In inadvertent congruity to the recent alarming ‘Freedom Day’, our selections in July 2021 were free of any specific theme.
One English Romantic and two modern American poets contributed two choices each:
The John Keats favourites were the sonnet ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’, full of haunting images that have ensured their all-time classic status.
Both ‘Introduction to poetry’ and ‘Forgetfulness’ by Billy Collins are funny but tinged with sadness.
Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’ is implacably honest and harsh, while in ‘Pheasant’, the poet makes a gentle appeal for the life of a bird to be spared – ‘let be’.
Similarly, in ‘The fish’, Elizabeth Bishop empathises with the creature she has caught.
There was outrageous humour and clever wordplay in Murray Lachlan Young’s ‘Thong poem’, John Cooper Clarke’s ‘I wanna be yours’ and Roald Dahl’s ‘ A hand in the bird’.
We also laughed at David Aldred’s ‘Holiday romance’ – in appropriate limerick form – , Roger Stevens’ ‘Louder’, John Betjeman’s ‘Harvest festival’, and James Reeves’ ‘Spicer’s Instant Poetry’.
Jackie Kay’s ‘Welcome wee one’ is a delightful and moving poem which now greets all new Scots.
Verses 47-48 from Byron’s ‘Beppo’ recall the poet’s love for England despite its faults, while Alfred Noyes in ‘St George and the dragon’ portrays St George as an absurdly self-deprecating English gentleman, and the snobbery of D H Lawrence’s ‘The Oxford voice’ appals the poet.
Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Leave this’ urges the worshipper to leave the temple and find God in the every-day.
The ineffable Walt Whitman was represented by a single verse from ‘Passage to India’, ‘O vast Rondure’.
Charlotte Mew’s poem ‘Rooms’, while very short, takes us on a journey through a life.
Matthew Sweeney ‘Tube ride to Martha’s’ relates to the tragic 1987 King’s Cross station fire. Another poem inspired by terrible events was Chris Short’s ‘Yesterday I was not a Jew’, found elsewhere on this site.
‘Mercies’ is one of a collection of 40 sonnets by Don Paterson, in this case marking the demise of a loved dog.
Drummond Allison’s ‘Verity’ is another sonnet, in which the Yorkshire cricketer Hedley Verity is unable to bowl out Death.
The untitled poem by e e cummings beginning ‘next to of course god’ also surprisingly turns out to be a sonnet.
Three popular favourites read were W E Henley’s ‘Invictus’, Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of parts’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’, though Marvell’s seducer was cut off in full flow when the Zoom session ran out of time.