Poetry for Students, Volume 35

Charles Dickens had this to say (in his 1846Letters
to Italy, quoted in Christopher Woodward’s book,
In Ruins) about the neglect into which the remains
of the ancient structure had fallen:

To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its

walls and arches overgrown with green; its cor-

ridors open to the day; the long grass growing

in its porches; young trees of yesterday, spring-

ing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit:

chance produce of the seeds dropped there by

the birds who build their nests within its chinks

and crannies;... is to see the ghost of old

Rome, wicked wonderful old city.

Other nineteenth-century writers, including

the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Haw-

thorne, and Henry James, would all visit the

Coliseum and give their impressions of it in writ-

ing. It was impossible not to be moved by the

grand but also melancholy sight of greatness

gone the way of all things under the relentless

hand of time. Indeed, soon after Byron turns his

WHAT

DO I READ

NEXT?

 Byron’s short poem ‘‘She Walks in Beauty,’’

first published in his collection,Hebrew Mel-

odies,in1815,hasalwaysbeenoneofhismost

popular lyrics. The poem was written in praise

of the beauty of Byron’s young cousin, Lady

Wilmot Horton, whom Byron had seen at a

party wearing a mourning dress. Byron wrote

the poem when he got home from the party.

‘‘She Walks in Beauty,’’ can be found in any

selection of Byron’s poems.

 Adonais (1821), by Byron’s friend Percy

Bysshe Shelley, is Shelley’s fifty-five-stanza

elegy on the death of the poet John Keats,

who died in 1821. Shelley had invited the sick

Keats to visit him in Italy, but Keats died

before the two poets could meet. Like Byron’s

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, this elegy is writ-

ten in Spenserian stanzas. It can be found in

any edition of Shelley’s poems.

 Poems of the Sea(2001), edited by J. D.

McClatchy, in the Everyman’s Library Pocket

Poets series, contains a variety of poems about

the sea from all periods. Authors represented

include Homer; John Milton; W. S. Merwin;

Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Edgar Allan Poe;

Samuel Taylor Coleridge; William Shake-

speare; John Masefield; Constantine Cav-

afy; and Wallace Stevens.

 The Sea! The Sea! An Anthology of Poems

(2005), edited by Peter Jay, is a collection of

poems about the sea. It includes some anony-

mous poems, including ‘‘The Seafarer’’ in Old

English, as well as poems by Tennyson, Mase-

field, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins,

John Donne, Paul Vale ́ry, and many others.

The book was published to celebrate the

two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of

Trafalgar in 1805, in which the British Navy

defeated the French fleet.

English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology

(1996), edited by Stanley Applebaum, is a

selection of 123 poems by the six major Eng-

lish Romantic poets: William Blake, William

Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John

Keats (including his poem ‘‘On the Sea’’),

Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Most

of the major short poems by these poets are

included, and excerpts from longer ones.

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African

American Nature Poetry(2009), edited by

Camille T. Dungy, consists of 180 poems by

ninety-three African American poets, includ-

ing such well-known figures as Phillis Wheat-

ley, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert

Hayden, and Melvin B. Tolson, as well as

newer voices, including Douglas Kearney,

Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. The

selections cover well over a century in African

American writing, from slavery to Recon-

struction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black

Arts Movement of the 1960s, and the present.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage