British Poetry Workshop

Poems read for a British Poetry workshop (India Study Center, May 2021, with Dr. Sridhar Rajeshwaran, Dr. Nilufer Bharucha, and Dr. Preeti Shirodkar), compiled poet by poet from Chaucer through Eliot’s The Waste Land – plus a few extra poems I found on the way.

After the workshop, I lovingly collected these into a single document, which laid out, split into folios, got printed and then bound it myself for a copy of my own.

Putting them up here so I can read them whenever I please without too much of a hunt.

Geoffrey Chaucer

• The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue
• The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Christopher Marlowe

• Doctor Faustus

Sir Philip Sidney

• Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show
• Alas, have I not pain enough, my friend

Edmund Spenser

• Amoretti LXXV: One Day I Wrote her Name

William Shakespeare

• Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
• Speech: “All the world’s a stage”
• The quality of mercy is not strained
• Many a time and oft
• Scene from Othello

Robert Herrick

• To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
• To Anthea, who may Command him Anything
• To Anthea*

Sir John Suckling

• A Soldier
• Song: I prithee send me back my heart
• Song: I prithee spare me gentle boy*

Richard Lovelace

• The Snail
• To Althea, from Prison
• The Grasshopper*

Thomas Carew

• Disdain Returned
• To my Inconstant Mistress

Henry Vaughan

• Friends Departed
• The Retreat

John Donne

• The Canonization
• The Sun Rising
• The Flea
• Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud
• No Man is an Island’

Andrew Marvell

• To His Coy Mistress

George Herbert

• The Pulley

John Milton

• Sonnet 19: When I consider how my light is spent | On His Blindness
• Sonnet 7: How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth | On Arriving at the Age of Twenty three

John Dryden

• Farewell Ungrateful Traitor
• Song to a Fair Young Lady Going out of Town in the Spring

Alexander Pope

• Ode on Solitude
• On A Certain Lady At Court
• The Universal Prayer*
• You know where you did despise*

Oliver Goldsmith

• The Village Preacher
• The Village Schoolmaster

Thomas Gray

• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

William Blake

• Introduction to the Songs of Innocence
• The Lamb
• The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young
• The Tyger
• The Clod and the Pebble
• Introduction to the Songs of Experience
• A Poison Tree
• The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow*

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Kubla Khan – also a favourite poem
• Frost at Midnight

William Wordsworth

• We Are Seven
• Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
• She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways – also a favourite poem
• The Solitary Reaper

John Keats

• La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
• When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be
• from Endymion
• To Autumn
• To Homer

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Ozymandias – also a favourite poem
• To a Skylark

Lord Byron (George Gordon)

• She Walks in Beauty
• January 22nd, Missolonghi
• The Isles of Greece
• The Destruction of Sennacherib
• Prometheus

Robert Burns

• A Red, Red Rose
• Auld Lang Syne

Robert Southey

• Poems on the Slave Trade

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

• Break, Break, Break
• Tithonus
• Ulysses – also a favourite poem
• from The Princess: Home they Brought her Warrior Dead
• The Charge of the Light Brigade

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• The Cry of the Children
• Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Emily Brontë

• No Coward Soul Is Mine
• Hope

Matthew Arnold

• Dover Beach
• Isolation: To Marguerite
• To Marguerite: Continued
• Growing Old

Robert Browning

• My Last Duchess
• Meeting at Night
• Parting at Morning
• Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
• Porphyria’s Lover

Christina Rossetti

• After Death
• “Crying, my little one, footsore and weary”
• When I am dead, my dearest
• Who Has Seen the Wind?
• Echo
• Remember

William Butler Yeats

• A Prayer for My Daughter
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree
• When You Are Old
• An Acre Of Grass
• He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven – also a favourite poem
• The Four Ages of Man
• The Second Coming

W. H. Auden

• Partition – a poem
• Lullaby
• Funeral Blues
• The Unknown Citizen
• The More Loving One

Gerard Manley Hopkins

• The Windhover | To Christ our Lord
• Spring and Fall
• Pied Beauty

T. S. Eliot

• The Waste Land (Part I only) – full poem is a long poem

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* I discovered these while compiling the main set.