Post A Poem A Day – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

‘Home’: A Poem by John Clare

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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 the end of a hard day, a place of comfort and belonging. The poem’s form deftly reflects this, with the last line of each stanza returning to home – i.e. by ending on the very word ‘home’.

‘Upon Appleton House’: A Poem by Andrew Marvell

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘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 issues of the mid-seventeenth century. ‘Appleton House’ is the Nun Appleton estate belonging to Fairfax in Yorkshire.

‘Frost at Midnight’: A Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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 formative importance of childhood and the way it shapes who we become, and the role nature can play in our lives.

‘The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad’: A Poem by Robert Herrick

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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 whole land seems to grieve for Charles and the loss to the kingdom that his death signifies.

‘Mont Blanc’: A Poem by Percy Shelley

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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 the Sublime – an ode to nature as a powerful and beautiful force. Shelley composed his poem ‘Mont Blanc’ during the summer of 1816, and it was first published in Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), which – beating Frankenstein by a year – was actually Mary’s first book.