Picnic Poetry – for no particular reason

Picnic Poetry: a blog in borrowed verse

Reading poetry has been important to me since I was a boy. Paula and I have always shared our favourite poems, films and novels with each other, a behaviour we both inherited from out families. This is a chance to make a record of some significant poems in my life, and also to share them with whatever audience is listening. While most of the older poems are available through Bartleby and other sites, some may still be covered by copyright, so I claim fair dealing, particularly for educational purposes! Thanks to The Writer’s Almanac for inspiration and occasional excerpts.

So here goes: a year of poetry! I started this in 2010, so that is the cycle governing the weeks and months, as is its Liturgical Calendar. You can work through it using the blog index page, starting at the beginning of the year, by date using the Archive, or use the Title Index.

Below, poems by author…

Picnic Poetry – for no particular reason

"Poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." (Aristotle)

A

Anonymous, ‘A hymn to the Virgin’
_ _ ‘I Sing of a Maiden’
_ _ , ‘O Sapientia’
Dante Alighieri, ‘Within my Lady’s Eyes’
Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’
_ _ “Growing Old’
Margaret Atwood, ‘Variations on the Word Sleep’
_ _ ‘Variations on the Word Love’
W.H. Auden, ‘Friday’s Child’
_ _ ‘Lullaby’
_ _ ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’
_ _ ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’
_ _ ‘Roman Wall Blues’
_ _ ‘Refugee Blues’
_ _ ‘September 1, 1939’
_ _ ‘Spain’
_ _ ‘Two Songs for Hedli Anderson’
_ _ ‘The Unknown Citizen’

B

David Baker, ‘Patriotics’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Sonnet 43’
_ _ ‘Love’
John Betjeman, “Myfanwy’
_ _ ‘Christmas’
The Bible, ‘Nunc Dimittus’
_ _ Song of Solomon 8
William Blake, ‘Tyger, Tyger’
_ _ ‘Holy Thursday‘
_ _ ‘London’
_ _ ‘The School Boy’
_ _ ‘Hear the Voice’
Chris Bounds, ‘Sydney’
Rupert Brooke, ‘Sonnet Reversed’
_ _ ‘The Great Lover’
Robert Browning, ‘Pippa’s Song’
_ _ ‘Apparent Failure’
_ _ ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, Rome’
_ _ ‘Easter-Day’
_ _ ‘Life in a Love’
_ _ ‘The Lost Leader’
_ _ ‘Love Among The Ruins’
_ _ ‘My Last Duchess’
_ _ ‘Porphyria's Lover’
_ _ ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’
_ _ ‘Why I am a Liberal’
Lord Byron, ‘We’ll go no more a-roving’
_ _ ‘She Walks in Beauty’

C

David Campbell, ‘Sydney’
G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Christ Child’
Gillian Clarke, ‘Flood’
S.T. Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’
Kenneth Crotty, ‘Pain’
e.e. cummings, ‘i thank you god’
_ _ ‘may i feel said he’
_ _ ‘i like my body when it is with your’
_ _ ’53’

D

Bruce Dawe, ‘Life Cycle’
_ _ ‘Homecoming’
_ _ ‘Weapons Training’
Emily Dickinson, ‘Because I could not stop for death’
_ _ ‘Tie the Strings to my Life’
Eve Dobell, ‘Advent 1916’
John Donne, ‘Death be not proud’
_ _ Elegie XVII – ‘On his mistress’
_ _ Elegy V: ‘His Picture’
_ _ Elegy X: ‘The Dream’
_ _ Elegy XIII: ‘His Parting From Her’
_ _ Elegies XVI: ‘The Expostulation’
_ _ Elegies XIX: ‘Whoever Loves’
_ _ Elegy XX: ‘On His Mistress Going to Bed’
_ _ ‘The Sunne Rising’
_ _ ‘The Good Morrow’
_ _ ‘Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward’
_ _ Holy Sonnets 1
Bob Dylan, ‘The Time They are A-Changin’”

E

Eagles, ‘Hotel California’
T.S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’
_ _ ‘The Four Quartets’
_ _ ‘The Hippopotamus’
_ _ ‘The Hollow Men’
–– ‘Journey of the Magi’
_ _ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
_ _ ‘La Figlia che Piange’
_ _ ‘Marina’
_ _ ‘Portrait of a Lady’
_ _ Preludes’
_ _ ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’
_ _ ‘Whispher of Immortality’
D.J. Enright, ‘The Cool Web’

F

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ‘On Myselfe’
Francis of Assissi, ‘O Deus, ego amo te’
Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’
_ _ ‘Fire and Ice’
_ _ ‘Mending Wall’
John Fuller, ‘Valentine’

G

Peter Gabriel, ‘In Your Eyes’
Deborah Garrison, ‘Goodbye, New York’
Robert Graves, ‘The Next War’
_ _ ‘I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned?’
Julian Grenfell, ‘Into Battle’
Fulke Greville, ‘Cælica: Sonnet XCVIII’
Anne Griffiths (trans. Rowan Williams) ‘I saw him standing’
Woody Guthrie, ‘This Land is Your Land’

H

Oscar Hammerstein II, ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’
Thomas Hardy, ‘A Wife in London’
_ _ ‘The Coronation’
Kevin Hart, ‘Jerusalem’
Seamus Heaney, ‘Requiem for the Croppies’
Felicia Hemans, ‘Casabianca’
Johann Heerman, ‘Ah, holy Jesus, how hast Thou offended’
Heinrich Heine, ‘The Silesian Weaver’
George Herbert, ‘Even Song’
_ _ ‘Faith’
Gerard Manly Hopkins, ‘Binsley Poplars’
_ _ ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe’
_ _ ‘Pied Beauty’
_ _ ‘God’s Grandeur’
A.E. Housman, From ‘Additional Poems’
Ted Hughes, ‘Hawk Roosting’
_ _ ‘The Thought-Fox’
_ _ ‘Theology’
Leigh Hunt, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’

I

J

Billy Joel, ‘New York State of Mind’
_ _ ‘And so it goes’
Ben Jonson, ‘Song to Celia’
James Joyce, ‘Chamber Music I’

K

John Keats, ‘Bright Star’
_ _ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’
_ _ ‘The Day is Gone’
_ _ ‘The Even of St Agnes’
_ _ ‘Happy is England’
_ _ ‘The Human Seasons’
_ _ ‘Lines to Fanny’
_ _ ‘Ode to Autumn’
_ _ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
_ _ ‘Ode on Melancholy”
_ _ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
_ _ ‘Ode to Psyche’
_ _ ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’
_ _ ‘On Solititude’
_ _ ‘To Autumn’
_ _ ‘When I have fears’
Charles Kinglsey, ‘Easter Week’
Rudyard Kipling, ‘My Boy Jack’
_ _ ‘If’
_ _ ‘The River’s Tale’

L

Philip Larkin, ‘The School in August’
_ _ ‘Home is so Sad’
-_ _ ‘Lent’
D.H. Lawrence, ‘Piccadilly Circus at Night’
Henry Lawson, ‘Faces in the Street’
_ _ ‘The Roaring Days’
Emma Lazarus, ‘The New Colossus’
Madeleine L’Engle, ‘Into the Darkest Hour’
_ _ ‘The Risk of Birth’
John Lennon, ‘Imagine’
Denise Levertov, ‘In California During the Gulf War’
_ _ ‘February Evening in New York’
_ _ ‘To Live in the Mercy of God’
_ _ ‘News Report, September 1991’
C.S. Lewis, ‘Evolutionary Hymn’
Inna Lisnianskaya, ‘From the Fourth Floor’
Amy Lowell, ‘Two Travellers in the Place Vendome’
M
Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’
John Masefield, ‘addressed to his ‘Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns’’
William Matthews, ‘Oxymorons’
William McGonagall, ‘Descriptive Jottings of London’
Sarah McLachlan, ‘World on Fire’
John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Field’
Thomas Merton, ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window’
John Milton, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’
_ _ ‘When I consider how my life is spent’
Joni Mitchell, ‘A Case of You’
_ _ ‘Both Sides Now’
_ _ ‘The Magdalene Laundries’
_ _ ‘River’
William Morris, ‘The Voice of Toil’
Les Murray, ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’
_ _ ‘The Meaning of Existence’
_ _ ‘Poetry and Religion’
_ _ ‘View of Sydney, Australia, from Gladesville road bridge’
Lam Thi My Da, ‘Bomb Crater Sky’

N

Pablo Neruda, ‘The Arrival in Madrid of the International Brigades’
_ _ ‘I Begin by Invoking Walt Whitman’
_ _ ‘I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair’
John Henry Newman, ‘The Pillar of Cloud’
_ _ The Litany of the Passion
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, ‘No More Boomerang’

O

Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’
_ _ ‘Shadwell Stair’
_ _ ‘Strange Meeting’

P

Vance Palmer, ‘A Farmer Remembers the Somme’
Dorothy Parker, ‘Love Song’
A.B. Paterson, ‘The Old Australian Ways’
Paul of Tarsus ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels’
_ _ Philippians 3:4b-14
Katherine Philips, ‘'Tis true our life is but a long disease’
Pink, ‘Stupid Girls’
Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus’
Alexander Pope, ‘On a Certain Lady at Court’

Q

R

Henry Reed, ‘The Naming of the Parts’
Anne Ridler, ‘Expectans Expectavi’
Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone’
Oscar Romero, ‘The God We Hardly Knew’
Christina Rosetti, ‘Monna Innominata’
_ _ ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’

S

Carl Sandburg, ‘Broadway’
_ _ ‘Autumn Dusk in Central Park’
_ _ ‘The Mayor of Gary’
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Counter-Attack’
_ _ ‘Everyone Sang’
_ _ ‘The Working Party’
Vernon Scannell, ‘Casualty – Mental Ward’
Gil Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not be Televised’
Alan Seeger, ‘Paris I’
William Shakespeare, Excerpts from each play (on a separate page)
_ _ ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’
_ _ ‘Music’ (The Merchant of Venice Act V Sc 1)
_ _ ‘This fellow’s of exceeding honesty’ (Othello III.iii.262)
_ _ Sonnet XXIX
_ _ Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds
_ _ Sonnet CL
Percy Bysshe Shelley , from ‘Adonais’
_ _ ‘Love’s Philosophy’
Eli Siegel, ‘Hymn to Fourth Avenue’
Paul Simon, ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’
_ _ ‘The Sounds of Silence’
Edith Sitwell, ‘Still Falls the Rain’
Kenneth Slessor, ‘Beach Burial’
_ _ ‘Five Bells’
_ _ ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’
_ _ ‘Out of Time’
_ _ ‘William Street’
Edmund Spenser, ‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’
Sting, ‘An Englishman in New York’
_ _ ‘ Fields of Gold ’
_ _ ‘Children’s Crusade’
Jonathan Swift, ‘On a Very Old Glass’
Arthur Symons, ‘Paris’

T

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’
_ _ ‘All Things WIll Die’
_ _ ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
_ _ ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’
_ _ ‘The Kraken Wakes’
_ _ ‘The Lady of Shalott’
_ _ ‘The Lotos Eaters’
_ _ ‘Maud’
_ _ ‘Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal’
_ _ ‘St Agnes’ Eve’
_ _ ‘Tears, Idle Tears’
Dylan Thomas, ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’
_ _ ‘The Conversation of Prayer’
_ _ ‘And death shall have no dominion’
_ _ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’
_ _ ‘Fern Hill’
_ _ ‘A Grief Ago’
_ _ ‘The Hunchback in the Park’
_ _ ‘Poem on his Birthday’
_ _ ‘Written for a Personal Epitaph’
Edward Thomas, ‘Words’
R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh Landscape’
Francis Thompson, ‘The Kingdom of God’
_ _ ‘The Hound of Heaven’
Chidiock Tichborne, Tichborne’s Elegy
J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘I Sit and Think’

U

U2, ‘One’

V

Various, Words on Paris
Venantius Fortunatus, ‘Vexilla Regis Prodeunt’

W

Walt Whitman, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’
_ _ ‘I hear America Singing’
_ _ ‘I Sing the Body Electric’
_ _ ‘The Wound-Dresser’
Anne Pierson Wiese, ‘Everything but God’
Oscar Wilde, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’
Rowan Williams, ‘Advent Calendar’
_ _, ‘Rublev’
William Carlos Williams ‘Dedication for a Plot of Ground’
William Wordsworth, ‘England, 1802’
_ _ ‘England! the time has come’
_ _ ‘Evening, Calais Beach’
_ _ ‘Daffodils’
_ _ ‘Intimations of Immortality’
_ _ ‘Lines composed upon Westminster Bridge’
_ _ From The Prelude Book 1
_ _ From The Prelude Book 2
_ _ ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’
_ _ ‘To a Skylark’
_ _ ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’
_ _ ‘Surprised by Joy’
_ _ ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’
_ _ ‘Tintern Abbey’
_ _ ‘The World is too much with us’
Judith Wright, ‘Grace’
_ _ ‘Request to a Year’
_ _ ‘Turning Fifty’
Lady Mary Wroth, ‘Bee you all pleas'd, your pleasures grieve not me’

X

Charles Wesley, ‘Morning Hymn’

Y

William Butler Yeats, ‘Among School Children’
_ _ ‘The Circus Animals' Desertion’
_ _ ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’
_ _ ‘Easter, 1916’
_ _ ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’
_ _ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’
_ _ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’
_ _ ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’
_ _‘Politics’
_ _ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
_ _ ‘The Second Coming’
_ _ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’
_ _ ‘When you are old’
_ _ ‘Where my books go’
_ _ ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’

Z