This wonderful little-known poem from one of English literature’s greatest nature poets isn’t available online anywhere, so we’ve reproduced it below as the latest in our ‘Post A Poem A Day’ challenge. In the poem, John Clare (1793-1864) extols the virtue of home as a place to return to at […]
Tag: Post A Poem A Day
‘Upon Appleton House’: A Poem by Andrew Marvell
‘Upon Appleton House’ is an example of a ‘country house poem’. Andrew Marvell (1621-78) wrote the poem for Thomas Fairfax, the father of the girl he was tutoring in the early 1650s, just after the end of the English Civil War, and the poem reflects many of the contemporary political […]
‘Frost at Midnight’: A Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Wordsworth’s great collaborator on the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Written in 1798, the same year that Lyrical Ballads appeared, ‘Frost at Midnight’ is a night-time meditation on childhood and raising children, offered in a conversational manner and focusing on several key themes of Romantic poetry: the […]
‘The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad’: A Poem by Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick (1591-1674), known as one of the ‘Cavalier poets’, was a Royalist who, following the English Civil War and the execution of King Charles I in 1649, penned this poem grieving for the loss of the king: ‘everything / Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing.’ For Herrick, the […]
‘Mont Blanc’: A Poem by Percy Shelley
The Romantics were greatly interested in a quality that Edmund Burke called ‘the Sublime’: that peculiar mixture of awe and terror we feel when confronted with great forces of nature. Percy Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is a classic example of Romantic poetry about […]