Oundle School
English
Poetry we recommend
‘A Fanfare for the Makers’
The English Department’s On-Line Poetry Suggestion List
‘Let us make. And set the weather fair’ (Louis Macneice)
Below you will find some recommended poems for a variety of well known poets.
Click on one of the period headings or one of the poets' names below to discover examples of their poetry.
Middle English
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)The Renaissance
Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552-1618)Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
John Donne (1572-1631)
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
The Seventeenth Century
George Herbert (1593-1633)John Milton (1608-1674)
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
The Romantic Period (1780-1830)
William Blake(1757-1827)William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Clare (1793-1864)
John Keats (1795-1821)
The Victorians (1830-1880)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Modernist
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
TS Eliot (1888-1965)
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
W H Auden (1907-1973)
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Contemporary
Philip Larkin(1922-1985)
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
Seamus Heaney (1939-)
Jo Shapcott (1953-)
Carol Ann Duffy (1955-)
Simon Armitage (1963-)
Middle English
Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)
... if gold ruste, what shal iren doo?
For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
And shame it is, if a prest take keep,
A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.
(The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, 502-506)
The Canterbury Tales:
General Prologue
The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
Troilus and Criseyde: Book I
The Renaissance
Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552-1618)
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
(The Nymph's Reply)
As You Came from the Holy Land
The Nymph's Reply
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
Poure out the wine without restraint or stay,
Poure not by cups, but by the belly full,
Poure out to all that wull,
And sprinkle all the postes and wals with wine,
That they may sweat, and drunken be withall.
(Epithalamion, 250-254)
Amoretti III: The Sovereign Beauty
Amoretti LXVII: Like as a Huntsman
Amoretti LXVIII: Most Glorious Lord of Life
Amoretti LXXIV: Most Happy Letters
The Shepheardes Calender: April
The Shepheardes Calender: October
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low.
(Astrophel and Stella XXXIX, 1-4)
Astrophel and Stella I (Loving in Truth)
Astrophel and Stella XX (Fly, Fly, my Friends)
Astrophel and Stella XXIII (The Curious Wits)
Astrophel and Stella XXXI (With how Sad Steps, O Moon)
Astrophel and Stella XXXIII (I might! -- Unhappy Word)
Astrophel and Stella VII (When Nature made her Chief Work)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before
In sequent toil all forwards do contend
(Sonnet LX: Like as the Waves Make towards the Pebbled Shore)
Sonnet XV: When I Consider everything that Grows
Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?
Sonnet XIX: Devouring Time, Blunt thou the Lion's Paws
Sonnet XXV: Let those who are in Favour with their Stars
Sonnet XXIX: When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men's Eyes
Sonnet XXX: When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought
Sonnet XXXIII: Full many a Glorious Morning have I Seen
Sonnet LX: Like as the Waves Make towards the Pebbled Shore
Sonnet LXIV: When I have Seen by Time's Fell Hand Defaced
Sonnet LXXIII: That Time of Year thou mayst in me Behold
Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been
Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds
Sonnet CXXX: My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing like the Sun
Sonnet CXLVI: Poor Soul, the Centre of my Sinful Earth
John Donne (1572-1631)
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
(The Sun Rising)
The Canonization
Elegy 19: To His Mistress Going to Bed
The Flea
The Good-morrow
Holy Sonnets: At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person'd God
Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud
Love's Alchemy
A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day
Satire III
The Sun Rising
Twickenham Garden
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
A Valediction: of Weeping
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine.
(Song to Celia, 1-2)
Epigrams:
On my First Son
Epigrams:
To John Donne
A Hymn
to God the Father
An Ode
to Himself
Song to Celia (Drink Me Only With Thine Eyes)
To
the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare
The Seventeenth Century
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Nothing hath got so far
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey
(Man, 19-20)
The Affliction (I)
The Altar
The Collar
Easter Wings
Love
(III)
Sin
(I)
Virtue
John Milton (1608-1674)
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.
(Paradise Lost Book IX)
Lycidas
Paradise
Lost: Book I
Paradise
Lost: Book II
Sonnet
XIX: When I Consider How my Light is Spent
Sonnet
XXIII: Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
(To his Coy Mistress, 31-32)
The
Definition of Love
The
Garden
To
his Coy Mistress
Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
But oh! what envious Gods conspire
To snatch his Pow'r, yet leave him the Desire!
(The Disappointment, 79-80)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
(An Essay on Criticism: Part 2, 362-365)
The Dunciad: Book IV (excerpt lines 1-656)
The Rape of the Lock: Canto 1
The Rape of the Lock: Canto 2
The Rape of the Lock: Canto 3
The Rape of the Lock: Canto 4
The Rape of the Lock: Canto 5
Solitude: An Ode
You know where you did despise
The Romantic Period (1780-1830)
William Blake (1757-1827)
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
(Milton: And did those feet in ancient time, 7-8)
The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow
The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young
The Clod and the Pebble
The Divine Image
A Divine Image
Introduction to the Songs of Experience
Introduction to the Songs of Innocence
The Lamb
The Little Black Boy
London
Milton: And did those feet in ancient time (excerpt)
A Poison Tree
The Sick Rose
Song: How sweet I roam'd from field to field
To the Muses
The Tyger
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
(A Slumber did my Spirit Seal)
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
I Travelled Among Unknown Men
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Nutting
The Prelude: Book 1: Childhood and School-time
The Prelude: Book 2: School-time (Continued)
Resolution and Independence
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
She Was a Phantom of Delight
Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman
A Slumber did my Spirit Seal
Strange fits of passion have I known
The Tables Turned
There was a Boy
Three Years She Grew
The World is too much with us
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!
(This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, 61-66)
Christabel
Dejection: An Ode
The Eolian Harp
France: An Ode
Frost
at Midnight
Kubla
Khan
The Nightingale
The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
This
Lime-tree Bower my Prison
Work
without Hope
George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824)
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
(She Walks in Beauty, 1-2)
Prometheus
She
Walks in Beauty
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory--
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
(Music when Soft Voices Die (To --), 1-4)
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats
Julian and Maddalo
Music when Soft Voices Die (To --)
Ode to the West Wind
Ozymandias
To a Skylark
John Clare (1793-1864)
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
(I am!, 6-10)
Autumn
The
Dying Child
I
am!
I
Hid my Love
The
Skylark
Summer
To
John Clare
John Keats (1795-1821)
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved e
Tasting of Flora and the country green
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
(Ode to a Nightingale)
The Eve of St. Agnes
La Belle Dame sans Merci
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Ode on Melancholy
Ode to a Nightingale
Ode to Psyche
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
To Autumn
When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be
The Victorians (1830-1880)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
This dog only, waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone,
Love remains for shining.
(To Flush, My Dog, 46-48)
The Lady's Yes
A Musical Instrument
My Heart and I
Sonnets from the Portuguese 1: I Thought how Theocritus
Sonnets from the Portuguese 6: Go from me
To Flush, My Dog
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.
(In Memoriam A. H. H.: 54, 13-20)
Break, break, break
The Charge of the Light Brigade
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 54 (Oh, yet we Trust that somehow Good)
The Lady of Shalott
The Lotos-eaters
Mariana
St. Agnes' Eve
Ulysses
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents:
That's somewhat: and you'll find the soul you have missed,
Within yourself, when you return him thanks.
(Fra Lippo Lippi, 217-220)
Andrea del Sarto
The Bishop Orders his Tomb
Cleon
An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab
Physician
Fra Lippo Lippi
A Grammarian's Funeral
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
Home-Thoughts, from the Sea
Love among the Ruins
My Last Duchess
Porphyria's Lover
A Toccata of Galuppi's
Two in the Campagna
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
(The Buried Life, 45-54)
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
(Remember, 9-14)
Goblin Market
Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets
Remember
When I am dead, my dearest
Modernist
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.
(The Voice, 13-16)
Afterwards
Channel Firing
The Darkling Thrush
In Tenebris
In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"
The Ruined Maid
The Voice
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
(God's Grandeur, 9-12)
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Binsey Poplars
The Caged Skylark
God's Grandeur
I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark
No Worst, There is None
Pied Beauty
Spring and Fall
Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord
The Windhover
The Wreck of the Deutschland
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
(The Second Coming)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
Easter 1916
Sailing to Byzantium
Among School Children
Byzantium
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions.
Let us express our envy for the man with a steady job and no worry about the
future.
You are very idle, my songs,
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about the streets, You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.
(Further Instructions)
Further Instructions
H. S. Mauberley (Life and Contacts) [Part I]
In a Station of the Metro
Lament of the Frontier Guard
From The Pisan Canto
The Seafarer
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
(The Soldier)
1914 I. Peace
1914 II. Safety
1914 III. The Dead
1914 IV. The Dead
1914 V. The Soldier
Heaven
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
Sonnet Reversed
T S Eliot (1888-1965)
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
(The Hollow Men)
Ash Wednesday
Gerontion
The Journey of the Magi
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Hollow Men
Portrait of a Lady
Rhapsody on a Windy Night
Sweeney among the Nightingales
The Waste Land
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now ...
(Strange Meeting, 40-44)
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Dulce et Decorum Est
Exposure
Strange Meeting
The Send-off
WH Auden (1907-1973)
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
(In Memory of W.B Yeats)
In Memory of W B Yeats
Musée des Beaux Arts
The Shield of Achilles
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace
(Fern Hill)
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Do not go gentle into that good night
Fern Hill
Contemporary
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
(Home is so Sad)
Annus Mirabilis
An Arundel Tomb
Ambulances
Aubade
A Study of Reading Habits
The Explosion
Going, Going
Home is so Sad
The Whitsun Weddings
This Be The Verse
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold
(Pike)
1. Pike
2. Roe-deer
3. The Thought-fox
4. Work and Play
Seamus Heaney (1939-)
I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
(Personal Helicon)
Anahorish
Blackberry-picking
Death of a Naturalist
Digging
Follower
Mid-term Break
Personal Helicon
The Blackbird of Glanmore
After dark, cabbages are proud and brilliant,
Supercool. We stalk the garden
Under the moon discussing politics with flowers
We inspect your houses in the early hours
Criticising the curtains, wondering about
The furniture, amazed at your reading habits.
Your clothes baffle us though we know
About layers and the colour of leaves.
We stare at your flabby fingers while
you sleep, speculate about your hairstyles.
(Cabbage Dreams)
Cabbage Dreams
Pig
Hedgehog
Rhinoceros
Rattlesnake
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child
(In Mrs Tilscher’s Class)
Beautiful
Room
Education
for Leisure
War
Photographer
Valentine
In
Mrs. Tilscher's Class
Comprehensive
My party piece:
I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick
conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves
beyond its means, and dies, I say the story
of my life –
dates and places, torches I carried,
a cast of names and faces, those
who showed me love, or came close,
the changes I made, the lessons I learnt –
then somehow still find time to stall and blush
before I'm bitten by the flame, and burnt.
A warning, though, to anyone nursing
an ounce of sadness, anyone alone:
don't try this on your own; it's dangerous,
madness.
(from Book of Matches)
Poem
from Book of Matches
The Dead Sea Poems
Killing Time (Millenium Poem)