Category: Poems from Poems

Blake’s wonderful poetic sequence, Songs of Innocence and Experience stands as a beautifully concise, thought-provoking and memorable way to show the intermingling of both human and natural beauty and brutality. His Lamb and Tyger are perhaps the most well-known examples of this. I used his simple quatrains to offer my take on these universal themes. … Continue reading “6. Unchanging truths: the two contrary states of the human soul”

As I near my eighth decade, I can no longer ignore the approaching reality of death. Ours is perhaps the first generation when the promise of a reunion in the after-life, which I believed in as a child, is not generally held. I used Coventry Patmore’s moving poem A Farewell to imagine my feelings at … Continue reading “7. Unchanging truths: parting”

I began writing my book Poems from Poems just before lockdown in 2020, so inevitably the strangeness and alarm of that time features in several of my poems. Here are a few examples: My take on Andrew Marvell’s incomparable To His Coy Mistress aims to show the frustration of the young man separated from his … Continue reading “8. Covid: young love”

Do you remember the time when meeting our nearest was permitted in the garden, but only at a safe distance? I took Tennyson’s love poem Come Into The Garden, Maud and used it to show a grandmother’s anguish at this impossible situation: “Come into the garden, my darling, my darling, For it is permitted at … Continue reading “9. Covid: other perspectives”