Oxford anthology of English poetry

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This two-volume anthology celebrates four centuries of English poetry, from the Elizabethan era to the present day. This, the second of the two volumes, covers poets from Blake to Heaney, and provides an excellent portrayal of a wide variety of eighteenth to twentieth century poets.

The richness and variety of this tradition are represented in this collection by all the great and familiar names, but also some of the less well-known poets who have often provided startling exceptions to the poetry of their age. The result is a rich and multi-coloured tapestry of the depth, diversity, and energy of poetry written in Britain and Ireland.

Beginning with William Blake, this second volume, covers many of the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats). It gives a generous survey of nineteenth century verse, including that of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, and Lewis Carroll, with poets from the twentieth-century being represented by poets such as Graves, Betjeman, Larking, Hughes, and Heaney.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• from Songs of Innocence
• Introduction (p. 1)
• The Lamb (p. 2)
• The Ecchoing Green (p. 2)
• The Chimney Sweeper (p. 3)
• Infant Joy (p. 4)
• On Another's Sorrow (p. 4)
• The School Boy (p. 5)
• from Songs of Experience
• The Clod & the Pebble (p. 6)
• The Sick Rose (p. 6)
• The Fly (p. 7)
• The Tyger (p. 7)
• The Garden of Love (p. 8)
• London (p. 8)
• The Human Abstract (p. 9)
• Infant Sorrow (p. 10)
• A Poison Tree (p. 10)
• Auguries of Innocence (p. 10)
• from Milton
• Jerusalem (p. 14)
• 'But turning toward Ololon in terrible majesty Milton' (p. 14)
• To Morning (p. 15)
• from Visions of the Daughters of Albion (p. 15)
• Auld Lang Syne
• Green Grow the Rashes (p. 17)
• Coming Through the Rye (p. 18)
• For A' That (p. 18)
• Whistle, and I'll come to You, My Lad (p. 19)
• A Red, Red Rose (p. 20)
• To a Mouse, on turning her up in her Nest with the Plough (p. 21)
• O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast (p. 21)
• Hay Making (p. 23)
• Dover Cliffs (p. 24)
• The Sleeping Beauty (p. 25)
• Ginevra (p. 26)
• A Wish (p. 28)
• Kilmeny (p. 29)
• A Boy's Song (p. 37)
• Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey (p. 38)
• Lucy Gray (p. 42)
• The Fountain (p. 44)
• Michael (p. 46)
• Lucy (p. 57)
• Resolution and Independence (p. 58)
• Sonnets
• London, 1802 (p. 62)
• 'It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free' (p. 62)
• Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (p. 63)
• The Solitary Reaper (p. 63)
• from The Prelude (p. 64)
• from The Lay of the Last Minstrel
• The Minstrel (p. 90)
• Melrose Abbey (p. 92)
• Love (p. 93)
• Nature's Sympathy with the Poet (p. 93)
• Patriotism (p. 94)
• Lochinvar (p. 95)
• from The Lady of the Lake
• Flowers and Trees (p. 97)
• Boat Song (p. 97)
• Coronach (p. 98)
• Ballad: Alice Brand (p. 99)
• Harp of the North, Farewell! (p. 102)
• from Rokeby
• Song: Brignall Banks (p. 103)
• Songs from the Novels
• Hie Away, Hie Away (p. 104)
• Lucy Ashton's Song (p. 105)
• Sound, Sound the Clarion (p. 105)
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (p. 106)
• Dejection: An Ode (p. 123)
• Work Without Hope (p. 127)
• Kubla Khan (p. 128)
• To a Young Ass (p. 129)
• This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (p. 130)
• The Homeric Hexameter (p. 132)
• After Blenheim (p. 132)
• Among His Books (p. 134)
• The Inchcape Rock (p. 135)
• Bishop Hatto and the Rats (p. 137)
• The Old Familiar Faces (p. 139)
• The Triumph of the Whale (p. 140)
• To Night (p. 141)
• Rose Aylmer (p. 142)
• On His Seventy-fifth Birthday (p. 142)
• Dirce (p. 142)
• Playhouse Musings (p. 142)
• Ye Mariners of England (p. 145)
• The Soldier's Dream (p. 146)
• The Minstrel Boy (p. 147)
• She is Far from the Land (p. 147)
• Pro Patria Mori (p. 148)
• Echoes (p. 148)
• The Journey Onwards (p. 149)
• Battle Song (p. 150)
• When Wilt Thou Save the People? (p. 151)
• Spring (p. 151)
• Song (p. 152)
• 'A wet sheet and a flowing sea' (p. 153)
• Abou Ben Adhem (p. 154)
• Jenny Kissed Me (p. 154)
• The Grasshopper and the Cricket (p. 155)
• The Grave of Love (p. 155)
• from Nightmare Abbey
• Three Men of Gotham (p. 156)
• from Maid Marian
• Robin Hood and the Grey Friars (p. 156)
• Over, Over (p. 157)
• from Crotchet Castle
• The Priest and the Mulberry Tree (p. 159)
• The War Song of Dinas Vawr (p. 160)
• The Leveller (p. 161)
• She Walks in Beauty (p. 162)
• The Destruction of Sennacherib (p. 162)
• from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (p. 163)
• Lines on Hearing that Lady Byron was Ill (p. 167)
• from Stanzas
• 'When a man hath no freedom' (p. 168)
• Prometheus (p. 168)
• from Don Juan (p. 170)
• Vision of Judgment (p. 184)
• The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna (p. 208)
• Song: 'Oh say not that my heart is cold' (p. 209)
• Song: To Mary (p. 209)
• The Mask of Anarchy (p. 210)
• England in 1819 (p. 223)
• Ozymandias (p. 224)
• Ode to the West Wind (p. 224)
• To a Skylark (p. 227)
• To the Moon (p. 229)
• Summer and Winter (p. 230)
• Love's Philosophy (p. 230)
• Adonais (p. 231)
• One Word is Too Often Profaned (p. 245)
• Music, When Soft Voices Die (p. 245)
• Written in Northampton County Asylum (p. 246)
• Noon (p. 246)
• After Reading in a Letter Proposals for Building a Cottage (p. 248)
• Sudden Shower (p. 249)
• from The Flitting (p. 249)
• Sonnets (p. 250)
• To ****** (p. 251)
• 'How many bards gild the lapses of time!' (p. 251)
• On First Looking into Chapman's Homer (p. 252)
• On the Grasshopper and Cricket 'Happy is England! I could be content' (p. 252)
• from Endymion (p. 252)
• The Eve of St. Agnes (p. 255)
• Ode to a Nightingale (p. 265)
• Ode on a Grecian Urn (p. 268)
• Ode to Psyche (p. 269)
• Ode: 'Bards of Passion and of Mirth' (p. 271)
• To Autumn (p. 272)
• Ode on Melancholy (p. 273)
• from Hyperion (p. 274)
• On Oxford. A Parody (p. 287)
• La Belle Dame Sans Merci (p. 288)
• The Loveliness of Love (p. 290)
• Song: 'Sweet in her green dell the flower of beauty slumbers' (p. 291)
• She was a Queen (p. 291)
• Song: 'She is not fair to outward view' (p. 293)
• To a Lofty Beauty, from her Poor Kinsman (p. 293)
• I've Plucked the Berry (p. 294)
• A Novel of High Life (p. 294)
• Autumn (p. 295)
• The Bridge of Sighs (p. 297)
• I remember, I remember (p. 300)
• Ballad: Time of Roses (p. 301)
• Horatius (p. 301)
• The Battle of Naseby (p. 318)
• Epitaph on a Jacobite (p. 320)
• The Armada (p. 320)
• The Wife A-Lost (p. 322)
• The Wind at the Door (p. 323)
• The Vicar (p. 324)
• School and Schoolfellows (p. 327)
• The Nameless One (p. 329)
• Dark Rosaleen (p. 331)
• from Death's Jest Book (p. 333)
• Sailors' Song (p. 334)
• Wolfram's Dirge (p. 334)
• Dream-Pedlary
• And Shall Trelawny Die? (p. 335)
• Are They Not All Ministering Spirits? (p. 336)
• The Shandon Bells (p. 337)
• from Aurora Leigh (p. 338)
• The Sweetness of England (p. 340)
• The Cry of the Children (p. 344)
• Cowper's Grave (p. 346)
• The Sleep
• from Sonnets from the Portuguese
• 'I thought once how Theocritus had sung' (p. 348)
• 'Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart' (p. 348)
• 'Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor' (p. 349)
• 'Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand' (p. 349)
• 'What can I give thee back, O liberal' (p. 349)
• 'Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed' (p. 350)
• 'If thou must love me, let it be for nought' (p. 350)
• 'My letters! all dead paper, ... mute and white!' (p. 350)
• 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways' (p. 351)
• The Irish Emigrant (p. 351)
• Old Song (p. 353)
• Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur (p. 355)
• Mariana (p. 366)
• The Lady of Shallot (p. 368)
• The Lotos-Eaters (p. 373)
• Ulysses (p. 374)
• Morte D'Arthur (p. 376)
• from The Princess
• 'Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean' (p. 382)
• 'Home they brought her warrior dead' (p. 382)
• 'Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white' (p. 383)
• from In Memoriam (p. 383)
• from Maud (p. 384)
• The Brook (p. 386)
• The Charge of the Light Brigade (p. 392)
• Northern Farmer: New Style (p. 393)
• 'Come not, when I am dead' (p. 396)
• Little Billee (p. 396)
• The Ballad of Bouillabaisse (p. 397)
• The Dong with a Luminous Nose (p. 400)
• Limericks
• 'There was an Old Person of Basing' (p. 402)
• 'There was an Old Man of Whitehaven' (p. 403)
• 'There was an Old Man of Thermopylae' (p. 403)
• 'There was an Old Man who screamed out' (p. 403)
• 'There was an Old Person of Bow' (p. 403)
• 'How pleasant to know Mr Lear!' (p. 403)
• from The Pied Piper of Hamelin (p. 404)
• Fra Lippo Lippi (p. 405)
• Two in the Campagna (p. 414)
• The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church (p. 416)
• Caliban upon Setebos (p. 419)
• Remembrance (p. 426)
• The Old Stoic (p. 427)
• My Lady's Grave (p. 427)
• Last Lines (p. 428)
• A Death Scene (p. 429)
• from Amours de Voyage (p. 431)
• Ode to the North-East Wind (p. 438)
• The Sands of Dee (p. 439)
• Young and Old (p. 440)
• The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire (p. 441)
• The Old Oak Tree at Hatfield Broadoak (p. 445)
• Shakespeare (p. 448)
• The Scholar Gipsy (p. 449)
• Dover Beach (p. 455)
• Heraclitus (p. 456)
• from The Angel in the House (p. 457)
• The Toys (p. 459)
• Four Ducks on a Pond (p. 460)
• The Blessed Damozel (p. 461)
• Sibylla Palmifera (p. 465)
• On Refusal of Aid between Nations (p. 465)
• from Modern Love (p. 466)
• Goblin Market (p. 466)
• Remember (p. 480)
• 'A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break' (p. 480)
• Song (p. 481)
• Ballad (p. 482)
• from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
• 'Will You Walk a Little Faster?' (p. 483)
• from Through the Looking-Glass
• Jabberwocky (p. 484)
• The Sun Was Shining On The Sea (p. 485)
• from The Hunting of the Snark
• The Baker's Tale (p. 488)
• The Vanishing (p. 489)
• To Peace (p. 491)
• Summer Dawn (p. 491)
• The Haystack in the Floods (p. 492)
• Chorus from 'Atalanta' (p. 496)
• A Forsaken Garden (p. 497)
• Sonnet (p. 500)
• The Ballad of 'Beau Brocade' (p. 500)
• I Look into My Glass (p. 507)
• Drummer Hodge (p. 508)
• To Lizbie Browne (p. 508)
• The Self-Unseeing (p. 510)
• A Church Romance (p. 510)
• Channel Firing (p. 511)
• The Oxen (p. 512)
• Midnight on the Great Western (p. 512)
• In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' (p. 513)
• Afterwards (p. 514)
• The Going (p. 514)
• Rain on a Grave (p. 515)
• I Found Her Out There (p. 516)
• The Voice (p. 518)
• After a Journey (p. 518)
• Beeny Cliff (p. 519)
• At Castle Boterel (p. 520)
• Heaven-Haven (p. 521)
• The Habit of Perfection (p. 521)
• The Wreck of the 'Deutschland' (p. 522)
• God's Grandeur (p. 531)
• The Windhover (p. 531)
• Pied Beauty (p. 532)
• In the Valley of the Elwy (p. 532)
• Duns Scotus's Oxford (p. 533)
• Andromeda (p. 533)
• The Candle Indoors (p. 534)
• Felix Randal (p. 534)
• Spring and Fall (p. 535)
• 'As kingfishers catch fire' (p. 535)
• 'No worst, there is none' (p. 536)
• 'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day' (p. 536)
• In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez (p. 536)
• 'Thou art indeed just, Lord' (p. 537)
• To R.B. (p. 537)
• London Snow (p. 538)
• On a Dead Child (p. 539)
• 'I love all beauteous things' (p. 540)
• Christ in the Universe (p. 540)
• At Night (p. 541)
• Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves (p. 542)
• The Vagabond (p. 543)
• Easter Day (p. 544)
• E Tenebris (p. 544)
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (p. 545)
• Bredon Hill (p. 562)
• 'On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble' (p. 563)
• 'Into my heart an air that kills' (p. 564)
• The Carpenter's Son (p. 564)
• Tommy (p. 565)
• Recessional (p. 566)
• The Way Through the Woods (p. 567)
• Mandalay (p. 568)
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree (p. 569)
• The Fiddler of Dooney (p. 570)
• No Second Troy (p. 570)
• The Fascination of What's Difficult (p. 571)
• To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (p. 571)
• Beggar to Beggar Cried (p. 572)
• The Magi (p. 572)
• A Coat (p. 573)
• Men Improve With the Years (p. 573)
• The Collar-Bone of a Hare (p. 573)
• On Being Asked for a War Poem (p. 574)
• Easter 1916 (p. 574)
• The Leaders of the Crowd (p. 576)
• The Second Coming (p. 576)
• Sailing to Byzantium (p. 577)
• A Prayer for My Son (p. 578)
• Leda and the Swan (p. 579)
• All Souls' Night (p. 579)
• Death (p. 582)
• For Anne Gregory (p. 582)
• Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop (p. 583)
• The Spur (p. 583)
• from Under Ben Bulben (p. 584)
• Collins (p. 585)
• The Dark Angel (p. 585)
• Sea Love (p. 587)
• The Cenotaph (p. 587)
• In the Fields (p. 588)
• I So Liked Spring (p. 588)
• June, 1915 (p. 589)
• The Trees are Down (p. 589)
• The South Country (p. 590)
• The Evenlode (p. 592)
• The Statue (p. 592)
• Henry King (p. 593)
• Jim (p. 593)
• Lord Finchley (p. 595)
• The Listeners (p. 595)
• Snow (p. 596)
• Song of the Mad Prince (p. 597)
• The Rolling English Road (p. 597)
• Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom: an Ode (p. 598)
• Femina Contra Mundum (p. 599)
• A Certain Evening (p. 600)
• Sea-Fever (p. 601)
• A Fellow Mortal (p. 601)
• The Owl (p. 602)
• As the Team's Head-Brass (p. 603)
• Thaw (p. 604)
• Gone, Gone Again (p. 604)
• Lights Out (p. 605)
• End of Another Home Holiday (p. 606)
• The Ship of Death (p. 608)
• Tortoise Shell (p. 611)
• Counter-Attack (p. 613)
• Glory of Women (p. 614)
• Lamentations (p. 614)
• The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (p. 615)
• Gerontion (p. 618)
• The Waste Land (p. 620)
• Whispers of Immortality (p. 631)
• from Four Quartets
• Little Gidding (p. 632)
• Break of Day in the Trenches (p. 639)
• Louse Hunting (p. 640)
• On Receiving News of the War (p. 640)
• The Innumerable Christ (p. 641)
• from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (p. 642)
• By Wauchopeside (p. 644)
• Wheesht, Wheesht (p. 645)
• Insensibility (p. 646)
• Anthem for Doomed Youth (p. 648)
• Miners (p. 648)
• Strange Meeting (p. 649)
• 'All the Hills and Vales Along' (p. 650)
• from In Parenthesis (p. 651)
• from Mabinog's Liturgy (p. 652)
• Sick Love (p. 654)
• Song: Lift-Boy (p. 654)
• Parent to Children (p. 655)
• Counting the Beats (p. 655)
• The Zulu Girl (p. 656)
• On Some South African Novelists (p. 657)
• Mass at Dawn (p. 657)
• Luis de Camoes (p. 657)
• The Commuted Sentence (p. 658)
• Scorpion (p. 658)
• Not Waving But Drowning (p. 659)
• 'The Italian soldier shook my hand' (p. 659)
• Death in Leamington (p. 660)
• A Subaltern's Love-Song (p. 661)
• In Westminster Abbey (p. 663)
• House of Rest (p. 664)
• The Metropolitan Railway (p. 665)
• Slough (p. 666)
• Note on Local Flora (p. 667)
• To an Old Lady (p. 667)
• Aubade (p. 668)
• The Beautiful Train (p. 669)
• Snow (p. 670)
• Birmingham (p. 670)
• The Sunlight on the Garden (p. 671)
• Sunday Morning (p. 672)
• Nostalgia (p. 672)
• from Autumn Journal (p. 673)
• Questioner Who Sits So Sly (p. 677)
• A Free One (p. 679)
• 1929 (p. 679)
• The Question (p. 684)
• Consider (p. 685)
• Oxford (p. 686)
• A. E. Housman (p. 688)
• Edward Lear (p. 688)
• Our Bias (p. 689)
• Lullaby (p. 689)
• Musee des Beaux Arts (p. 690)
• 'As I walked out one evening' (p. 691)
• 'O lurcher-loving collier, black as night' (p. 693)
• Refugee Blues (p. 693)
• In Memory of W. B. Yeats (p. 694)
• September 1, 1939 (p. 696)
• The Shield of Achilles (p. 699)
• The Cave of Making (p. 701)
• Ode to the Diencephalon (p. 704)
• Moon Landing (p. 704)
• Atlantis (p. 705)
• 'What I expected was' (p. 708)
• Delos (p. 709)
• Strip-tease (p. 709)
• Acropolis (p. 710)
• Vega (p. 710)
• 'Not in the poet is the poem or' (p. 711)
• To My Mother (p. 711)
• Rhodri (p. 712)
• Echoes (p. 713)
• Nocturne by Ben Shahn (p. 713)
• The force that through the green fuse drives the flower (p. 714)
• Especially when the October wind (p. 715)
• Light breaks where no sun shines (p. 716)
• After the funeral (p. 717)
• The Conversation of Prayer (p. 718)
• A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London (p. 718)
• Poem in October (p. 719)
• Do not go gentle into that good night (p. 721)
• On being asked to write a school hymn (p. 722)
• The Beast in the Space (p. 723)
• Deceptions (p. 724)
• No Road (p. 724)
• Toads (p. 725)
• The Whitsun Weddings (p. 726)
• Days (p. 728)
• MCMXIV (p. 728)
• Toads Revisited (p. 729)
• An Arundel Tomb (p. 730)
• Going, Going (p. 732)
• The Explosion (p. 733)
• One Flesh (p. 734)
• A Letter to Peter Levi (p. 735)
• On The Move (p. 735)
• The Last Man (p. 736)
• The Man Seeking Experience Enquiries His Way of a Drop of Water (p. 740)
• View of a Pig (p. 741)
• Heptonstall (p. 742)
• Tractor (p. 742)
• Roe-deer (p. 744)
• The day he died (p. 745)
• New Year's Eve Poem 1965 (p. 746)
• Himalayan Balsam (p. 747)
• The Forge (p. 748)
• Tinder (p. 748)
• Wedding Day (p. 749)
• Punishment (p. 749)
• Acknowledgements (p. 753)
• Index of Poets (p. 757)
• Index of First Lines (p. 759)