New Year Poem

"In Memoriam" . . . .  Alfred Lord Tennyson

Lovely Christmas Poem

"A Christmas Life" . . . . by Wendy Cope

White Christmas, Anyone?

Five "Snow" poems.

"London Snow"  . . . . . .      Robert Bridges

"Snow in the Suburbs" . . . Thomas Hardy

"She Tells Her Love" . . . .   Robert Graves

"Stopping by Woods" . . . .  Robert Frost
"Snow" . . . . . . . . . . . Edward Thomas

I cannot find the following poem on the Internet, so I cannot link to it from its title.  I break my rule, therefore, and post it in full.  I heard it on the BBC, in the summer of 2009, in a programme fronted by John Prescott, formerly our unlamented Deputy Prime Minister.  Bloggers from outwith the UK may not know that Mr. Prescott was formerly a ship's steward, then Shop Steward and thence to political prominence as representative of "Old Labour" in the Blair government.  The poet, Maurice Harney, was an engineer in the UK Merchant Marine.  This is a lovely little "regret" poem . . .

A Time For Sea

I shall acknowledge age

when the call of far wild seas no longer stirs my blood,

when I shall not see as a boy would see

the beauty of homebound ships harbouring on the flood.


Only then will I sit in the lee of warehouse walls,

Conjuring dreams from the river's mist.

Only then will I weep an old man's tears

For times that I have known,

For lips that I have left unkissed.

Maurice Harney

Him Downstairs


Him downstairs knows everything.
He stalks me.  But when his sandals
rattle the gravel, I don't stay
to canter through old times
or take the "by-the-ways" that bait
his nattertraps. I don't need
doddergenarian advice.
I'm too young a dog
to be taught old tricks
and I've been caught too often
in his thickets of yesteryear.
So I skulk downwind or use
sly footwork to dodge
his monologue lassoos.
If snared I'll haw and hum
and keep a weather-eye
for the venom that stipples his view
of Empire, lawnmowers, schools,
and men who aren't men
if they can't use tools -
till he grumbles off to hunt his wife.
Once she plucked my sleeve and gently
hoped I wasn't bored.  "It's his tongue,"
she said, "his years.  He's so handless.
Stubborn."  I hummed  and hawed,
and we stood there speechless -
I at her loyalty,
she from her life, her tears.

The End of Ambition . .

As Dubai sinks in its sea of debt . . . a reminder from a bygone age!

Ozymandias . . . . by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A thought-provoking poem about language

"The Cool Web" . . .  by Robert Graves

I'll be a fly-by-night who, poised
where gravity forbids a single step
interrogates the breeze, then ventures.
There's a lurch than churns the entrails, till
blind trust in the wing thats vectors
earth and air arrests the chasm plunge
and lifts me, harnessed to the wind's trapeze.
Night is as indigo as dreams.
I might be manta, bat or privateer
with all seven stars to plunder,
a scaly dactyl rattling down the thermals,
spars like grating talons clamped
on a nightmare Icarus.  I swoop
where small lights blink,  where pines conspire
with the wind's edge, indistinct.
I shift my emphasis.
My laugh drifts from the ridge.
A farm dog curls into his own fretful whine.
Perhaps the goodwife, spine chilled, gaze upthrown,
will glimpse my witchcraft split the risen moon.

Two poems of loss and regret.

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae  . . . Ernest Dowson.   Don't be put off by the title . . . the poem ain't in Latin. How many song, film and book titles has this heartbroken poem been responsible for?

This is to Let You Know . . .  by . . . It'll surprise you if you don't know!  It was a hard job finding a print version of this poem.  The link here takes you to a blogged copy of it.  The Doc first came across it on BBC Radio 4 "Poetry Please".  You'll find plenty of "settings to music" of it on www, usually Death to a Poem!  But not as fatal as the truly dreadful settings of the Dowson poem above . . 

Two poems that perfectly capture "moments out of time"


"Stopping by woods . . . "  Robert Frost.   The last stanza so well known it was quoted inter alia by John F. Kennedy. Note the repeated last line.  Is it possible that Lawrence Durrell's use of  this device in several of his (sadly neglected) poems was a homage to Frost?


"Adlestrop."  Edward Thomas      You old enough to remember branch-line steam trains that stopped at every hen-house along the way?   If not, this lovely little poem could be quite lost on you.

Serenade For Tuba

This poem is at present linked back from the POETRY PANTRY.

Poetry Pantry provides opportunity for poets to let others see their earlier work.  This was my first ever published poem, appearing in the mid-70's in the Carcanet Press "Scottish Poetry 8"

SERENADE FOR TUBA

  Come up and greet my jolly, golden solace.

Through here! She voices best in gurgling bathrooms.

Stroke - she won't bite - her close coiled, shining cloisters . . .

A gin-crazed plumber, in to fix the ball-cock

swooned when his gaze rolled round those crotcheted pipings . .

Your smile leers massive, from burnished haunch reflected.

Fondle her foghorn face. I think she likes you.

Sit! Sit! I'll clasp her close and get her going.

I fell for her, my hippo, in a junk-shop.

She squatted, three-pound-ten, a chubby bargain.

A friendly welder patched one tattered buttock.

Ignore choleric thumps from upstairs neighbours.

My rondos resonating with their windows

enrage her cat which claws his potted cacti.

Ex-R.A.F., his tracer drills my ceiling.

Give him his way, he'd melt her down for bullets.

Have suitors, faint as simpering glockenspiels

stitched frills to hot-eyed love with lace flutes needling,

entombed their caverned lusts in lowing cellos,

or scraped and sidled with seductive fiddles?

I, triple-tongued and three crooked fingers pumping,

lip firm with lung in heartfelt syncopation

will plight a fat-cheeked troth that shakes the sternum.

Our mammoth blasts bring hearts' defences tumbling.

Lips purse. Trial puffs fan distant, dripping cellars.

Stirred echoes faintly wander spiralled sewers . . .

(This melancholy mastodon of music

fair uses up the Brasso, I can tell you.)

Now eggs of sorrow in her tin bowels hatching

trundle her ghostly, subterranean gloamings,

soar to the flaring spaces of her belfry.

And OOMPAH roars its challenge to despair.