Poetry page

Nettles by Vernon Scannell

My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.
‘Bed’ seemed a curious name for those green spears,
That regiment of spite behind the shed:
It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears
The boy came seeking comfort and I saw
White blisters beaded on his tender skin.
We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.
At last he offered us a watery grin,
And then I took my hook and honed the blade
And went outside and slashed in fury with it
Till not a nettle in that fierce parade
Stood upright any more. Next task: I lit
A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead.
But in two weeks the busy sun and rain
Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:
My son would often feel sharp wounds again.

This poem is studied at GCSE level and was written by an ex-soldier father who was haunted by war.

To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird that never wert, that from Heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher From the earth though springest like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, and singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightening of the sunken sun, o’er which clouds are bright’ning, thou dost float and run; like an unbodied joy whose race had just begun.

The pale purple even melts around thy flight; like a star from heaven, in the broad day-light though art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen are the arrows of that silver sphere, whose intense lamp narrows in the white dawn clear until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air with thy voice is loud, as, when the night is bare, from one lonely cloud the moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflow’d.

What art thou we know not; what is most like thee? Drops so bright to see as from thy presense showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden in the light of thought, singing hymns unbidden, till the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden in a palace tower, soothing her love-laden soul in secret hour with music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden in a dell of dew, Scattering unbeholden it’s a real hue among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embower’d in its own green leaves, by warm winds deflower’d, till the scent it gives makes with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers on the twinkling grass, rain-awaken’d flowers, all that ever was joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, Sprite or Bird, what sweet thoughts are thine: praise of love or wine that panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus Hymeneal, or triumphant chant, match’d with thine would be all but an empty vaunt, a thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains of thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains? What shapes of thine own kind? What ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance langour cannot be: shadow of annoyance never came near thee: thou lovest: but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.

Waking or asleep, thou of death must deem things more true and deep than we mortals dream, or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after, and pine for what is not: our sincerest pain is fraught; our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn, hate, and pride; and fear; if we were things born not to shed a tear, I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures of delightful sound, Better than all treasures than in books are found, thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know, such harmonious madness from my lips would flow, the world should listen then, as I am listening now.

Husband of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, Percy wrote these beautifully romantic 21 stanzas to a fervent little bird in whose harmonious madness he experienced the divine spirit. Like Socrates, he believed that self-controlled poetry would be eclisped by that of men driven out of their minds. Thomas Hardy later wrote in homage his poem “Shelley’s Skylark.”

THE PEDIGREE OF HONEY by Emily Dickinson

The pedigree of honey
does not concern the bee; 
A clover any time to him
Is aristocracy. 

American poet, Dickinson self-isolated after the civil war in 1865 and it is believed that this human contact-free time with correspondence only by letters, allowed her to imagination to work and positively informed her poetry.