FAMOUS SHORT VERSES

Unless you wish to aim very high indeed, the safest foundation for the bluffer in poetry is to have full knowledge of what most people can merely recollect hazily. Here, the couplet – two lines of verse that frequently rhyme – is your friend. And so is anything of four lines or under (or even more in the case of Wordsworth’s estimable ‘The Rainbow’) To this end, commit the following 20 snatches of verse (or as many of them as you can) to memory, remember where they came from and who wrote them, and use them at every opportunity. NB: the secret in most cases is to know the second line.

1. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all
   Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
   ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, John Keats
2. The boy stood on the burning deck
   Whence all but he had fled;
   The flame that lit the battle’s wreck
   Shone round him o’er the dead.
   ‘Casabianca’, Felicia Dorothea Hemans
3. I grow old...I grow old...
   I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
   ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, TS Eliot
4. Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
   Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.
   ‘The Ballad of East and West’, Rudyard Kipling
5. – O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
   To break earth’s sleep at all?
   ‘Futility’, Wilfred Owen
6. Come live with me and be my love,
   And we will all the pleasures prove.
   ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, Christopher Marlowe
7. Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range,
   Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
   ‘Locksley Hall’, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
8. Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
   Smiles awake you when you rise.
   ‘Golden Slumbers’ (and borrowed by The Beatles for
   ‘Golden Slumbers’, Abbey Road), Thomas Dekker
9. Here a little child I stand,
   Heaving up my either hand.
   ‘A Child’s Grace’, Robert Herrick
10. But soon a wonder came to light,
    That showed the rogues they lied:
    The man recovered of the bite,
    The dog it was that died.
    ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog’,
    Oliver Goldsmith (NB: the secret here
    is to remember the first line.)
11. To see a world in a grain of sand,
    And a heaven in a wild flower,
    Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
    And eternity in an hour.
    ‘Auguries of Innocence’, William Blake
12. Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
    O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
    ‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in her Nest with
    the Plough, November, 1785’, Robert Burns
    (NB: the secret here is to try to remember what must be the longest title of any poem.)
13. My heart leaps up when I behold
    A rainbow in the sky:
    So was it when my life began;
    So is it now I am a man;
    So be it when I shall grow old,
    Or let me die!
    The child is father of the man;
    And I could wish my days to be
    Bound each to each by natural piety.
    ‘The Rainbow’, William Wordsworth
14. O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
    Through all the wide Border his steed was the best.
    ‘Lochinvar’, Sir Walter Scott
15. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
    And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.
    ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, Lord Byron
16. The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
    If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
    ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Percy Bysshe Shelley
17. I mount! I fly!
    O Grave! Where is thy victory?
    O Death! Where is thy sting?
    ‘The Dying Christian to his Soul’, Alexander Pope
18. Against the Brydale day, which was not long:
    Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.
    ‘Prothalamion’, Edmund Spenser
19. Stands the church clock at ten to three?
    And is there honey still for tea?
    ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, Rupert Brooke
20. Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
    A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse – and Thou.
    ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur’, Edward FitzGerald