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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  PENGUIN’S POEMS FOR LIFE

  LAURA BARBER is former editorial director for Penguin Classics and now publishes contemporary literature. She also selected and introduced Penguin’s Poems for Love and Penguin’s Poems by Heart.

  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

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 2007

  Published in paperback in Penguin Classics 2008

  1

  Selection and editorial material copyright © Laura Barber, 2007

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  The Acknowledgements on pages 368–75 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

  978-0-14-188979-5

  Contents

  Preface

  A Note on the Poems

  Birth and Beginnings

  Sylvia Plath: Morning Song

  William Blake: Infant Sorrow

  Walter de la Mare: The Birthnight: To F.

  Thomas Traherne: The Salutation

  Anne Stevenson: The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Little bosom not yet cold’

  E. E. Cummings: ‘from spiralling ecstatically this’

  Anonymous: The Creation, from the Chester Cycle of the Mystery Plays

  W. S. Merwin: Just This

  Thomas Dekker: ‘Golden slumbers kiss your eyes’, from Pleasant Comedy of Patient Grissil, IV, ii

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Frost at Midnight

  Walt Whitman: A Noiseless Patient Spider

  Sylvia Plath: You’re

  Percy Bysshe Shelley: To Ianthe

  Thomas Hardy: Heredity

  Ambrose Philips: To Miss Charlotte Pulteney, in her mother’s arms

  Chinua Achebe: Generation Gap

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘There he lay upon his back’, from Aurora Leigh, Sixth Book

  Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring

  William Blake: ‘The Angel that presided o’er my birth’

  Childhood and Childish Things

  Henry Vaughan: The Retreat

  William Wordsworth: Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

  R. S. Thomas: Children’s Song

  Ted Hughes: Full Moon and Little Frieda

  Robert Louis Stevenson: Escape at Bedtime

  Eugene Field: Dutch Lullaby

  Walt Whitman: There Was a Child Went Forth

  Anonymous: ‘What are little boys made of?’

  Anonymous: ‘There was a little girl, who had a little curl’

  Lewis Carroll: Jabberwocky, from Alice Through the Looking-Glass

  Thomas More: Childhood

  A. A. Milne: The End

  Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Childhood and His Visitors

  Derek Mahon: Jardin du Luxembourg

  William Barnes: Children

  Spike Milligan: My Sister Laura

  Louis Untermeyer: Portrait of a Child

  George Eliot: from Brother and Sister: I

  Olivia McCannon: Probability

  Seamus Heaney: The Railway Children

  Judith Wright: Legend

  Frances Cornford: Childhood

  Robert Graves: Warning to Children

  Felicia Dorothea Hemans: Casablanca

  Gerard Manley Hopkins: Spring and Fall (to a young child)

  William Blake: The School Boy

  John Clare: Schoolboys in Winter

  Thomas Gray: Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

  Gwen Harwood: Father and Child: I. Barn Owl

  Alexander Pope: ‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing’, from An Essay on Criticism

  Edwin Muir: Childhood

  Hugo Williams: Scratches

  Patience Agbabi: North(west)ern

  Carol Ann Duffy: In Mrs Tilscher’s Class

  Growing Up and First Impressions

  C. Day Lewis: Walking Away

  William Barnes: Sister Gone

  Andrew Young: Field-Glasses

  Rudyard Kipling: If

  Lewis Carroll: Rules and Regulations

  Samuel Johnson: A Short Song of Congratulation

  Lemn Sissay: Going Places

  William Shakespeare: ‘To be, or not to be – that is the question’, from Hamlet, III, i

  Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

  Thomas Hardy: ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’

  John Keats: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

  William Wordsworth: ‘O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!’, from The Prelude, Book XI (1850)

  Ebenezer Jones: High Summer

  Robert Wever: In Youth is Pleasure

  Robert Herrick: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

  Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Withinne the temple he wente hym forth pleyinge’, from Troilus and Criseyde, Book I

  John Clare: First Love

  Robert Graves: Love Without Hope

  Elizabeth Daryush: Still-life

  Aphra Behn: ‘When Maidens are young and in their Spring’, from The Emperor of the Moon, II, v

  Charles Turner: A Country Dance

  Kirsty Gunn: Mataatua

  George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘Young Juan wandered by the glassy brooks’, from Don Juan, Canto I: XC–XCIII

  Adrian Mitchell: A Puppy Called Puberty

  Sasha Dugdale: First Love

  Togara Muzanenhamo: Smoke

  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: ‘An upper chamber in a darkened house’

  Christopher Marlowe: ‘By this, sad Hero, with love unacquainted’, from Hero and Leander, Sestiad II

  Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress

  John Keats: ‘They told her how, upon St Agnes’ Eve’, from The Eve of St Agnes: VI–IX, XXII–XXXVI

  D. H. Lawrence: Green

  E. E. Cummings: ‘i like my body when it is with your’

  Christina G. Rossetti: A Birthday

  Walt Whitman: We Two Boys together Clinging

  A. E. Housman: ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’, from A Shropshire Lad: II

  Louis MacNeice: Apple Blossom

  Making a Living and Making Love

  Sir Henry Wotton: The Character of a Happy Life

  B
en Jonson: ‘Come on, sir. Now you set your foot on shore’, from The Alchemist, II, i

  John Davidson: Thirty Bob a Week

  Theodore Roethke: Dolor

  Thomas Hood: The Song of the Shirt

  Linton Kwesi Johnson: More Time

  Philip Larkin: Toads

  William Wordsworth: ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon’

  Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Sisyphus

  Derek Walcott: Ebb

  Arthur Clough: ‘Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth’

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Work Without Hope

  John Milton: ‘Now came still ev’ning on twilight grey’, from Paradise Lost, Book IV

  W. H. Davies: Leisure

  Louis MacNeice: Meeting Point

  Richard Barnfield: ‘Sighing, and sadly sitting by my Love’

  Ben Okri: I Held You in the Square

  Thomas Moore: Did Not

  Fleur Adcock: Against Coupling

  Ogden Nash: Reflections on Ice-Breaking

  Edmund Waller: To Phillis

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: [A Summary of Lord Lyttleton’s ‘Advice to a lady’]

  Kim Addonizio: For Desire

  Robert Herrick: Delight in Disorder

  Christopher Marlowe: Elegia V: Corinnae concubitus, from Ovid’s Elegies, Book I

  Charles Simic: Crazy about Her Shrimp

  Emily Dickinson: ‘Wild Nights – Wild Nights!’

  John Donne: The Ecstasy

  David Constantine: ‘As our Bloods Separate’

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’, from The Princess

  Arthur Symons: White Heliotrope

  Robert Browning: Two in the Campagna

  Lemn Sissay: Love Poem

  Family Life, for Better, for Worse

  Christopher Marlowe: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

  Edwin Muir: The Confirmation

  John Betjeman: The Subaltern’s Love-song

  William Blake: ‘Hail Matrimony, made of Love!’, from An Island in the Moon

  Edmund Spenser: ‘Ye gentle Birds, the world’s fair ornament’, from Prothalamion

  Edward Lear: The Owl and the Pussy-cat

  Carmen Bugan: A house of stone

  William Shakespeare: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’, Sonnet 116

  Sir Philip Sidney: ‘My true-love hath my hart, and I have his’, from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

  Carol Ann Duffy: White Writing

  Dick Davis: Uxor Vivamus…

  Abraham Cowley: The Wish

  Philip Larkin: This Be The Verse

  Adrian Mitchell: This Be the Worst

  Maura Dooley: Freight

  Mark Strand: ‘The Dreadful Has Already Happened’

  William Wordsworth: ‘My heart leaps up when I behold’

  Robert Burns: A Poet’s Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father

  Stephen Spender: To My Daughter

  James Joyce: On the Beach at Fontana

  Gwen Harwood: In the Park

  Coventry Patmore: The Toys

  Charles Lamb: Parental Recollections

  Fleur Adcock: For a Five-year-old

  Robin Robertson: New Gravity

  Ben Jonson: On My First Son

  Peggy Carr: Flight of the Firstborn

  Anne Bradstreet: In Reference to Her Children, 23 June, 1659

  William Carlos Williams: Dance Russe

  Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves’

  Michael Ondaatje: The Strange Case

  David Constantine: Don’t jump off the roof, Dad…

  Robert Browning: Love in a Life

  Robert Crawford: Home

  Grace Nichols: Like a Beacon

  A. K. Ramanujan: Self-Portrait

  Robert Hayden: Those Winter Sundays

  Dilip Chitre: Father Returning Home

  Vincent Buckley: from Stroke, VII

  Elizabeth Jennings: One Flesh

  Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: The Unequal Fetters

  Charlotte Mew: The Farmer’s Bride

  Geoffrey Chaucer: ‘Now sire, thanne wol I telle yow forth my tale’, from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue in The Canterbury Tales

  William Shakespeare: ‘Too hot, too hot!’, from The Winter’s Tale, I, ii

  George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘’Tis melancholy and a fearful sign’, from Don Juan, Canto III: V–VIII

  Ezra Pound: The Bath Tub

  John Milton: ‘They sat them down to weep, nor only tears’, from Paradise Lost, Book IX

  George Meredith: ‘At dinner she is hostess, I am host’, from Modern Love: XVII

  Patience Agbabi: Accidentally Falling

  Ernest Dowson: Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae

  John Dryden: ‘Why should a foolish Marriage Vow’, from Marriage A-La-Mode, I, i

  Michael Drayton: ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’

  Sir Thomas Wyatt: ‘They flee from me, that sometime did me seek’

  Nick Laird: To The Wife

  D. H. Lawrence: Trust

  William Shakespeare: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, Sonnet 18

  Douglas Dunn: Modern Love

  Seamus Heaney: The Skunk

  Thom Gunn: The Hug

  Anne Bradstreet: To My Dear and Loving Husband

  George Crabbe: ‘The ring so worn, as you behold’

  Dom Moraes: Future Plans

  John Donne: Love’s Growth

  Getting Older, Looking Back

  Alison Fell: Pushing forty

  John Keats: To Autumn

  Andrew Marvell: The Garden

  Frederick Goddard Tuckerman: ‘As when down some broad river dropping, we’

  Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach

  John Clare: ‘I Am’

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Mezzo Cammin

  Philip Larkin: The Old Fools

  Charles Simic: Grayheaded Schoolchildren

  Robert Southey: The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them

  Lewis Carroll: ‘ “You are old, Father William,” the young man said’, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

  Ralph Waldo Emerson: Terminus

  W. B. Yeats: Sailing to Byzantium

  Carole Satyamurti: Day Trip

  Jenny Joseph: Warning

  Wole Soyinka: To My First White Hairs

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Ulysses

  Sir Henry Lee: ‘His Golden locks, Time hath to Silver turn’d’

  John Milton: ‘When I consider how my light is spent’

  George Herbert: The Forerunners

  William Wordsworth: Old Man Travelling. Animal Tranquillity and Decay, A Sketch

  James Henry: Very Old Man

  Edward Thomas: Old Man

  Matthew Arnold: Growing Old

  Stephen Spender: ‘What I expected, was’

  T. E. Hulme: The Embankment

  Ernest Dowson: Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam

  W. B. Yeats: When You are Old

  Stevie Smith: Pad, pad

  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: A Song of a Young Lady. To her Ancient Lover

  Leigh Hunt: Rondeau

  William Shakespeare: ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’, Sonnet 73

  Robert Burns: John Anderson My Jo

  George Gordon, Lord Byron: ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’

  Thomas Moore: ‘Oft, in the stilly night’

  Edward Thomas: Adlestrop

  Algernon Charles Swinburne: A Vision of Spring in Winter

  Thomas Hood: I Remember, I Remember

  D. H. Lawrence: Piano

  William Shakespeare: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’, Sonnet 30

  James Henry: ‘Another and another and another’

  Intimations of Mortality<
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  Mark Strand: A Morning

  Edmund Blunden: The Midnight Skaters

  Edna St Vincent Millay: Dirge Without Music

  Dylan Thomas: Do not go gentle into that good night

  Christopher Marlowe: ‘Ah, Faustus,/Now hast thou but one bare hour to live’, from Doctor Faustus, scene xiv

  Wilfred Owen: Futility

  Henry Vaughan: ‘They are all gone into the world of light!’

  Walter Savage Landor: Age

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Tithonus

  Emily Dickinson: ‘Because I could not stop for Death’

  Sir Walter Ralegh: A Farewell to Court

  Thomas Campion: ‘Never weather-beaten Sail more willing bent to shore’

  Alexander Pope: The Dying Christian to His Soul

  John Donne: ‘Death be not proud, though some have called thee’

  William Shakespeare: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun’, from Cymbeline, IV, ii

  Emily Brontë: ‘No coward soul is mine’

  George Eliot: ‘O may I join the choir invisible’

  Rupert Brooke: The Soldier

  Julia Alvarez: Last Trees

  Louis MacNeice: The Sunlight on the Garden

  Thomas Hardy: Afterwards

  Christina G. Rossetti: Remember

  D. H. Lawrence: Bavarian Gentians

  Caroline Oliphant, Baroness Nairne: The Land o’ the Leal

  Katherine, Lady Dyer: [Epitaph on Sir William Dyer]

  Charles Causley: Eden Rock

  Edmund Waller: Of the Last Verses in the Book

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Crossing the Bar

  Alden Nowlan: This Is What I Wanted to Sign Off With

  Walter Savage Landor: ‘Death stands above me, whispering low’

  Raymond Carver: Late Fragment

  Mourning and Monuments

  W. H. Auden: Funeral Blues

  Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘Dark house, by which once more I stand’, from In Memoriam A. H. H.: VII

  Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief’

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Grief

  Ivor Gurney: To His Love

  Douglas Dunn: The Kaleidoscope

  Edna St Vincent Millay: ‘Time does not bring relief; you all have lied’

  William Wordsworth: ‘Surprized by joy – impatient as the Wind’

  Thomas Hardy: After a Journey

  Anonymous: The Unquiet Grave

  Emily Brontë: Remembrance

  R. S. Thomas: Comparisons