Best Remembered Poems

LINES

INTRODUCTION

Best remembered, when applied to a poem, is a fuzzy expression. Poems highly regarded in one century may be forgotten in the next, and poems that blush unseen are often discovered generations later. Poems much studied by professors of literature may be unknown to everybody outside of academia. Poems everyone knows, such as Casey at the Bat, are usually considered doggerel by the critics and unworthy of attention. Works that are well known in Canada or England may not be well known here in the U.S., and vice versa. Poems loved by the elderly may be unfamiliar to the middle-aged, and the young these days are generally too hooked on inane rock lyrics to read any poetry.

Even if a time, place and particular kind of reader are specified, how can one decide which poems are best known? William Harmon, who teaches English literature at the University of North Carolina, has examined what he considers our nation’s most popular poems in a book titled The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry: The Top 100 Poems (Columbia University Press, 1990). Harmon selects as top those poems that have the most reprint listings in The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry. This is one way to define best remembered, but how accurately does it reflect public sentiment? Maybe it just reflects the taste of compilers, who have a notorious habit of cribbing from earlier collections.

One of the most successful of all anthologies—it is still in print—is One Hundred and One Famous Poems, first published in 1916. The compiler and original publisher, Roy J. Cook, wrote in his Preface: A spirit of daring out of proportion to any hope of gain must at times possess a publisher. I recently glanced through this volume and was struck by the fact that about half its poems are now flyblown, and many are by authors whose names are as unfamiliar as the names in Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. I will cite one typical example. Maltbie Davenport Babcock, a New York Presbyterian minister, authored a poem that begins:

Be strong!

We are not here to play, to dream, to drift;

We have hard work to do, and loads to lift;

Shun not the struggle—face it; ’tis God’s gift.

Another long-selling anthology of popular verse is Hazel Felle-man’s Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936). Best loved is far from the same as best remembered. Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, is known to everybody, but few today have read it, and even fewer love it. One can recall poems assigned in high school or college without liking them or having glanced at them since. And just what does best loved mean? A poem intensely relished by a small group of readers, yet unknown to others? A poem moderately liked by everybody, but not passionately loved by anyone?

With all these dreary caveats in mind, and others I haven’t mentioned, here are the poems that my intuition tells me are among the most well known at the moment among those in the United States who like poetry. I am not concerned with titles known to those who never read a book. (What poems would they call best remembered, I wonder?) I have made no effort to conduct a survey. Indeed, I cannot imagine how any survey could with reasonable accuracy confirm or disconfirm my list. It goes without saying that no other anthologist would make the same selection. I myself might have made a different selection were I in a different mood.

Many well-known poems are not in this book because of their length. Length, too, is a fuzzy term, but clearly a small book like this could not include Byron’s Don Juan or Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, or even moderately long ballads such as Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner or Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes.

This book contains only one selection, Abou Ben Adhem, that is a translation. I am among those who hold that poetry is untranslatable except for the plots of epics and long narrative verse. Like all so-called translations, I consider Abou Ben Adhem to be a fresh poem roughly based on the ideas in another. Nor is this collection the place (with a few exceptions, such as Home, Sweet Home) for lyrics written to be set to music, even though many popular songs are poems in their own right and better known than most verse in this anthology.

The poems I have selected are not necessarily those I think are best loved either by critics or the general public. They certainly are not the poems best loved by me. Nor are they poems I consider the greatest, whatever that may mean. They are, I repeat, poems I assume to be the best remembered, or at least among the best remembered, in the sense that they are the best known to ordinary Americans who like poetry. Many poems I consider great, as well as poems not so great but which I personally cherish, are not here because they are not well known enough. Some poems I care not a rap about, and regard as doggerel, are here because they obviously are so well known. In some cases I may have cheated a bit by slipping in poems not so familiar now as they were in the recent past.

The selections are arranged alphabetically by author. My hope is that readers will enjoy rereading their favorites, and that here and there one may encounter a gem he or she has never seen before.

ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN (1832–1911)

ELIZABETH AKERS ALLEN was literary editor of the Portland, Maine, Daily Advertiser. Rock Me to Sleep, her only poem of lasting popularity, first appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post in 1860, under the pseudonym Florence Percy. The poem was falsely claimed by Alexander Ball, a New Jersey harness maker and writer of doggerel, whose friends published an entire book defending his outrageous claim. The wild story is told by Mrs. Allen in her Sunset Song and Other Verses (1902) and by Burton E. Stevenson in Famous Single Poems (1923). No controversy over a poem’s authorship was ever funnier or more bitter.

By 1923, thirty composers had set Rock Me to Sleep to music. It was sung in minstrel shows, issued as an illustrated gift book and printed on thousands of leaflets that were distributed to Civil War soldiers.

Rock Me to Sleep

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,

Make me a child again just for to-night!

Mother, come back from the echoless shore,

Take me again to your heart as of yore;

Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,

Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;

Over my slumbers your loving watch keep—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!

I am so weary of toil and of tears—

Toil without recompense, tears all in vain—

Take them and give me my childhood again!

I have grown weary of dust and decay,

Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away,

Weary of sowing for others to reap—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,

Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you!

Many a summer the grass has grown green,

Blossomed and faded, our faces between;

Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain,

Long I to-night for your presence again;

Come from the silence so long and so deep—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

Over my heart in the days that are flown,

No love like mother-love ever has shone;

No other worship abides and endures,

Faithful, unselfish, and patient, like yours;

None like a mother can charm away pain

From the sick soul and the world-weary brain;

Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold,

Fall on your shoulders again as of old;

Let it drop over my forehead to-night,

Shading my faint eyes away from the light;

For with its sunny-edged shadows once more,

Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore;

Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

Mother, dear mother, the years have been long

Since I last listened your lullaby song;

Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem

Womanhood’s years have been only a dream.

Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,

With your light lashes just sweeping my face,

Never hereafter to wake or to weep—

Rock me to sleep, mother—rock me to sleep!

MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822–1888)

SON OF the headmaster of Rugby, and a graduate of Oxford, Arnold became a distinguished Victorian poet, essayist and critic of both literature and religion. His attacks on literal interpretation of the Bible made him one of England’s pioneers in the higher criticism of Scripture. For ten years he was a professor of poetry at Oxford, and throughout his life held a variety of government posts related to education. My poems, he wrote,

represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might fairly be urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet, because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.

Dover Beach, Arnold’s best-known poem, is from his New Poems (1867). It was set to music by the American composer Samuel Barber.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the Straits;—on the French coast, the light

Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the ebb meets the moon-blanch’d sand,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d;

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757–1827)

THE ARTIST, poet and mystic William Blake included his poem about the tiger in Songs of Experience (1794), where it was hand-lettered and accompanied by his drawing of a tiger prowling through a jungle. Symmetry, in Blake’s day, was a synonym for beauty. In Portraits from Memory, Bertrand Russell recalls meeting a Cambridge student friend who was quoting the poem in the darkest part of a winding college staircase. Russell continues:

I had never, till that moment, heard of Blake, and the poem affected me so much that I became dizzy and had to lean against the wall.

The Tyger

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp,

Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears

And water’d heaven with their tears:

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,

In the forests of the night:

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

FRANCIS WILLIAM BOURDILLON (1852–1921)

EDUCATED AT Oxford, Bourdillon lived a quiet, happily married, uneventful life in England as a tutor. He was an ardent mountaineer and an authority on French literature, highly respected for his translation of Aucassin et Nicolette, a thirteenth-century French romance. Although he published many books of verse, only The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, from Among the Flowers and Other Poems (1878), is remembered today.

The Night Has a Thousand Eyes

The night has a thousand eyes,

And the day but one;

Yet the light of the bright world dies

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies

When love is done.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812–1889)

FOR SOME reason—a decay of Protestant faith among critics?—Browning is much less studied now than fifty years ago when Browning clubs flourished all over the nation. He was such a distinguished poet in his day that he was buried in Westminster Abbey. The story of his romantic elopement with the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the basis of Rudolf Besier’s play The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1930), later made into a successful movie.

The song sung by the little silk-mill girl Pippa in Pippa Passes (1841) is surely Browning’s most quoted, most memorized, lyric. It was set to music by Amy Beach, and recorded by several famous singers.

Meeting at Night (from Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845) is one of Browning’s best-loved love lyrics, happily free of the obscure lines that characterize his longer poems. Note how omitting the n of in gives line six a slushy sound, and how the abccba palindromic rhyme scheme suggests the slow movement of waves. Browning’s short sequel, Parting at Morning, has a similar palindromic rhyme scheme:

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,

And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:

And straight was a path of gold for him,

And the need of a world of men for me.

Critics have worried about the meaning of this brief lyric’s last two lines. Does him refer to the sun and its gold path on the water, or to the man who is returning to profitable work? Is me the man who speaks in Meeting at Night or is it the woman speaking about how a society of men needs her?

Pippa’s Song

The year’s at the spring

And day’s at the morn;

Morning’s at seven;

The hillside’s dew-pearled;

The lark’s on the wing;

The snail’s on the thorn:

God’s in his heaven—

All’s right with the world!

Meeting at Night

The gray sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794–1878)

A SELF-EDUCATED journalist—he was chief editor of the New York Evening Post for half a century—Bryant was one of the nation’s earliest and most revered nature writers. Most of Thanatopsis, composed when he was only seventeen, first appeared in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1811. Washington Irving edited Bryant’s collected works, and Bryant himself edited the most famous of early anthologies, the mammoth Family Library of Poetry and Song.

Bryant’s calm, humorless aloofness was satirized by James Russell Lowell:

There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,

As a smooth, silent iceberg that never is ignified ...

He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,

There’s no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-olation;

Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,

But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on—

He’s too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on.

Thanatopsis

To him who in the love of Nature holds

Communion with her visible forms, she speaks

A various language; for his gayer hours

She has a voice of gladness, and a smile

And eloquence of beauty, and she glides

Into his darker musings, with a mild

And healing sympathy, that steals away

Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts

Of the last bitter hour come like a blight

Over thy spirit, and sad images

Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,

And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,

Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;—

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice—Yet a few days, and thee

The all-beholding sun shall see no more

In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,

Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,

Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist

Thy image. Earth, that nourish’d thee, shall claim

Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,

And, lost each human trace, surrendering up

Thine individual being, shalt thou go

To mix for ever with the elements,

To be a brother to the insensible rock,

And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain

Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak

Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place

Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down

With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,

The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,

All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills

Rock-ribb’d and ancient as the sun,—the vales

Stretching in pensive quietness between;

The venerable woods; rivers that move

In majesty, and the complaining brooks

That make the meadows green; and, pour’d round all,

Old Ocean’s grey and melancholy waste,—

Are but the solemn decorations all

Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,

The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,

Are shining on the sad abodes of death,

Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings

Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,

Or lose thyself in the continuous woods

Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound

Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:

And millions in those solitudes, since first

The flight of years began, have laid them down

In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.

So shalt thou rest: and what if thou withdraw

In silence from the living, and no friend

Take note of thy departure? All that breathe

Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh

When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care

Plod on, and each one as before will chase

His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave

Their mirth and their employments, and shall come

And make their bed with thee. As the long train

Of ages glide away, the sons of men,

The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes

In