Poetry for Pleasure

Description

This collection has something for everyone. Perhaps you lean toward ballads, or maybe you love sonnets. You might prefer odes to nature, enjoy witty rhymes, or find yourself drawn to more philosophical or patriotic verse. From Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson to Henry Wotton and Mary Coleridge, this anthology spans a galaxy of poets—both renowned and anonymous. Whatever your aesthetic sensibilities, you're sure to find a poet to please you in this compact and thoughtfully curated compendium.

Selected by

MAUNG KAUNG, m.a. (Lond.), Late Educational Adviser to the Government of Burma, Former Headmaster, Government High School, Rangoon

Table of contents

I. FUN AND NONSENSE

• The Height of the Ridiculous – Oliver Wendell Holmes

• Little Billee – William Makepeace Thackeray

• The Pigtail – William Makepeace Thackeray

• The Diverting History of John Gilpin – William Cowper

II. TALES

• Lochinvar – Sir Walter Scott

• Allen-a-Dale – Sir Walter Scott

• The Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington – Unknown

• From Horatius – Lord Macaulay

• The Lady of Shalott – Lord Tennyson

• The Ballad of Semmerwater – Sir William Watson

• Earl Haldan’s Daughter – Charles Kingsley

• La Belle Dame Sans Merci – John Keats

• The Highwayman – Alfred Noyes

• Yussouf – James Russell Lowell

• The Slave’s Dream – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

III. ‘ALL BEAUTEOUS THINGS’

• I Love All Beauteous Things – Robert Bridges

• On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer – John Keats

• Lean Out of the Window – James Joyce

• The Old Woman – Joseph Campbell

• A Passer-by – Robert Bridges

• Cargoes – John Masefield

• The Solitary Reaper – William Wordsworth

IV. NATURE

• O Summer Sun – Laurence Binyon

• To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train – Frances Cornford

• The World – William Wordsworth

• Daybreak – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• A Fine Day – Michael Drayton

• How Beautiful is the Rain – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• The Daffodils – William Wordsworth

• Composed upon Westminster Bridge – William Wordsworth

• From The Cloud – Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Written in March – William Wordsworth

• The Eagle – Lord Tennyson

• The Snare – James Stephens

• The Fly – William Blake

• All That’s Past – Walter de la Mare

V. LOVE

• Lux in Tenebris – Robert Browning

• She Walks in Beauty – Lord Byron

• There is a Lady Sweet and Kind – Unknown

• Light – F. W. Bourdillon

VI. LOYALTIES

• The Soldier – Rupert Brooke

• Breathes there the Man, with Soul so Dead? – Sir Walter Scott

• How Sleep the Brave – William Collins

• I Vow to Thee, My Country – Sir Cecil Spring-Rice

VII. LIFE AND VALUES

• From Ulysses – Lord Tennyson

• Going Down-Hill on a Bicycle – Henry Charles Beeching

• The Character of a Happy Life – Henry Wotton

• Dream-Pedlary – Thomas Lovell Beddoes

• Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth – Arthur Hugh Clough

• The War Song of Dinas Vawr – Thomas Love Peacock

• The Arrow and the Song – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Fame and Friendship – Henry Austin Dobson

• I Remember, I Remember – Thomas Hood

• Shut in, Shut out – Harold Begbie

VIII. TIME, DEATH AND MUTABILITY

• Uphill – Christina Georgina Rossetti

• ’Tis but a Week – Gerald Gould

• Coronach – Sir Walter Scott

• Fear no More – William Shakespeare

• Virtue – George Herbert

• To Daffodils – Robert Herrick

• Death the Leveller – James Shirley

• Time, you old Gipsy Man – Ralph Hodgson

• Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley

IX. FAITH IN LIFE

• In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’ – Thomas Hardy

• Heights and Depths – William Canton

• Heraclitus – William Johnson Cory

• Egypt's Might is Tumbled Down – Mary E. Coleridge

• Joy and Woe are Woven Fine – William Blake

APPENDIX

• Notes and Aids to Study