Poets and Poetry
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Poets and Poetry’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem about a suicidal cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th, 1854.
In 1853, Britain, France and Turkey went to war with Russia. On October 25th, 1854, during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, Lord Raglan ordered a cavalry brigade to raid some small hill-top gun emplacements. Somehow the orders got garbled. What Lord Cardigan read was an order to lead 670 lightly-armed horsemen straight at the main body of the Russian army.
Michael Drayton’s lady friend breaks up with him, and really it’s a relief, absolutely the best thing to do. Unless...
Michael Drayton was an English poet of William Shakespeare’s generation, remembered today for his poems on English history and geography, and his clever imitations of Horace and Ovid. In 1593, he began publishing Idea: The Shepherd’s Garland in which he recorded the ups and downs of his attachment to a lady from Warwickshire. The sonnet below appeared in the 1619 edition.
On a visit to England in 1599, Swiss doctor Thomas Platter found time to pop across the Thames and take in a show.
In 1599, Swiss physician Thomas Platter and his older half-brother, Felix, paid a visit to England, then ruled by Elizabeth I. Two o’clock in the afternoon of Tuesday September 21st found Thomas at a theatre ‘across the water’ in Southwark. He may have attended the fading Rose; but most scholars assume he crowded into the brand new Globe to watch one of Mr Shakespeare’s much-admired plays.
Three years before the Great War, Rudyard Kipling recalled how one English king simply paid his bullying neighbours to stay at home.
In the reign of Ethelred the Unready (r. 978-1016) Viking raiders harassed the people of eastern and southern England so cruelly that the King bribed them to stop. In a verse contribution to CRL Fletcher’s A School History of England (1911), Rudyard Kipling drew the moral for any nation listless enough to buy a quiet life.
Marullus was disgusted at the way that the fickle people of Rome turned so easily from one hero to another.
In 60 BC, three rivals for control of the Roman Republic, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, formed the Triumvirate, an uneasy alliance. Crassus died in 53 out in Syria. Caesar defeated Pompey in Greece in 48, and Pompey’s sons in Spain in 45. He returned home to popular adoration, and in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Marullus was disgusted by this celebration of victory for Roman over Roman.
William Cowper told Lady Hesketh about a walk beside the river at Olney, and the affecting behaviour of his spaniel Beau.
In June 1788, William Cowper wrote to his friend Lady Hesketh about a remarkable act of devotion from his spaniel Beau. It all happened when Cowper, who now lived a rather retired life owing to his shattered nerves, was taking a break from his books with a walk by the River Great Ouse near Olney in Buckinghamshire. The following month he cast the tale into verse.