Sir John Betjeman was one of England’s Poet Laureates, and perhaps the most loved, who spent a good deal of time in his favourite town of Sidmouth in North Devon. He even wrote a poem about it:
Farewell seductive Sidmouth by the sea
Older and more exclusive than Torquay
You’re the town for me!
William Wordsworth (the Lake District poet)
William Wordsworth wrote many poems on nature. Born in Cockermouth and educated in Hawkshead (in Cumbria), the house where he lived in Grasmere, is now a popular tourist attraction.
William’s sister Dorothy was also a poet, and not shy about her views on the circular house built on Belle Isle, the largest of the Lake District islands. Writing that ‘one of the pleasantest spots on earth, has been deformed by man’. Local William Dell was not impressed either, describing it as looking ‘like a tea canister in a shop window’.
A Victorian Poet of Italian Heritage
Despite her Italian parentage, Christina Rossetti was born and raised in England. All four children had good educations (her brother was also a poet). She was regarded as the finest poet of the Victorian era.
Christina was devoutly religious, causing her to refuse two offers of marriage. She led a reclusive life after one brother’s death, and died age just 64. Despite never marrying, she wrote some of the greatest-ever love poems. And this poem on colours:
What is pink? a rose is pink
By a fountain’s brink.
What is red? a poppy’s red
In its barley bed.
What is blue? the sky is blue
Where the clouds float thro’.
What is white? a swan is white
Sailing in the light.
What is yellow? pears are yellow,
Rich and ripe and mellow.
What is green? the grass is green,
With small flowers between.
What is violet? clouds are violet
In the summer twilight.
What is orange? Why, an orange,
Just an orange!
England’s Greatest Ever Nature Poet?
DH Lawrence (born in Nottingham) did not just write banned novels, his nature poems are amazing. He had a controversial life, running off with the wife of his professor. But they did remain together, until his early death from TB complications.
While they lived in Sicily, DH wrote Snake. On coming across a venomous reptile, his ‘English education’ tells him to throw a stick at it – the snake is not injured but convulses and goes back underground. Immediately he feels shame, missing out for a chance at meeting one of the ‘lords of life’. Read it aloud!
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
before me.He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
are venomous.And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into
that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing
himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Lawrence’s poem ‘Baby Tortoise‘ also speaks to empathy for other creatures:
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open
Like some iron door:
You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple
And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four-pinned toes,
Rowing slowly forward.
Rather like a baby working its limbs.
Except that you make slow, ageless progress
And a baby makes none.
Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.
An American Poet (buried in Yorkshire)
Sylvia Plath was an American poet who studied at Cambridge, where she met former poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Her poems was so good, she won the Pullitzer Prize for Literature (one of only four to receive it after death, in this case 20 years later).
Always suffering from depression (her novel The Bell Jar was based on her experiences in a 1950s hospital), this beautiful young mother sadly killed herself in the harsh winter of 1963, placing her head in the gas oven. Tragically years later, her son also committed suicide. She is buried near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire.