Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen?
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the birds cry…
Category: poetry
“I have only once encountered pure evil in a person”: Auden on Yeats
Auden’s “In Memory of W B Yeats” is a great tribute poem, especially the closing lines: Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice…
Dylan Thomas, Poem in October, read by Dylan Thomas
It was my thirtieth year to heaven Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood And the mussel pooled and the heron Priested shore The morning beckon With water…
Versions of Alcman’s “Sleep”
At First Known When Lost, Stephen Pentz collects some versions of fragmentary lines by the Spartan lyric poem Alcman. This fragment was used by Edgar Allan Poe for the epigraph…
“Hell is where the damned stay, immobilized by their choices” – Rowan Williams on The Divine Comedy, TLS, September 12th 2017
From this review There is still a tendency among not very attentive readers – not to mention people who have read almost nothing of the work but have picked up…
Poem on Ballymanus Mine Disaster, 1943
On May 10th, 1943, a stray mine washed ashore in the Rosses of Donegal. What happened next is recounted in this Irish Times piece on a memorial unveiled in 1999:…
“Water”, Philip Larkin
If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water. Going to church Would entail a fording To dry, different clothes. My liturgy would employ…
Poems on the wind – John Hewitt, Patrick McDonagh, Wallace Stevens
From First Known When Lost: In the meantime, we have the wind. And poems about the wind. Providence White roses shatter, overblown, by the breath of a little wind undone,…
Séamus Sweeney 