A short and sweet poem to end our first season of Pause For Poetry. Sara Teasdale was a leading female voice in American poetry at the beginning of the 20th Century, won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1917 and saw much critical and popular success. https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-30442 We're taking a little break over summer but will be …

A sort of elegy written for a flower, this poem uses the image of the dead rose as a reflection of the fragiliy of life. Barrett Browning was an incredibly successful and talented poet who, through her marriage to poet Robert Browning, became very well-known in her lifetime. https://allpoetry.com/A-Dead-Rose Find out more about Pause for Poetry at …

Whitman discusses the inevitabilty of death and finds peace in those assurances of the title. A hugely influential figure in American poetry and American culture, Whitman wrote mostly in free verse and much of his work addresses the ideals of humanism. Leaves of Grass, the collection from which Assurances is taken, was revised multiple times by Whi…

A wonderful example of a poem actually about being in love (rather than unrequited love or loss etc.), Rossetti uses the celebration of a birthday to celebrate her love with some glorious natural imagery in the second stanza. Rossetti wrote some incredible poetry - we'll definitely be featuring more soon. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/4499…

Keats wrote this poem after his beloved brother George left England for America in 1818. The sonnet uses fantastical imagery of nature which Keats then undermines in the last couplet by implying that they mean little without George there with him to appreciate them. During this time Keats contracted tuberculosis and he died at the age of 25. George…

The two long stanzas in this poem represent The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden. The sumptuous imagery in this poem seem to celebrate creativity and life, and the clever parallels between the two stanzas heighten the links Yeats is making between the joys and fragility of life. https://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_two…

Dickinson's work was never published in her lifetime but has come to be appreciated as some of the finest of American poetry. The very grounded initial image of walking a dog by the beach quickly morphs into a fantastical adventure with mermaids, pearls and personifiation of the sea itself. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50976/i-started-ear…

... or A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment. This poem was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1797 after a (possibly opium-influenced) dream and was published in 1816. Supposedly Coleridge woke up from his dream with th intention of writing hundreds of lines of poetry but was interrupted by an infamous 'person from Porlock' (Porlock is a small villag…

An elegy written for his son who died of the Plague in 1603. Full of anguish, Jonson eschews the traditional form of an elegy and offers little in the way of hope or an end to his emotional suffering. Jonson's comparison between his son and his poems is particularly moving, intrinsically linking Jonson's identiy as an author, his 'fathership' of hi…

One of the best-known sonnets in the English language, Shelley's Ozymandias is a masterful study of timelessness, power and vanity. What does it mean to leave a legacy? Might Shelley's poem even outlast the legacy of Ozymanidas? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias Find out more about Pause for Poetry at http://airglowaudio.com/p…

A slightly regretful vow to mature, this poem was written by Byron in 1817 and published in 1830 after his death. An elegy-of-sorts to a wild youth, Byron shares Donne's skill in sometimes not-so-subtle sexual imagery and playfulness in language. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43845/so-well-go-no-more-a-roving Find out more about Pause for …

Written as an imagined elegy from a wife to a husband, Remembrance was published as part of a collection of the Brontë sisters' poetry in 1846, one year before the publication of Wuthering Heights - her only novel - and just two years before her death in 1848. The poetry collection was called 'Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell', the sisters' a…

Wordsworth was very fond of an Ode (an ode is a poem written celebrating something or someone) - this wasn't even the only ode he wrote to a skylark! We'll hopefully perform his other skylark poem soon. William Wrodsworth is widely renkowned as one fo the finest English poets so his work will no-doubt become a regular feature on this podcast. Make …

Also known as Lucy Ashton's Song, this short but impactful poem was written as part of the Scottish writer's novel The Bride of Lammermoor. (Is a Scot called Scott a type of nominitive determinism?) https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/lucy-ashtons-song/ Find out more about Pause for Poetry at http://airglowaudio.com/pfp…

While largely ignored during his lifetime, Blake in many ways epitomises British Romanticism. He was a talented poet, painter and printmaker and wrote this poem around 1803, although it wasn't published until 60 years later. An augury is another name for an omen. Subscribe to Pause For Poetry to make sure you catch the next part of this huge poem l…

This poem was written in 1908 by Australian Henry Lawson. Lawson is regarded as one of the finest Australian poets of his time and was the first writer to be given a state funeral on his death in 1922. http://www.ironbarkresources.com/henrylawson/InTheDaysWhenWeAreDead.html Find out more about Pause for Poetry at http://airglowaudio.com/pfp…

Fringford Brook, as well as being quite difficult to say (yes these are edited!), is, along with Hethe, a pretty village in rural Oxfordshire, UK. Violet Jacob was a Scottish novelist and poet, pehaps best known for her novel Flemington. If you have any recommendations of other female poets for us to read (must have died more than 70 years ago to b…

Diplomat (and spy?) Sir Henry Wotton wrote several well-known poems which were first published in the posthumous collection Reliquiae Wottonianae. Do you think he manages to capture the character of a happy life? How different is having a happy life today compared to being an aristocrat in Elizabethan times? https://poets.org/poem/character-happy-l…

Today's poem, often simply referred to by its first line, is an Elizabethan ballad from 1603 that is attributed to contemporary court lute player (or is that lutist? Luter?) John Dowland. The true author of the poem is unknown. https://allpoetry.com/Weep-You-No-More,-Sad-Fountains Find out more about Pause for Poetry at http://airglowaudio.com/pfp…

The ever-fascinating John Donne wrote this poem some time around 1611 for his wife Anne before leaving her to go on a trip to Europe. A valediction is an evocative term for a farewell and the first recorded usage of the term in English dates back to around the time Donne wrote this poem. https://allpoetry.com/A-Valediction:-Forbidding-Mourning Find…