Victorian Poetry: An Anthology

Readings highlighted in gray will be included on the anthology’s companion website.

Preface
Introduction

Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
Song of the Shirt
The Workhouse Clock
The Bridge of Sighs

William Barnes (1801–1886)
The Gre’t Woak Tree
The Common a-Took In
My Orcha’d in Linden Lea
The Wife A-Lost
Tokens
The Turnstile
Woak Hill
The Wind at the Door

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838)
Sappho’s Song
Lines of Life
Revenge
The Factory
Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans
The Unknown Grave
Felicia Hemans
Night at Sea

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Felicia Hemans
The Young Queen
L.E.L.’s Last Question
The Cry of the Children
To George Sand: A Desire
To George Sand: A Recognition
Grief
The Romaunt of the Page
Lady Geraldine’s Courtship
A Woman’s Shortcomings
A Man’s Requirements
The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point
A Year’s Spinning
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Flush or Faunus
Hiram Power’s “Greek Slave”
A Curse for a Nation
from Aurora Leigh: Book 1; from Book 2; from Book 5
Mother and Poet
A Musical Instrument
Lord Walter’s Wife
My Heart and I

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
What is Poetry?

Caroline Norton (1808–1877)
Crippled Jane
A Voice from the Factories
The Mother’s Last Watch
The Picture of Sappho
The Poet’s Choice

Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883)
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
The Kraken
Mariana
Song [A spirit haunts the year’s last hours]
The Dying Swan
To —, with the Following Poem
The Palace of Art
Oenone
Fatima
The Lady of Shalott
The Hesperides
The Lotos-Eaters
Semele
Ulysses
The Epic
Morte d’Arthur
Break, break, break
St Simeon Stylites
The Two Voices
Locksley Hall
from The Princess

• As through the Land
• Sweet and Low
• The Splendour Falls
• Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead
• Ask Me No More
• Tears, Idle Tears
• Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal
• Come Down, O Maid
• [The Woman’s Cause is Man’s]

In Memoriam
The Eagle
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Maud
Tithonus
Flower in the Crannied Wall
The Holy Grail
To E. FitzGerald
Tiresias
Vastness
To the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava
Far—Far—Away
Crossing the Bar

Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833)
On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry, and on the Lyrical Poems of Alfred Tennyson

Robert Browning (1812–1889)
Johannes Agricola in Meditation
Porphyria’s Lover
My Last Duchess
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister
Count Gismond
Cristina
The Laboratory
“How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”
Pictor Ignotus
The Lost Leader
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church
Meeting at Night
Parting at Morning
Love Among the Ruins
A Woman’s Last Word
Fra Lippo Lippi
A Toccata of Galuppi’s
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”
The Statue and the Bust
How It Strikes a Contemporary
The Last Ride Together
Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha
Memorabilia
Andrea del Sarto
In a Year
Cleon
Two in the Campagna
A Grammarian’s Funeral
One Word More
Dis Aliter Visum
Abt Vogler
Rabbi Ben Ezra
Caliban upon Setebos
May and Death
Prospice
Amphibian
The Householder
House
Now
Epilogue
Love in a Life; Essay on Shelley, from The Ring and the Book, Bishop Blougram’s Apology

Edward Lear (1812–1888)
Selected Limericks
The Owl and the Pussy-cat
The Jumblies
Calico Pie
The Dong with a Luminous Nose
The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò
The Pobble Who Has No Toes
How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!

Grace Aguilar (1816–1847)
Past, Present, and Future: A Sketch
The Hebrew’s Appeal
Song of the Spanish Jews
The Wanderers

Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
High waving heather ’neath stormy blasts bending
I’ll come when thou art saddest
Loud without the wind was roaring
A little while, a little while
The Old Stoic
Shall Earth no more inspire thee
My Comforter
To Imagination
Plead for Me
Remembrance
Stars
No coward soul is mine
I’m happiest when most away
If grief for grief can touch thee
Often rebuked, yet always back returning

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861)
Duty—that’s to say complying
Epi-Strauss-ium
Easter Day
Easter Day II
Qui Laborat, Orat
Is it true, ye gods, who treat us
Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Hymnos Ahymnos
Seven Sonnets on the Thought of Death
Jacob
In the Great Metropolis
To spend uncounted years of pain
Recent English Poetry
from Dipsychus
from Amours de Voyage
The Latest Decalogue
“There is no God,” the Wicked Saith
That there are powers above us I admit

George Eliot (1819–1880)
Two Lovers
O, May I Join the Choir Invisible
Brother and Sister

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
The Forsaken Merman
Quiet Work
Shakespeare
To a Gipsy Child by the Seashore
Resignation
Memorial Verses
The Buried Life
Switzerland
The Scholar-Gipsy
Philomela
Preface to Poems, 1853
Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse
from The Function of Criticism at the Present Time
Thyrsis
Dover Beach
East London
West London
Rugby Chapel
Immortality
Palladium
Growing Old

Coventry Patmore (1823–1896)
from The Angel in the House
The Prologue
The Paragon
The Revelation
The Wife’s Tragedy
The Foreign Land
The Azalea
Departure
The Toys
A Farewell
To the Unknown Eros
To the Body

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864)
A Legend of Bregenz
The Cradle-Song of the Poor
The Lesson of the War, 1855
Thankfulness
A Woman’s Question
A Lost Chord
Two Worlds
A Woman’s Answer
A Woman’s Last Word
An Appeal
The Jubilee of 1850
A Desire
The Church in 1849
The Homeless Poor

George Meredith (1828–1909)
Modern Love
Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn
The Lark Ascending
Lucifer in Starlight

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
The Blessed Damozel
My Sister’s Sleep
Sister Helen
Jenny
Sybilla Palmifera
Lady Lilith
Mary Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee
The House of Life (1870 edition)
Silent Noon
A Sonnet is a moment’s monument
The Burden of Nineveh
Hand and Soul
The Orchard Pit
Robert Buchanan, “The Fleshly School” (full text)
“The Stealthy School (full text)
Found

Elizabeth Siddal (1829–1862)
A Year and a Day
Shepherd Turned Sailor
The Lust of the Eyes
Worn Out
At Last
Love and Hate
The Passing of Love
Lord, May I Come?

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
Goblin Market
Dream-Land
At Home
A Triad
Cousin Kate
Spring
A Birthday
Remember
After Death
An End
My Dream
An Apple-Gathering
Echo
Winter: My Secret
“No, Thank You, John”
May
A Pause of Thought
Song [“She sat and sang alway”]
Song [“When I am dead, my dearest”]
Dead before Death
Rest
The Convent Threshold
Up-Hill
“A Bruised Reed Shall He Not Break”
A Better Resurrection
The Prince’s Progress
Twice
What Would I Give?
Memory
L.E.L.
Life and Death
The Lowest Place
A Christmas Carol
Monna Innominata
Birchington Church-Yard
Have I Not Striven, My God?
“Endure Hardness”
An Echo from Willow-Wood
I wish I were a little bird
Cobwebs
In an Artist’s Studio
Introspective
“The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness”
Promises like Pie-Crust
In Progress
Sleeping at Last

Joseph Skipsey (1832–1903)
The Hartley Calamity
The Stars are Twinkling
Get Up!
The Dewdrop

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) )
How doth the little crocodile
You are old, Father William
Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur
Jabberwocky
The Walrus and the Carpenter

In winter, when the fields are white
The White Knight’s Song
A boat, beneath a sunny sky

William Morris (1834-1896)
Riding Together
Summer Dawn
The Defense of Guenevere
The Eve of Crécy
The Sailing of the Sword
The Blue Closet
The Tune of Seven Towers
The Haystack in the Floods
Two Red Roses Across the Moon
In Prison
Masters in this Hall
from The Earthly Paradise
An Apology
Chants for Socialists, No. 1: The Day is Coming
Thunder in the Garden
[Hopes and Fears for Art]
[from News from Nowhere]
[How I Became a Socialist]

James Thomson (1834–1882)
The City of Dreadful Night

W.S. Gilbert (1836–1911)
When I was a Lad
I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General
If You’re Anxious for to Shine
A Lady Fair, of Lineage High
I’ve Got a Little List
The Sun Whose Rays are All Ablaze

Augusta Webster (1837–1894)
By the Looking-Glass
Circe
The Happiest Girl in the World
A Castaway
Coming Home
An Inventor
Mother and Daughter

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909)
The Sundew
Choruses from Atalanta in Calydon
1. When the hounds of spring
2. Before the beginning of years
A Ballad of Life
A Ballad of Death
Laus Veneris
The Triumph of Time
Les Noyades
A Leave-Taking
Itylus
Anactoria
Hymn to Proserpine
Hermaphroditus
Rondel
A Match
Faustine
The Leper
Dolores
The Garden of Proserpine
Ave atque Vale
A Forsaken Garden
A Ballad of Dreamland
“Non Dolet”
Hertha
A Nympholept
The Lake of Gaube
from William Blake

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
Hap
Neutral Tones
Ditty
In a Wood
The Temporary the All
Friends Beyond
In a Eweleaze near Weatherbury
Drummer Hodge
The Darkling Thrush
The Ruined Maid
The Self-Unseeing
An August Midnight
God-Forgotten
In Tenebris
A Broken Appointment
The Man He Killed
A Trampwoman’s Tragedy
The Minute Before Meeting
Night in the Old Home
The Convergence of the Twain
Under the Waterfall
Poems of 1912-13
The Going
Your Last Drive
The Walk
Rain on a Grave
I Found Her Out There
Without Ceremony
Lament
The Haunter
The Voice
His Visitor
A Circular
A Dream or No
After a Journey
A Death-Day Recalled
Beeny Cliff
At Castle Boterel
Places
The Phantom Horsewoman
The Spell of the Rose
St. Launce’s Revisited
Where the Picnic Was
Channel Firing
In Time of “the Breaking of Nations”
The Oxen
Overlooking the River Stour
The Shadow on the Stone
During Wind and Rain
Afterwards
Proud Songsters
Nobody Comes

Mathilde Blind (1841–1896)
Entangled
from The Ascent of Man
[Winding all my life about thee]
On a Forsaken Lark’s Nest
Reapers
The Songs of Summer
The Red Sunsets, 1883
The Russian Student’s Tale
A Mother’s Dream
Manchester by Night
Rest

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
Author’s Preface
The Habit of Perfection
The Wreck of the Deutschland
God’s Grandeur
The Starlight Night
Spring
The Sea and the Skylark
The Windhover
Pied Beauty
Hurrahing in Harvest
The Caged Skylark
Binsey Poplars
The Candle Indoors
Felix Randal
Spring and Fall
Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves
Inversnaid
[As kingfishers catch fire]
Carrion Comfort
[No worst, there is none]
Harry Ploughman
[To seem the stranger lies my lot]
[I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day]
[My own heart let me more have pity on]
That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection
[Thou art indeed just, Lord]
To R. B.
Moonrise

Michael Field (Katharine Bradley [1846–1914] and Edith Cooper [1862–1913])
[Dreamless from happy sleep I woke]
[Atthis, my darling, thou did’st stray]
[Maids, not to you my mind doth change]
[Climbing the hill a coil of snakes]
La Gioconda
The Birth of Venus
The Sleeping Venus
A girl
[It was deep April, and the morn]
[Mortal, if thou art beloved]
[Sometimes I do dispatch my heart]
[She mingled me rue and roses]
The Grand Mogul
[Our myrtle is in flower]
Cyclamens
Unbosoming
[When I grow old]
To Christina Rossetti
Power in Silence
Nests in Elms
Eros
The Mummy Invokes His Soul
Old Ivories
Ebbtide at Sundown
Where the Blessed Feet Have Trod
Trinity

Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
A Letter from a Girl to Her Own Old Age
To One Poem in a Silent Time
Renouncement
Cradle-Song at Twilight
The Shepherdess
Parentage

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
[I saw red evening through the rain]
Bed in Summer
Whole Duty of Children
Looking Forward
The Land of Counterpane
The Land of Nod
Good and Bad Children
Requiem
[I have trod the upward and the downward slope]

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Helas!
Requiescat
E Tenebris
To Milton
Impression du Matin
Le Jardin
The Harlot’s House
Symphony in Yellow
from “The Decay of Lying”
from “The Critic as Artist”
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Disciple
The Artist
The Sphinx
The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Toru Dutt (1856–1877)
À mon Père
Savitri

Near Hastings
Baugmaree
The Lotus
Our Casuarina Tree

John Davidson (1857–1909)
A Northern Suburb
Thirty Bob a Week

A. Mary F. Robinson (1857–1944)
A Dialogue
[God Sent a Poet to Reform his Earth]
Song [Oh for the Wings of a Dove]
The Scape-Goat
Men and Monkeys
A Ballad of Forgotten Tunes
Neurasthenia
The Frozen River
The Present Age
Tree-Talk
Inter Pares

Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden (1858–1889)
The Lady Doctor
The Sister of Mercy
Love Versus Learning
Illusions
Scientific Wooing
The New Orthodoxy
Natural Selection
Solomon Redivivus, 1886
Christ, the Nazarene

Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936)
1887
[Loveliest of trees, the cherry now]
[On moonlit heath and lonesome bank]
[When I watch the living meet]
[When I was one-and-twenty]
[Look not in my eyes, for fear]
[Oh, when I was in love with you]
To an Athlete Dying Young
[The street sounds to the soldiers’ tread]
[This time of year a twelvemonth past]
[Is my team ploughing]
[Others, I am not the first]
[On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble]
[From far, from eve and morning]
[Into my heart an air that kills]
The Immortal Part
[Shot? so quick, so clean an ending?]
[With rue my heart is laden]
[Terence, this is stupid stuff]
[I hoed and trenched and weeded]
The Parallelogram; or, Infant Optimism
[In the morning, in the morning]
The Oracles
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
[Because I liked you better]
[Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?]
The African Lion

Francis Thompson (1859–1907)
The Hound of Heaven

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)
The Sunset of the Century

<Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861–1907)
The Lady of Trees
In London Town
The Witch
L’Oiseau Bleu
The Other Side of a Mirror
Words

Tekahionwake / E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913)
A Cry from an Indian Wife
The Happy Hunting Grounds
The Song My Paddle Sings
Kicking-Horse River
The Cattle Thief
Ojistoh
from His Sister’s Son
The Corn Husker
The Art of Alma-Tadema
The Lost Lagoon

May Kendall (1861–1943)
Lay of the Trilobite

The Conscientious Ghost
“Taking Long Views”
Woman’s Future
The Mermaid’s Chapel
Heraclitus in Church
To the Next Meeting
The Sandblast Girl and the Acid Man
Love and Matter
Fairies and the Philologist
In the Toy Shop
Journeying

Amy Levy (1861–1889)
Xantippe
Felo de Se
Magdalen
To Lallie
A London Plane-Tree
London in July
A March Day in London
Ballade of an Omnibus
Ballade of a Special Edition
Straw in the Street
London Poets
Borderland
The Old House
The Last Judgment
Cambridge in the Long
To Vernon Lee
The End of the Day
At a Dinner Party

Sir Henry Newbolt (1862–1938)
Vitaï Lampada
He Fell Among Thieves

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
Danny Deever
Tommy
Gunga Din
The Widow at Windsor
Mandalay
Recessional
The White Man’s Burden
Boots
If

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Ephemera
Down by the Salley Gardens
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Who Goes with Fergus?
The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart
Into the Twilight
[The wind blows out of the gates of the day]
The Cap and Bells
The Secret Rose
The Travail of Passion
He Remembers Forgotten Beauty
The Song of Wandering Aengus
He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Adam’s Curse

Arthur Symons (1865–1945)
Pastel
Maquillage
In Bohemia
The Absinthe Drinker
Javanese Dancers
Nora on the Pavement
from The Decadent Movement in Literature
Prologue
On the Stage
La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge
Stella Maris
Mauve, Black, and Rose
White Heliotrope
To One in Alienation
Impression

Ernest Dowson (1867–1900)
Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae
To One in Bedlam
Extreme Unction
Spleen
Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

Villanelle of the Poet’s Road

Lionel Johnson (1867–1902)
Plato in London
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross
The Dark Angel
The Precept of Silence
Bagley Wood
The Church of a Dream
The Destroyer of a Soul
The Darkness
The Sleep of Will

Charlotte Mew (1869–1928)
V. R. I.
The Farmer’s Bride
Madeleine in Church
The Road to Kérity

Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945)
In Praise of Shame
The Two Loves
The Dead Poet

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949)
Indian Dancers
Palanquin-Bearers
Indian Weavers
Village-Song
In Praise of Henna
Cradle-Song
Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad
Street Cries
To India

Glossary