I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and Other Poems You Half Remember from School edited by Ana Sampson
Michael O’Mara, £9.99
This anthology is not intended, as Ana Sampson makes clear in her introduction, to be a collection of the best poems or poets but, rather, “a nostalgic tour of those half-remembered lines from school as well as the poems and fragments we find, sometimes to our surprise, we can recite”. Nevertheless, she manages to include poems by Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Donne, Milton, Swift, Pope, Goldsmith, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Hopkins, Housman, Yeats and Masefield. And, from the last century, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, WH Auden, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin. Which is pretty comprehensive.
There are the poems you would expect, such as To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold, Not Waving But Drowning by Stevie Smith and The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. And then there are the lines you know, even if you can no longer remember who wrote them: “’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” (Clement Moore); “What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare” (WH Davies); “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” (Emma Lazarus); “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, / Weep, and you weep alone” (Ella Wheeler); and “The boy stood on the burning deck / Whence all but he had fled” (Felicia Hemans).
Many of the poems here – especially the high Victorian ones – reek of a British Empire won on the playing fields of Eton and on which the sun famously never set. There’s If, of course, by Rudyard Kipling, although there is also Tommy, a bitterer piece of work. It’s not just our empire, either; there’s “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord” from The Battle Hymn of the Republic written by Julia Ward Howe during the American Civil War.
Although we get Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitaï Lampada (“There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight / Ten to make and the match to win”) we don’t get Drake’s Drum. But that’s a minor quibble. Most homes have a poetry anthology but if you don’t – or if your copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury is falling apart – then invest in a copy of Ana Sampson’s new book. Once you dip in and start you won’t be able to stop.
Keith Richmond
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