English country Christmas helped Tennyson in his deep mourning for an old friend.
The material trappings of Christmas – the tree, the lights, the presents, the dinner and its customs – are sometimes the only things left to cling to when faith wavers, as Tennyson found, mourning his close friend Arthur Henry Hallam.
A professional journalist and author recognises that he has met his match
Bombay-born Rudyard Kipling’s first job was as a journalist in what was then the Indian city of Lahore. Kipling grasped the importance of sending his ‘honest serving-men’ out on duty in the search for accurate reports, but even the most investigative of journalists has to recognise that in certain company, he is a mere amateur.
A poem of nostalgia for the sea breezes and yellow gorse of Northumberland.
War-poet Wilfrid Gibson never served abroad, and was in fact accepted for the army only at his fifth application, in 1917. These short verses do not come from his war-themed collections (though many reflect that subject) but from a set remembering Northumberland, the county of his birth in Hexham.
A meditation on our instinctive love for the place in which we live.
This is just part of a rather longer poem in which Kipling explores the fundamental truth that no mere human can really love everyone and everything equally. That, he says, is why it is both necessary and right that we feel particularly bound to, and responsible for, the place we call home.