Post A Poem A Day – Page 14 – Interesting Literature

‘Goodbye’: A Poem by Alun Lewis

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Alun Lewis (1915-44) is one of the best-known English poets of the Second World War. Lewis wrote ‘Goodbye’ about his first night with his wife.

Goodbye

So we must say Goodbye, my darling,
And go, as lovers go, for ever;
Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels
And make an end of lying down together.

I put a final shilling in the gas,
And watch you slip your dress below your knees
And lie so still I hear your rustling comb
Modulate the autumn in the trees.

‘To Sleep’: A Poem by John Keats

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘To Sleep’, a sonnet by one of the leading second-generation Romantic poets, John Keats (1795-1821), addresses sleep as a ‘soft embalmer of the still midnight’. Sleep allows us to escape our own minds, when one’s conscience begins to prick us, keeping us awake. Sleep wraps us up in lovely delicious rest, and allows us to forget the world.

To Sleep

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.

‘A Dream’: A Poem by William Blake

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Published in Blake’s 1789 book Songs of Innocence, ‘A Dream’ is about William Blake’s vision of three insects: an ant (‘emmet’), a beetle, and a glow-worm, which is in fact a kind of beetle. Not only that, but these are talking insects: the emmet confides that she has lost her children, and the bright glow-worm offers to light the way for her through the night, so she can recover them.

‘A Dream’ by William Blake

Once a dream did weave a shade
O’er my angel-guarded bed,
That an emmet lost its way
Where on grass methought I lay.

Troubled, wildered, and forlorn,
Dark, benighted, travel-worn,
Over many a tangle spray,
All heart-broke, I heard her say:

‘John Anderson, My Jo’: A Poem by Robert Burns

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘John Anderson, My Jo’ is one of Robert Burns’s finest love poems or love songs. A brief note; ‘jo’ is Scots dialect for ‘sweetheart’, and the speaker of the poem is a woman addressing her ageing husband, reassuring him that although his hair may be greying (what remains of it), he is still her ‘jo’ and they will go ‘hand in hand’ together through life.

‘The Waterfall’: A Poem by Henry Vaughan

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

There’s something about the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan (1621-95) which smacks more of the later Romantic movement than of the metaphysical ‘school’ to which he belonged. This poem, describing the natural beauty of the waterfall, is a fine demonstration of how Vaughan anticipated Romanticism by over a century.

The Waterfall

With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth
Doth thy transparent, cool, and wat’ry wealth
Here flowing fall,
And chide, and call,
As if his liquid, loose retinue stay’d
Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid;