Poems, scored

Keats, at twenty-two, imagines dying before he has written the books in him, before he has traced the romance he sees in the night sky, before he has loved. The sonnet turns in its last lines: standing alone on the shore of the world, he thinks until love and fame sink to nothing.

A traveler stands where two roads part in an autumn wood, looks down one, and takes the other, though both are worn 'really about the same'. He imagines telling the story years later, with a sigh, as the choice that made all the difference. Frost wrote it partly as a gentle joke on his friend Edward Thomas, who always regretted the path he had not taken.

Six stanzas of questions to a tiger 'burning bright': what immortal hand or eye could make it, with what hammer, chain, furnace and anvil, and whether the maker who made the Lamb could make this too. The last stanza repeats the first, with one word changed: 'Could' becomes 'Dare'.

Eight lines on homesickness for a place that cannot be returned to: the 'blue remembered hills' of a country seen from far off, 'the land of lost content', and 'the happy highways where I went / And cannot come again'. Housman, a Latin scholar in London, wrote of a Shropshire he barely knew.

At a coppice gate on the century's last evening, the frozen land looks like the nineteenth century's corpse and every spirit seems as fervourless as the speaker. Then an aged, frail thrush bursts into joyful song. With so little cause for it, Hardy can only think the bird knew of 'some blessed Hope' of which he himself was unaware.