Full Description
The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me is the ultimate reader's companion to poetry: a selection of 100 classic poems from ?ve centuries with lively "companion" commentaries to go with and illuminate each poem. The heavy bear can be many things which go with the bearer: another self or alter ego, the burden of poetry or art, what weighs us down and makes us do what we don't really want to do as well as what pulls us back to our selves, the animal side which makes us bearable or human.
The editors' selection ranges from Wyatt, Ralegh and Shakespeare in the 16th century, to Donne, Milton and Marvell in the 17th, to Swift, Pope and Johnson in the 18th. It embraces the Romantic visions of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, as well as the later, darker outlook of Browning, Tennyson and Hardy, and seeks enlightenment in the shadowlands of Emily Dickinson, Wilde and Yeats.
As well as journeying with the reader through some of the greatest poems in the English language, The Heavy Bear encounters many modern poets, not least Delmore Schwartz, whose sense of con?ict between self and society gave birth to this anthology's title-poem, 'The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me'. Others include some of the major figures in Irish poetry Brendan Kennelly knew personally as well as wrote about, including Patrick Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland.
The poems keep each other company in this highly original compilation, questioning each other in a continuing thematic, imagistic debate which the editors seek to explore in their responses, trying at all times to de?ne their sense and vision of poetry as disturbing, questioning, enlightening companionship for the reader.
Both editors are renowned communicators of poetry: Brendan Kennelly (1936-2021) as one of Ireland's best-loved poets, as Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin, and as a popular cultural commentator on Irish television; Neil Astley as founder and editor of Bloodaxe Books and editor of the Staying Alive anthology series.
Contents
Neil Astley
11 Preface: The Making of the Heavy Bear
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)
19 Introduction: The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
25 'They flee from me that sometime did me seek'
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)
27 'Wyatt resteth here'
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
30 'Thou blind man's mark'
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
32 'One day I wrote her name upon the strand'
Chidiock Tichborne (1558-1586)
34 Elegy for Himself
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
36 Elegia VI
Sir Walter Ralegh (1552-1618)
40 The Lie
Robert Southwell (?1561-1595)
44 The Burning Babe
Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
46 Since There's No Help
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
48 Sonnet 73: 'That time of year...'
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
50 'Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss'
Thomas Campion (1567-1620)
53 What if a Day
John Donne (1572-1631)
55 The Flea
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
58 On My First Son
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
60 Gather Ye Rosebuds
Henry King (1592-1669)
62 Exequy upon His Wife
George Herbert (1593-1633)
67 Love III
Edmund Waller (1606-1687)
69 Go, Lovely Rose
Richard Crashaw (1612/3-1649)
71 The Flaming Heart
Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)
74 To Althea from Prison
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
76 A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment
Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
79 They Are All Gone into the World of Light!
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)
82 To His Coy Mistress
John Milton (1608-1674)
86 from Paradise Lost
Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)
89 Dreams
John Dryden (1631-1700)
93 from Absalom and Achitophel
John Oldham (1653-1683)
95 from The Third Satire of Juvenal, imitated
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
101 A Description of a City Shower
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
104 Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
107 from London: A Poem
Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
114 An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard
Christopher Smart (1722-1771)
120 from Jubilate Agno
Oliver Goldsmith (c.1730-1774)
125 from The Deserted Village
William Cowper (1731-1800)
129 The Poplar-Field
William Blake (1757-1827)
131 The Tyger
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
134 Kubla Khan
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
138 Upon Westminster Bridge
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
140 Darkness
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
146 Ode to the West Wind
John Keats (1795-1821)
152 Ode to a Nightingale
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
158 I Remember, I Remember
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
160 Tithonus
John Clare (1793-1864)
163 I Am
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
165 My Last Duchess
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
169 How do I love thee?
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)
171 Stanzas (attr.)
Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
173 Remembrance
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
176 Dover Beach
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
180 Remember
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1892)
182 Sudden Light
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
184 Native Moments
Emily Dickinson (1822-1888)
186 Because I could not Stop for Death
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)
188 Renouncement
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)
190 The Windhover
George Meredith (1828-1909)
200 Lucifer in Starlight
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
202 Luke Havergal
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
205 from The Ballad of Reading Gaol
A.E. Housman (1859-1936)
215 Good creatures do you love your lives
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
217 The Voice
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)
219 Madeleine in Church
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)
227 The Listeners
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
229 The Road Not Taken
Edward Thomas (1878-1918)
232 Adlestrop
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
234 Break of Day in the Trenches
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
236 Base Details
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
238 Strange Meeting
W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
241 The Second Coming]
242 Leda and the Swan
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
247 My Grandmother's Love Letters
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
249 Snake
Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
253 Sonnet: What my lips have kissed
Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
255 The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
257 A Grave
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
259 The Snowman
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
261 Full Moon
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
262 'next to of course god america i'
Archibald Macleish (1892-1982)
264 Ars Poetica
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
267 The Journey of the Magi
Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967)
270 Shancoduff
270 Epic
276 Brendan Kennelly: 'A Man I Knew'
Ruth Pitter (1897-1992)
277 The Coffin Worm
Elizabeth Daryush (1887-1977)
279 'Anger lay by me all night long'
Sheila Wingfield (1906-1992)
281 from Beat Drum, Beat Heart
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
286 In Memory of W.B. Yeats
Keith Douglas (1920-1944)
289 How to Kill
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
291 Prayer Before Birth
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
295 Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
297 The River God
Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
299 The Thought-Fox
300 from The Burnt Fox
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
302 Morning Song
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
304 Living
Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016)
305 September Song
Austin Clarke (1894-1974)
307 The Redemptorist
W.S. Graham (1918-1986)
310 The Beast in the Space
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
312 Diving into the Wreck
Michael Longley (born 1939)
316 Wounds
Derek Mahon (1941-2020)
319 A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
324 One Art
Derek Walcott (1930-2017)
326 Love after Love
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
327 Aubade
Anne Stevenson (1933-2020)
330 Poem for a Daughter
Ken Smith (1938-2003)
332 Being the third song of Urias
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
334 from Sweeney Astray
Eavan Boland (1944-2020)
340 The Journey
348 References
352 Acknowledgements
