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.

An old-time preacher tells Genesis to his congregation. A lonely God steps out on space, makes light, sun, moon and stars, walks the valleys and mountains into being, spits out the seas and fills the earth with green things and living creatures. Still lonely, he sits by a river, kneels in the clay, and shapes a man 'like a mammy bending over her baby', then blows into him the breath of life.

Two of Shakespeare's sonnets about time. In 12 the speaker counts the clock and watches everything fade, the day, the violet, dark hair, the trees, the harvest, and tells the young man that only children can defy Time's scythe. In 60 the minutes run to their end like waves toward a pebbled shore, Time digs lines in beauty's brow and mows everything down, yet the poet hopes his verse will stand against Time's cruel hand.

A sonnet about the Statue of Liberty, written in 1883 for an auction that raised money for its pedestal. It contrasts the bronze Colossus of Rhodes, a monument to conquest, with a 'mighty woman with a torch', the 'Mother of Exiles', who stands at New York's harbor and speaks without words: give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

A short prose poem that tells you to stay drunk at all times, so as not to feel Time crushing your shoulders: drunk on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you please. And if you wake up sober, on a palace staircase or in a ditch or alone in your room, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock what time it is; they will all answer that it is time to get drunk.