An esteemed friend of mine recently came up with the brilliant challenge of selecting our “Desert Island Poems” that is ten poems of reasonable length (so no Paradise Lost) including at least one in translation or a language other than English. We disliked each other’s choices and we never finished the conversation, but I loved the idea and thought I’d put it up here.
The selection process was difficult, as I imagine it is for Desert Island Discs and raised several questions. Am I choosing my favourite poems, or those I think are the best? Who am I trying to impress? Am I attempting somehow to represent myself or just choosing my favourites? It’s made me wonder how many people come off Desert Island Discs cursing themselves for their choices. I don’t even think I’ve managed to come up with my own definitive version, but I hope I’ve struck a balance.
By the way, the point of posting this is to get other people to put up their own selections so I can admire them. So come on you horrible English teachers who tell me you like my blog: stop reading, sign in and get writing. (Love you).
And don’t feel you have to choose ten. Whatever you feel like.
1. Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Read this out loud slowly and savour the sounds. ‘Fragment’, indeed. It’s perfect!
2. The Jumblies by Edward Lear
A masterpiece of travel literature and because poetry doesn’t have to be serious.
3. O where are you going? by W H Auden
In case the island’s full of noises and I need to be brave.
4. My Last Duchess by Robert Browning
Get someone to read this to you. A word perfect portrayal of an absolute monster .
5. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
I’ll need humour and something to think about on the island.
6. Catullus 63/ “The Attis Poem” by Catullus (A Roman)
The worst ‘morning after’ ever? Handy introduction
7. Beeny Cliff by Thomas Hardy
Fell in love with this when I was 16. Can’t read it without crying now.
8. Rain Song by Badr Shakir al- Sayyab
A life-changer. Prepare to be blown away.
9. Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Heartbreaking. Let’s fly away, away…
10. Terence, this is stupid stuff by A. E. Houseman
Poetry or beer when times are tough?
Now I’ve done this, I’m still really dissatisfied: it seems too Romantic and why no female poets? Oh cripes. Am failure.
Following a Full Moon 
Nice articole! Keep up writing!
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The English teachers must be too scared of judgement to post their choices yet (the wusses.) I, on the other hand, already know I’m going to be terrible at this because I’m one of those dreadful people who hasn’t really read poetry since school. So the poems I know and love are from the A Level syllabus, circa 2005… I’m going to have to do this in stages. I might not even be able to get to ten, and I’m going to start with two and a half. Your list has given me lots of new poems to read!
1. Larkin’s An Arundel Tomb for its ambivalence. I love the line ‘Snow fell, undated.’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb
(1.5) (I don’t feel I can choose more than one poem by the same poet, but I also have a soft spot for For Sidney Bechet http://www.allinfo.org.uk/levelup/sidney.htm)
2. You’ve already chosen what might have been my first choice of Keats poem, so I’m going with Ode on Melancholy. It appeals to the artfully melancholic teenager in me.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44478/ode-on-melancholy
I would be much better at choosing ten paintings…
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Please please please choose ten paintings ,you can have a guest slot. You could have all ten by the same poet if you wanted , although someone has pointed out that in the original it’s only eight.. Thanks so much, Claire,I I love your choices (especially the last two lines of the Arundel Tomb). English teachers is silly.
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I think I might have meant ‘equivocation’ instead of ‘ambivalence’ when talking about Larkin. Hm… have to track down an English teacher to ask.
I would love to choose my Desert Island paintings! I would take it far too seriously and worry too much about leaving the wrong ones out. I can say with certainty though that one of my top eight/ten would be Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/405551/self-portrait-as-the-allegory-of-painting-la-pittura. The link gives a pretty good summary of why it’s such a fantastic painting. It’s just completely, uniquely confident (not least for the technical challenge of painting the top of her own head – such a self-assured thing to do) and I love its toughness.
Incidentally, talking of fascinating 17th century women I just listened to an episode of In Our Time on Aphra Behn http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0977v4t and I think you might enjoy it. I didn’t really know anything about her but she sounds awesome. Still tenuously connected with Desert Island Poems because she wrote poetry (utterly filthy apparently). I would need some of her resourcefulness when stuck on the island.
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Right, I’m going to submit a few now. More to come at a later date.
1. ‘Ulysses’ by Tennyson. I enjoy the heroic tone and the poise of the phrasing. At the end of another desk-bound day, I like to tell myself that one day I too will ‘Push off, and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows…’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses
2. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost. This one is in for its perfect quietness and the final repetition. Magic.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening
3. ‘Adlestrop’ by Edward Thomas. It often comes to mind when I’m looking listlessly out of a train window. The final line is a truly audacious use of county names for poetic effect!
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53744/adlestrop
4. ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ by Yeats, for how it moves towards those final lines. We all have our own gallery like this, I think.
5. ‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold. I’m sensing a pattern here, because this is another poem that captures its subject perfectly. At the same time, the ideas go beyond simple picture-painting. I often think of the ‘ignorant armies’ or the ‘darkling plain’ when watching the news. Depressing.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/dover-beach
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Thanks for this completely gorgeous selection of poems and such incisive comments. English teachers may serve a purpose after all !
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I’m also woefully lacking in poetry-reading experience, but when I found an anthology to meander through last year the one that really stuck with me was Ben Okri, ‘I Held You in the Square’. I felt like it absolutely captured that romantic and idealistic and above all fleeting moment of being completely swept up with bliss for someone and everything else falling away. It is such a vivid but unsustainable (cynic?) phase of falling in love that I was thrilled to come across it and feel that someone had managed to put the sensation in writing. Thank you for making me think of this again – I’m really enjoying pondering the DID question and reading all the recommendations..
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I love it when a poem suddenly strikes like that with full force.
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Many thanks to followingafullmoon for suggesting this exercise. It’s been real fun choosing. This is the list:
1. Who said that only one person can choose ‘Ode to a Nightingale’? It’s my number 1. Verse five takes my breath away no matter how many times I read it.
2.Gillian Clarke ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’. The power of poetry on a damaged mind – heart-rending.
3. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnet from the Portuguese ‘How do I love thee?’ Surely the best love poem ever.
4. Alice Meynell ‘Renouncement’. Powerful expression of suppressed passion, in a perfect sonnet.
5. Pam Ayres ‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’. At first reading, a funny poem about poetry. But it says a lot about how we use words, and what is poetry.
6. Kate Clanchy ‘Not Art’. What many women do as a matter of course and get little recognition for.
7. Andrew Salkey ‘A Song for England’. This is the nearest I could include as a poem in another language, Caribbean Patois. Poetry in translation rarely works for me.
8. Must have something by Byron, and would prefer ‘Don Juan’, (plenty of time to read it on a desert island)but the rules say it must be a short poem. So ‘Stanzas to Augusta’, the version that begins ‘Though the day of my destiny’s over’
9. Billy Collins ‘Introduction to Poetry’. How to read a poem, and how not to.
10. Tony Walsh ‘This is the Place’. Read out to the crowd at the open-air vigil following the Manchester Arena bombing. Look it up on youtube, and cry.
Well, that’s the thoughts of a retired English teacher who read poetry with her primary school children every day.
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Wow! Lucky primary school children if they got to read poems like this every day. I have just had an amazing time looking up the ones I didn’t know. I LOVE the Billy Collins and was so moved by the Tony Walsh: poetry doing what it should. Thank you.
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Glad you liked the selection. Re your blog No Woman No Cry, have you read Charles Causley’s The Ten Types of Hospital Visitor?
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I read it school. Makes even more sense now. Link below if anyone’s interested
https://allpoetry.com/Ten-Types-of-Hospital-Visitor
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Desert Island Poems – Frances White
Thanks, Helen, for inviting us to participate in this most enjoyable exercise. My choice of poems was inevitably limited to those I could find a link to. I formed a much longer list and whittled it down to this shortlist. They’re all poems that have stayed with me over many years, so I’m happy to present them without comment. I hope readers will find a poem here to enjoy.
1. Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/fern-hill/
2. To a Child Dancing in the Wind by WB Yeats
http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/to_a_child_dancing_in_the_wind.html
3. The Ambush by Brian Patten
http://www.brianpatten.co.uk/poetry.html
4. To Autumn by John Keats
http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poems/to_autumn.shtml
5. To Maeve by Mervyn Peake
http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2004/03/to-maeve-mervyn-peake.html
6. Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy
http://www.fulgura.de/sonett/karussel/original/prayer.htm
7. Defying Gravity by Roger McGough
https://janne-d.dreamwidth.org/71739.html
8. Flowers by Wendy Cope
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/flowers-by-wendy-cope-g8w5h5rhw5k
9.Christmas by John Betjeman
http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/787
10. Dante’s Inferno Canto I, Translated by Seamus Heaney
http://articles.latimes.com/1993-05-23/books/bk-38605_1_seamus-heaney
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Desert Island Poems: I’ve only just read this after your “It’s Arterial Blood” post. You have thrown down the gauntlet Helen. I wish I wasn’t so late taking it up, and I hesitate over my selections and the reasons for them, too. Who wouldn’t? Lets just say these are the ones that jump out on this particular day, and really there’s nothing here to frighten the horses. So: ten of my personal favourites, in no particular order, just the order in which I thought of them. Don’t ask me, though, if I could only take just one which would it be. Answer comes there none . . .
I’m sure the Wasteland is readily available, but two of my selections I couldn’t find published on line outside of the collections they come from. Not sure if I would have the right to re-produce them here but I would be happy to type them out if you or anyone is interested.
So . . .
1. From The Wasteland, T. S. Eliot: The first part of Section V – “What The Thunder Said” I love this section, starting from the first line “”After the torchlight . . . “ until the end of the 4th stanza: “Vienna London/ Unreal” It has an eerie, spooky feeling that reminds me of walking in the Mojave Desert where my parents lived for many years – a sometimes brutal and harsh seeming landscape which I learned to love, but some would see as the epitome of a wasteland. I can imagine some of the imagery here really striking a chord with your favourite – Al-Sayyab
2. Apples, John Harvey. I can’t help it – tears usually well up when I read this. Frustratingly, I can’t find a link to it anywhere on line. It’s from his collection Bluer Than This
3. Warming Her Pearls, Carol Ann Duffy https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56715/warming-her-pearls
4. Journey of the Maji, T. S. Eliot. I’d never heard this poem until I settled in Britain where it’s so often included as a reading at Christmas time. http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-journey-of-the-magi/
5. Little Tree, e. e. cummings. Another one on a Christms theme. We often like to read out loud at that time of year. There’s a childish/childlike element to much of his work. Strong echoes of my American upbringing. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47304/little-tree
5. Mending Wall, Robert Frost. Another reminder of my American roots. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
6. “What lips my lips have kissed . . .”, Edna St. Vincent Millay. This is one of her sonnets, not identified by number as far as I know, but by the first line. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46557/what-lips-my-lips-have-kissed-and-where-and-why
7. Ode To The Onion, Pablo Neruda. Only Neruda can make an onion sexy! (the version I have is in the “Being Alive” compilation, translated by Stephen Mitchell) http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/pablo_neruda/poems/15730
8. Good Bones, Margaret Atwood. Sort of a prose poem, this one, from her collection by the same name. I once heard her reading this on the radio, and was immediately taken. When I see it on the page now I hear her voice as I scan the words. She has such a beady eye, a dry wit, and often cuts straight to the heart of things. I couldn’t find a link to this piece on line either, but the book is readily available, and I commend it to you.
9. Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas. https://poets.org/poem/fern-hill One of so many poems introduced to me by my wife Julie
10. The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Edward Lear. Let’s round this off with some light hearted nonsense: a much needed medicine in difficult times! http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ll/pobble.html
As you say, a brilliant challenge, and I enjoyed doing it, your list and the others above, too.
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