by Paul Keegan
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ‘My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves’
MAY KENDALL Lay of the Trilobite
A. MARY F. ROBINSON Neurasthenia 1888
W. E. HENLEY from In Hospital
II Waiting
III Interior
AMY LEVY A Ballade of Religion and Marriage 1889
W. B. YEATS Down by the Salley Gardens
WILLIAM MORRIS Pomona 1891
RUDYARD KIPLING Danny Deever 1892
RUDYARD KIPLING Mandalay
W. B. YEATS The Sorrow of Love
ARTHUR SYMONS At the Cavour
JOHN DAVIDSON Thirty Bob a Week 1894
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON To S. R. Crockett 1895
ALICE MEYNELL Cradle-Song at Twilight
ALICE MEYNELL Parentage
MAY PROBYN Triolets
Tête-à-Tête
Masquerading
A Mésalliance
MARY E. COLERIDGE An Insincere Wish Addressed to a Beggar 1895
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI Promises Like Pie-crust
ERNEST DOWSON Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam
A. E. HOUSMAN from A Shropshire Lad
XII ‘When I watch the living meet’
XL ‘Into my heart an air that kills’
LII ‘Far in a western brookland’
JOHN DAVIDSON A Northern Suburb
1897 ARTHUR SYMONS White Heliotrope
RUDYARD KIPLING Recessional
1898 OSCAR WILDE from The Ballad of Reading Gaol ‘He did not wear his scarlet coat’
W. E. HENLEY To W. R.
THOMAS HARDY Neutral Tones
THOMAS HARDY Thoughts of Phena
1900 THOMAS HARDY The Darkling Thrush
1906 WALTER DE LA MARE The Birthnight
WALTER DE LA MARE Autumn
WALTER DE LA MARE Napoleon
1908 MARY E. COLERIDGE No Newspapers
MICHAEL FIELD (KATHERINE BRADLEY and EDITH COOPER) The Mummy Invokes His Soul
1909 JOHN DAVIDSON Snow
J. M. SYNGE On an Island
1910 J. M. SYNGE The ’Mergency Man
1911 W. H. DAVIES Sheep
1912 THOMAS HARDY The Convergence of the Twain
T. E. HULME Autumn
T. E. HULME Image
EZRA POUND The Return
1913 EZRA POUND In a Station of the Metro
1914 H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) Oread
THOMAS HARDY from Poems of 1912–13
The Walk
The Voice
After a Journey
At Castle Boterel
W. B. YEATS The Cold Heaven
W. B. YEATS The Magi
CHARLOTTE MEW Fame
1915 EZRA POUND The Gypsy
EZRA POUND / RIHAKU from Cathay
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
Lament of the Frontier Guard
RUPERT BROOKE Peace
RUPERT BROOKE Heaven
1916 D. H. LAWRENCE Sorrow
CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’
EDWARD THOMAS Cock-Crow
EDWARD THOMAS Aspens
ANNA WICKHAM The Fired Pot
CHARLOTTE MEW A quoi bon dire
CHARLOTTE MEW The Quiet House
T. S. ELIOT The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917
T. S. ELIOT Aunt Helen
ISAAC ROSENBERG Break of Day in the Trenches
ISAAC ROSENBERG August 1914
ISAAC ROSENBERG ‘A worm fed on the heart of Corinth’
THOMAS HARDY During Wind and Rain
EDWARD THOMAS Old Man
EDWARD THOMAS Tall Nettles
EDWARD THOMAS Blenheim Oranges
EDWARD THOMAS Rain
WILFRED OWEN Futility 1918
WILFRED OWEN Anthem for Doomed Youth
WILFRED OWEN The Send-Off
WILFRED OWEN Maundy Thursday
SIEGFRIED SASSOON Base Details
SIEGFRIED SASSOON The General
SIEGFRIED SASSOON Everyone Sang 1919
IVOR GURNEY To His Love
IVOR GURNEY The Silent One
RUDYARD KIPLING from Epitaphs of the War. 1914–18
A Servant
A Son
The Coward
The Refined Man
Common Form
RUDYARD KIPLING Gethsemane
LAURENCE BINYON For the Fallen (September 1914)
W. B. YEATS The Wild Swans at Coole
T. S. ELIOT Sweeney Among the Nightingales
EZRA POUND from Homage to Sextus Propertius
VI ‘When, when, and whenever death closes our eyelids’
EZRA POUND from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 1920
II ‘The age demanded an image’
IV ‘These fought in any case’
V ‘There died a myriad’
W. B. YEATS Easter, 1916
T. S. ELIOT Gerontion
A. E. HOUSMAN from Last Poems
XII ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’
XXXIII ‘When the eye of day is shut’
XXXVII Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
XL ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying’
A. E. HOUSMAN ‘It is a fearful thing to be’
1922 T. S. ELIOT from The Waste Land
I The Burial of the Dead
IV Death by Water
IVOR GURNEY Possessions
IVOR GURNEY The High Hills
1923 D. H. LAWRENCE Medlars and Sorb-Apples
D. H. LAWRENCE The Mosquito
D. H. LAWRENCE The Blue Jay
HILAIRE BELLOC On a General Election
HILAIRE BELLOC Ballade of Hell and of Mrs Roebeck
W. B. YEATS Leda and the Swan
1925 ROBERT GRAVES Love Without Hope
ROBERT BRIDGES To Francis Jammes
EDMUND BLUNDEN The Midnight Skaters
BASIL BUNTING from Villon ‘Remember, imbeciles and wits’
EDWIN MUIR Childhood
HUGH MACDIARMID from Sangschaw
The Watergaw
The Eemis Stane
1926 HUGH MACDIARMID Empty Vessel
HUGH MACDIARMID from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle ‘O wha’s the bride that cairries the bunch?’
1927 JAMES JOYCE from Pomes Penyeach Bahnhofstrasse
1928 THOMAS HARDY Lying Awake
AUSTIN CLARKE The Planter’s Daughter
W. B. YEATS Sailing to Byzantium
W. B. YEATS from Meditations in Time of Civil War
V The Road at My Door
VI The Stare’s Nest by My Window
W. B. YEATS Among School Children
W. H. AUDEN ‘Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings’
1929 D. H. LAWRENCE The Mosquito Knows
D. H. LAWRENCE To Women, As Far As I’m Concerned
D. H. LAWRENCE Innocent England
E. C. BENTLEY [Clerihews]
‘George the Third’
‘Nell’
EDMUND BLUNDEN Report on Experience
ROBERT GRAVES Sick Love
ROBERT GRAVES Warning to Children
ROBERT GRAVES It Was All Very Tidy
W. H. AUDEN ‘This lunar beauty’ 1930
T. S. ELIOT Marina
BASIL BUNTING from Chomei at Toyama 1932 ‘I have been noting events forty years’
D. H. LAWRENCE Bavarian Gentians
RUDYARD KIPLING The Bonfires 1933
W. B. YEATS In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz
DYLAN THOMAS The force that through the green fuse
HUGH MACDIARMID from On a Raised Beach 1934 ‘All is lithogenesis – or lochia’
WILLIAM EMPSON This Last Pain 1935
WILLIAM EMPSON Homage to the British Museum
LOUIS MACNEICE Snow
WILLIAM SOUTAR The Tryst
W. H. AUDEN ‘Out on the lawn I lie in bed’ 1936
W. H. AUDEN ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’
ELIZAB
ETH DARYUSH Still-Life
LAURA RIDING The Wind Suffers
PATRICK KAVANAGH Inniskeen Road: July Evening
A. E. HOUSMAN from More Poems
XXIII ‘Crossing alone the nighted ferry’
XXXI ‘Because I liked you better’
A. E. HOUSMAN ‘Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on 1937 his wrists?’
JOHN BETJEMAN The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
DAVID JONES from In Parenthesis
from Part 3 ‘And the deepened stillness’
from Part 7 ‘But sweet sister death’
AUSTIN CLARKE The Straying Student 1938
ROBERT GRAVES To Evoke Posterity
ELIZABETH DARYUSH ‘Children of wealth in your warm nursery’
LOUIS MACNEICE The Sunlight on the Garden
W. B. YEATS Long-legged Fly 1939
W. H. AUDEN In Memory of W. B. Yeats
LOUIS MACNEICE from Autumn Journal
I ‘Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire’
XV ‘Shelley and jazz and lieder and love and hymn-tunes’
W. H. AUDEN Musée des Beaux Arts 1940
JOHN BETJEMAN Pot-Pourri from a Surrey Garden
WILLIAM EMPSON Missing Dates
WILLIAM EMPSON Aubade
1941 LOUIS MACNEICE Meeting Point
LOUIS MACNEICE Autobiography
1942 T. S. ELIOT from Little Gidding II ‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve’
ALUN LEWIS Raiders’ Dawn
NORMAN CAMERON Green, Green is El Aghir
STEVIE SMITH Bog-Face
STEVIE SMITH Dirge
PATRICK KAVANAGH from The Great Hunger
from I ‘Clay is the word and clay is the flesh’
III ‘Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day’
from XI ‘The cards are shuffled and the deck’
from XII ‘The fields were bleached white’
1943 HENRY REED Judging Distances
DAVID GASCOYNE Snow in Europe
DAVID GASCOYNE A Wartime Dawn
KEITH DOUGLAS Desert Flowers
1944 H. D. (HILDA DOOLITLE) from The Walls Do Not Fall I ‘An incident here and there’
SORLEY MACLEAN Hallaig
LAURENCE BINYON Winter Sunrise
LAURENCE BINYON The Burning of the Leaves
KEITH DOUGLAS Vergissmeinnicht
1945 ROBERT GRAVES To Juan at the Winter Solstice
DYLAN THOMAS Poem in October
W. H. AUDEN from The Sea and the Mirror Miranda
RUTH PITTER But for Lust
WILLIAM EMPSON Let It Go
1946 SAMUEL BECKETT Saint-Lô
KEITH DOUGLAS How to Kill
1949 EDWIN MUIR The Interrogation
1950 MARION ANGUS Alas! Poor Queen
STEVIE SMITH Pad, Pad
1951 DYLAN THOMAS Over Sir John’s Hill
1952 DYLAN THOMAS Do not go gentle into that good night
W. H. AUDEN The Fall of Rome
W. H. AUDEN The Shield of Achilles
1954 JOHN BETJEMAN Devonshire Street W.1
ROBERT GARIOCH Elegy
THOM GUNN The Wound
PHILIP LARKIN At Grass
NORMAN MACCAIG Summer Farm 1955
EDWIN MUIR The Horses 1956
TED HUGHES The Thought-Fox 1957
LOUIS MACNEICE House on a Cliff
STEVIE SMITH Not Waving But Drowning
STEVIE SMITH Magna est Veritas
GEOFFREY HILL A Pastoral 1959
TED HUGHES Pike 1960
PATRICK KAVANAGH Epic
PATRICK KAVANAGH Come Dance with Kitty Stobling
PATRICK KAVANAGH The Hospital
R. S. THOMAS Here 1961
ROY FISHER from City
from By the Pond
Toyland
THOM GUNN In Santa Maria del Popolo
THOM GUNN My Sad Captains
MALCOLM LOWRY [Strange Type] 1962
CHRISTOPHER LOGUE / HOMER from Patrocleia
[Apollo Strikes Patroclus]
CHARLES TOMLINSON The Picture of J. T. in a Prospect of 1963 Stone
R. S. THOMAS On the Farm
LOUIS MACNEICE Soap Suds
LOUIS MACNEICE The Taxis
AUSTIN CLARKE Martha Blake at Fifty-One
PHILIP LARKIN Mr Bleaney 1964
PHILIP LARKIN Here
PHILIP LARKIN Days
PHILIP LARKIN Afternoons
DONALD DAVIE The Hill Field
SYLVIA PLATH Sheep in Fog 1965
SYLVIA PLATH The Arrival of the Bee Box
SYLVIA PLATH Edge
BASIL BUNTING from Briggflatts 1966 I ‘Brag, sweet tenor bull’
R. S. THOMAS Pietà
R. S. THOMAS Gifts
SEAMUS HEANEY Personal Helicon
TED HUGHES Thistles 1967
TED HUGHES Full Moon and Little Frieda
JOHN MONTAGUE from A Chosen Light
11 rue Daguerre
GEORGE THEINER / MIROSLAV HOLUB The Fly
1968 GEOFFREY HILL Ovid in the Third Reich
GEOFFREY HILL September Song
ROY FISHER As He Came Near Death
ROY FISHER The Memorial Fountain
1969 MICHAEL LONGLEY Persephone
DOUGLAS DUNN A Removal from Terry Street
DOUGLAS DUNN On Roofs of Terry Street
NORMAN MACCAIG Wild Oats
IAIN CRICHTON SMITH Shall Gaelic Die?
1970 W. S. GRAHAM Malcolm Mooney’s Land
IAN HAMILTON The Visit
IAN HAMILTON Newscast
TOM LEONARD from Unrelated Incidents 3 ‘this is thi’
TED HUGHES from Crow A Childish Prank
1971 THOM GUNN Moly
GEOFFREY HILL from Mercian Hymns
I ‘King of the perennial holly-graves’
VI ‘The princes of Mercia were badger and raven’
VII ‘Gasholders, russet among fields’
XXVII ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’
GEORGE MACKAY BROWN Kirkyard
1972 STEVIE SMITH Scorpion
CHARLES TOMLINSON Stone Speech
DEREK MAHON An Image from Beckett
SEAMUS HEANEY The Tollund Man
SEAMUS HEANEY Broagh
DOUGLAS DUNN Modern Love
ÉILEAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN Swineherd
ÉILEAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN The Second Voyage
1973 THOMAS KINSELLA Hen Woman
THOMAS KINSELLA Ancestor
MICHAEL LONGLEY Wounds
PAUL MULDOON Wind and Tree
1974 PHILIP LARKIN This Be the Verse
PHILIP LARKIN Money
PHILIP LARKIN from Livings
II ‘Seventy feet down’
PHILIP LARKIN The Explosion
PADRAIC FALLON A Bit of Brass
1975 SEAMUS HEANEY from Singing School
6 Exposure
DEREK MAHON The Snow Party
DEREK MAHON A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
D. J. ENRIGHT Remembrance Sunday
JOHN FULLER Wild Raspberries
MICHAEL LONGLEY Man Lying on a Wall 1976
ELMA MITCHELL Thoughts after Ruskin
THOM GUNN The Idea of Trust
DONALD DAVIE from In the Stopping Train 1977 ‘I have got into the slow train’
NORMAN MACCAIG Notations of Ten Summer Minutes
W. S. GRAHAM Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch
ROBERT GARIOCH The Maple and the Pine
GEOFFREY HILL from An Apology for the Revival of Christian 1978 Architecture in England
9 The Laurel Axe
12 The Eve of St Mark
THOMAS KINSELLA Tao and Unfitness at Inistiogue on the River Nore
JAMES FENTON In a Notebook
JEFFREY WAINWRIGHT 1815
CRAIG RAINE A Martian Sends a Postcard Home 1979
CHRISTOPHER REID Baldanders
TED HUGHES February 17th
SEAMUS HEANEY The Strand at Lo
ugh Beg
MICHAEL LONGLEY from Wreaths
The Linen Workers
TOM PAULIN Where Art is a Midwife 1980
PAUL MULDOON Why Brownlee Left
PAUL MULDOON Anseo
PAUL DURCAN Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish Priest’s Parlour
PAUL DURCAN The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious
JAMES FENTON A German Requiem 1981
TONY HARRISON The Earthen Lot
TONY HARRISON Continuous
DEREK MAHON Courtyards in Delft
PAUL MULDOON Quoof 1983
PAUL MULDOON The Frog
TOM PAULIN Desertmartin
SEAMUS HEANEY Widgeon 1984
SEAMUS HEANEY from Station Island VII ‘I had come to the edge of the water’
DOUGLAS DUNN from Elegies
The Sundial
1985 DEREK MAHON Antarctica
JOHN AGARD Listen Mr Oxford don
1987 PETER DIDSBURY The Hailstone
PAUL MULDOON Something Else
CIARAN CARSON Dresden
EAVAN BOLAND Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
1988 CHARLES CAUSLEY Eden Rock
EDWIN MORGAN The Dowser
NORMAN MACCAIG Chauvinist
1989 TED HUGHES Telegraph Wires
1990 KEN SMITH Writing in Prison
CIARAN CARSON Belfast Confetti
NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL (trans. PAUL MULDOON) The Language Issue
EAVAN BOLAND The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
1991 SEAMUS HEANEY from Lightenings VIII ‘The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise’
MICHAEL LONGLEY The Butchers
1992 DENISE RILEY A Misremembered Lyric
THOM GUNN The Hug
THOM GUNN The Reassurance
1994 HUGO WILLIAMS Prayer
HUGO WILLIAMS Last Poem
EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN Studying the Language
CHRISTOPHER REID / OVID Stones and Bones
Acknowledgements
Index of Poets
Index of First lines
Index of Titles
Preface
Anthologies beg questions of structure as well as of inclusion. The former tend to be given and to receive less attention than the latter, because their procedures are taken for granted. Thus most modern anthologies – whether they cover a particular period or the entire span – are arranged historically, poet by poet, by dates of birth. Such has been the settled practice since Arthur Quiller Couch’s inaugurative Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), and has acquired a time-honoured air not least because it appears to honour time.
This convention is tenacious, but of relatively recent date. In earlier periods anthologies were conceived more as miscellanies, grouping poems by kind and assuming the community of the poem rather than the autonomy of the poet. It is worth remembering that even Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861) is a hybrid, refracting poems through a lens which is by turns chronological and thematic (the latter ‘in gradations of feeling or subject’), but not primarily author-centred.
The New Penguin Book of English Verse is closer in spirit to such older instances. It is arranged by poem rather than by poet, with each poem entering the sequence according to the date of its first appearance – whether in volume form, or periodical form, or occasionally (for the poetry of earlier periods) the approximate date at which it is known to have been circulating in manuscript. In other words, poems are restored to the moment when they became known to the public for whom the poet wrote.
