Because of the fact that Lord Byron
Synonymised ‘female’ and ‘siren’,
Thoughts of craftswomen, draughtswomen,
Scotswomen, yachtswomen
Did his each waking minute environ.

People asked of the poet John Dryden,
‘To the lyric, your range, won’t you widen?’
Said the poet, enraged,
‘Can’t you see I’m engaged
In translating the myth of Poseidon!’

The poet named Sam Taylor Coleridge
Had marital woes. I’ll the whole abridge:
He explained, ‘On my life,
Making love to my wife
Is like trying to coax and cajole a fridge.’

The scholar and poet named Gray
Guessed at Peterhouse, Cambridge he’d stay,
But to Pembroke upped sticks
In 1756
When rowdy undergrads drove him away.

A poet by name Robert Herrick
Went to Dartmoor to work as a cleric.
Every poem he wrote
Went in one book of note,
So don’t you dare call it generic.

There once was a poet called Marlowe
From Canterbury, nowhere near Harlow.
He was quite the big noise,
Loved tobacco and boys,
Like the Robbie to Shakespeare’s Gaz Barlow.

The poet-historian Milton
Described battles in Wiltshire, near Wilton.
He may as well have not written
His History of Britain,
But his poetry’s aged like fine Stilton.

A four-foot-six Catholic named Pope
In town couldn’t not interlope.
So he left to make grottos
And countless bon mottos
On what springs eternal, viz. hope.

Volume Two of The Poems of Shelley
Features cover art by Botticelli.
Bysshe’s corpora encased
By Italia, birthplace
Of Venus and tagliatelle.

There once was a poet called Spenser
Who’d have no doubt got into Mensa.
Dedications umpteen
He inscribed to the Queen,
And so never ran foul of the censor.

The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
A notable Twickenham denizen,
Wrote of stag, hind and roe,
And the ‘lily-white doe’,
But never the subject of venison.

* ᴬⁿᵈ ᴾᵉᵗᵉʳʰᵒᵘˢᵉ
† ᴼᶠᶠᵉʳᵉᵈ
‡ ᶜᶦʳᶜᵃ

It is worth saying something about a more recent predecessor, namely Pope. Gray was somewhat influenced by him – they did meet, though it is not known when – and ‘In 1752 he began a systematic study of the history of English poetry […] encouraged by a copy of Pope’s outline for such a history’.2 However, Gray notably contrasts Pope’s professionalism, for, while the latter lived by his pen, Gray’s ‘desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement.’3 He spent a lot of time in post-Popean Twickenham, at Strawberry Hill, the house built by his friend Horace Walpole a third of a mile from Pope’s villa.

Gray could have been a Parkleys Poet Laureate alongside Dryden and Tennyson, but refused the Lord Chamberlain’s offer. Like Brooke, Gray wrote one outstandingly beloved poem, and it was for this that the laureateship was offered: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church‐Yard’. Bloom calls it ‘perhaps [the] most allusive of all poems in the language’, in which ‘Gray compounds Milton with Spenser’. The DNB says it is ‘one of the great poems of the English language; to many readers, learned and otherwise, it has stood almost for the idea of poetry itself.’ In closing this series on the Parkleys Poets, I’ll quote the opening and let it stand without comment.

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The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (1–4)

Pope went from the City, to Hammersmith, to Binfield in Windsor Forest, where his self-education began – ‘his masters were […] Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden’3 – and in 1716 to Chiswick, where he lived in what’s now the Mawson Arms. Finally, in 1719 he leased land in Twickenham and built his villa and famous grotto. Around 1740, he sent his servant to improve his view by felling trees at Ham House, to the chagrin of the 4th Earl of Dysart: ‘My Lord complains, that Pope, stark mad with gardens, / Has lopt three trees the value of three farthings’.4

Pope was a genius at coining expressions so good that people attribute them to Shakespeare – ‘fools rush in’ etc. – but ‘What makes him so formidable, a Milton among satirists, is The Dunciad, certainly the poetic masterpiece of its century.’ This is Bloom, who says The Dunciad’s ending describes ‘simply the way things are’:

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Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All. (IV. 649–56)

However, the DNB says ‘When the nation is challenged or declines, when the civil order seems in jeopardy, Pope and Dryden are likely to come up.’ There’s no sign of them, so it must be that, as the meme saith, this is fine.

Of our Parkleys Poets, Marlowe is the only one whose eponymous adjective – ‘Marlovian’ – is not only listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but characterised, ‘with reference to his sonorous language and to the extremes of violence, cruelty, and ambition depicted’. Bloom says one finds in Marlowe ‘impiety, audacity, worship of power, ambiguous sexuality, occult aspirations, defiance of moral order, and above all else a sheer exaltation of the possibilities of rhetoric, of the persuasive force of heroic poetry.’

Marlowe is also the only Parkleys Poet whose most important work is dramatic. ‘Of all non-Shakespearean plays from the early modern period, Doctor Faustus is probably the most widely read’.1 But it’s a play in blank verse – ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ – and I’ll quote from Faustus’s last speech, which Bloom calls ‘one of the great dramatic poems in the language’:

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Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven […]
                              let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul! […]
Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistopheles! (V. ii. 60–115)

Marlowe was not dragged to hell, but died from ‘a mortal wound above his right eye’, after a dinner in Deptford. The DNB records that ‘There was an argument over the bill’. Perhaps, influenced by his time in the Netherlands, Marlowe had suggested that they go Dutch.

More seriously, Thomas Nashe paid him tribute by saying ‘His lyfe he contemned in comparison of the libertie of speech.’

In 1883 Tennyson was the first poet given a barony, raising him to Byron’s rank, whose death he remembered: ‘I was fourteen […] I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: “Byron is dead!”’

Tennyson had been made Poet Laureate in 1850 – ‘the most felicitous of the poets laureate’ (DNB) – around the time he frequented the Star and Garter and lived in Twickenham. ‘Such was the sense of national loss’, the DNB goes on, ‘the abolition of the office of poet laureate was solemnly mooted when Tennyson died.’

Like Tennyson Court – the last to be built – Tennyson is a later addition to the canon. None of the Parkleys Poets match the architecture in being modernist, but, Brooke aside, Tennyson is the modernest, and the only one whose voice is preserved, thanks to the recording of him reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. But rather than those uninteresting dactylics, I’ll close with ‘Crossing the Bar’, which Tennyson said should be ‘put […] at the end of all editions of my poems’:

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Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar. (9–16)

Tennyson – ‘a creature of some primordial English stock’1 – crossed the bar in 1892 and was interred, with Spenser and fellow Laureate Dryden, in Poets’ Corner. ‘I have no life to give’, he once said, ‘for mine has been one of feelings not of actions’. A vindication of the manliness of feelings.

Pope perfected heroic couplets, but Dryden is praised at his expense in Gotham by Charles Churchill, who, with the Muses,

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                                                              often laid,
Fast by the Thames, in Ham’s inspiring shade,
Amongst those Poets, which make up your train […]
Have I, at your command, in verse grown grey,
But not impair’d, heard Dryden tune that lay,
Which might have drawn an Angel from his sphere […]
Whilst Pope, with envy stung, enflam’d with pride,
Pip’d to the vacant air on t’ other side. (III. 415–22/24)

That’s Dryden, pictured at Ham House, Pope piping in his grotto over on the Middlesex bank – a sort of west London derby.

Like Ham House, Dryden flourished during the Restoration, becoming the first Poet Laureate in 1670. (The other Parkleys Poet Laureate is Tennyson.)

If any poem Dryden wrote during his laureateship could draw angels, it would be that identified by Walter Savage Landor: ‘nothing was ever written in hymn equal to the beginning of Dryden’s Religio Laici’:

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Dim as the borrow’d beams of Moon and Stars
To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers,
Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high,
Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky
Not light us here; So Reason’s glimmering Ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtfull way,
But guide us upward to a better Day.
And as those nightly Tapers disappear
When Day’s bright Lord ascends our Hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religions sight;
So dyes, and so dissolves in Supernatural Light. (1–11)

What we think of as modern poetry is Wordsworthianism […] [But] Coleridge actually invented what was to be the Wordsworthian mode in such early poems as “The Eolian Harp” (1795) and “Frost at Midnight” (1798)[.] (Harold Bloom)

Yet, ‘Although he first became known to his contemporaries as a poet […] by the end of his life it was rather as a talker and thinker that he was famous’ (H. J. Jackson).

However it’s told, Coleridge’s story contains a preponderance of sadness. Like Byron, Dryden, and Herrick, he lost his father when still a child. Later, he loved a woman called Sara and married a woman called Sara, but not the same Sara. He became addicted to opium and never quit. De Quincey said, ‘He wanted better bread than can be made with wheat’; Carlos Baker that, ‘He moved restlessly across the English landscape, pursued by demons that he could not escape because they were inside him.’ But his most perceptive critic was probably himself: ‘From my earliest recollection I have had a consciousness of Power without Strength.’1

He might have done his most notable writing as critic and philosopher, but this series is on the Parkleys Poets. Bloom says ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’ belong to the ‘conversational’ group of poems, but I will quote from the much loved example of the ‘daemonic’ group, ‘Kubla Khan’, written in 1797 but not published until 1816 (at Byron’s behest). Think of Ham, Eric Lyons, and Coleridge Court:

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In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (1–11)

Milton was born in the house at the sign of the Spread Eagle, Bread Street, and attended St Paul’s School from around the age of twelve. He went to Christ’s College, Cambridge early in 1625, and after that lived in Hammersmith, then Horton.

Poetry notwithstanding, for much of his career Milton was a writer of prose polemics, his Areopagitica (1644), written during the Civil War, being one of the great arguments against censorship: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’

Like Spenser, his ‘master’ and ‘original’, Milton saw his poetic role as a national one. But, unlike the royalist Spenser, from the Restoration in 1660 Milton the republican did not get to live in an England of his choosing. Perhaps this influenced him in eschewing the Arthurian and, in Paradise Lost, widely considered the greatest English poem, attempting to ‘justify the ways of God to men’.

The poem begins with Satan, who Coleridge said possesses ‘a singularity of daring’ and Shelley ‘energy and magnificence’. But it ends with Adam and Eve, all too human, paradise having been lost:

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They looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat […]
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way. (XII. 641–49)

Is paradise regained to be found in the vicinity of Milton Court? Perhaps, according to one former resident of Ham – a saint no less – who said ‘I dreamed about it when a schoolboy as if it were paradise.’1

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A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,
Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine,
The cruell markes of many’ a bloody field[.] (I. i. 1)

The knight is accompanied by the Lady Una (true religion) and a dwarf, and the first thing the trio do is to shelter from a storm in some woods, which is the occasion for Spenser’s ‘sylva’ or catalogue of trees:

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The sayling Pine, the Cedar proud and tall,
The vine-propp Elme, the Poplar neuer dry,
The builder Oake, sole king of forrests all,
The Aspine good for staues, the Cypresse funerall.

The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme… (I. i. 8–9)

How many can you identify in sylvan Parkleys, and how did Eric Lyons know to build Spenser Court next to the holm oak?

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I send, I send here my supremest kiss
To thee my silver-footed Thamesis.
No more shall I reiterate thy Strand,
Whereon so many stately structures stand;
Nor in the summer’s sweeter evenings go
To bathe in thee, as thousand others do. (1–6)

It was the Civil War that came to the rescue. Parliamentarian success in the south-west, in 1646, had the benefit of sweeping Herrick, a Royalist, back to London. There, he published the book for which he is remembered, and in which ‘His Tears to Thamesis’ appears.

[H]e saw Hesperides as a definitive life’s work […] Containing almost 1400 poems, probably almost all that he could find to print in 1647, Hesperides was and remains the only effort by an important English poet to publish his entire œuvre in one organized collection. (DNB)

The Hesperides are the nymphs of the west in Greek mythology. Herrick may have been born in the City but must have been familiar with the more westerly, Arcadian Thames-side region where Herrick Court now stands, in order to have continued, in his address to the river,

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No more shall I along thy crystal glide
In barge with boughs and rushes beautified,
With soft-smooth virgins (for our chaste disport)
To Richmond, Kingston, and to Hampton Court. (7–10)

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’Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love! (1–4)

In the fifth stanza he shakes himself back to the present and the heroic:

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But ’tis not thus—and ’tis not here
Such thoughts should shake my Soul, nor now
Where Glory decks the hero’s bier,
Or binds his brow. (17–20)

Seize the day, in other words. (Byron was actually the first English writer to employ the Horatian aphorism carpe diem.) He had gone to Greece to fight for freedom and against tyranny; and, unlike Brooke, who said ‘If I should die’, perhaps at some level wanted to. Particularly after the deaths of Keats and Shelley, he probably invested something in the idea that the good die young. The poem ends,

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Seek out—less often sought than found—
A Soldier’s Grave, for thee the best;
Then look around, and choose thy Ground,
And take thy Rest! (37–40)

About three weeks later, Byron collapsed in a violent convulsion. ‘[T]o terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece’, he told his doctor. Two days more and he was dead.

If you seek a Byronic hero in Byron Court, look, in the words of Thomas Babington Macaulay, for ‘a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection’.

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It is a woe too ‘deep for tears,’ when all
Is reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,
Whose light adorned the world around it, leaves
Those who remain behind, not sobs or groans,
The passionate tumult of a clinging hope;
But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were. (713–20)

But life in Shelley Court surely has more in common with the paradise of a redeemed world described at the end of Prometheus Unbound:

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The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains,
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed: — but man:
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, — the King
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: — but man:
Passionless? no — yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made, or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended Heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane. (III. iv. 193–204)

Shelley was born near Horsham, Sussex in 1792 and drowned off the Italian coast, at the age of twenty-nine, in 1822. In many ways he, with Byron, is what we expect of the Romantic, the one who wrestles with consciousness, lives dangerously, and dies young. His fellow poet Robert Browning paid him tribute by saying, ‘Whatever Shelley was, he was with an admirable sincerity.’

‘Over the smooth green lawns of the Edwardian era’, says the Headmaster in Alan Bennett’s play Forty Years On, ‘the sun seemed always to shine, like one’s last summer term at school that memory has turned all to gold.’ This is Rupert Brooke’s England, and his most famous poem is an elegy to it:

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If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

In the event, the foreign field was on the Greek island of Skyros, imbued by his remains, Brooke imagined, with flowers, sunshine, laughter, and gentleness. But perhaps he would also have been pleased to think that, forty years on, some corner of an English field fitting that description would become Brooke Court.