Poems, hymns, and other songs I loved into memory, along with others I have only lately learned to love.
I know a handful or these by, or nearly by, heart (❤️/🩷).
Table of Contents
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
This will be continually updated and cleaned up as I gradually add to my Commonplaces section.
Recurring sources:
Leland Ryken:
CCEL:
Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin University
The Temple, by George Herbert (Messy. You have been warned.)
Old Songs
William Shakespeare (1564—1616)
“To be, or not to be, that is the question” 🩷
John Donne (1572–1631)
Holy Sonnet 11: [“Spit in my face, you Jews”]
George Herbert (1593–1633)
“Redemption” ❤️
“The Agony” ❤️
“The Elixir” ❤️
Poetry Foundation, CCEL, Ryken
“The Collar” ❤️
Poetry Foundation, CCEL (1633), Ryken, The Priory
“The Pulley” ❤️
“Jordan (I)” 🩷
“Love (III)” ❤️
“The Jews”
“The Temper (I)”
John Milton (1608–1674)
Sonnet 7: “How soon hath Time” ❤️
Sonnet 19: “When I consider how my light is spent” ❤️
John Newton (1725–1807)
“Prayer answered by crosses” (“I asked the Lord”) ❤️
William Cowper (1731–1800)
“Light shining out of darkness” (“God moves in mysterious ways”) 🩷
William Blake (1757–1827)
“The Lamb”
“The Tyger”
John Keats (1795–1821)
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Ozymandias”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“A Psalm of Life: What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist” 🩷
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The Kraken” ❤️
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“An emerald is as green as grass”
“Who Has Seen the Wind?” 🩷
“Stroke a flint…” 🩷
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
[First published in 1918.]
“God’s Grandeur” ❤️
[“As Kingfishers Catch Fire”] ❤️
“Pied Beauty” 🩷
[“Carrion Comfort”] ❤️
[“Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord”] 🩷
[“It was a hard thing to undo this knot”]
Simmering
“The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo”
Recommended by Kilby Austin in her “The pursuit of beauty: an answer”.
Recorded readings:
Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Nothing Gold Can Stay” ❤️
“Fire and Ice” ❤️
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)
Four Quartets
Excerpts from “Burnt Norton,” (I)
John Updike (1932–2009)
“Seven Stanzas at Easter”
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
“Digging”
New Songs
Rhina Espaillat
“Here” 🩷
Luke Miller
“A Blessing” 🩷
Coldplay
“Viva La Vida”
The Oh Hellos
Abram Newcomer
“Pray for Poets” ❤️
Kilby Austin
Recommendations by The Rabbit Room readers
Rabbit Room roundup of Substack poets
I have yet to read something from each and every one of these poets, but I’m looking forward to working through the lists in coming days and weeks and years.
Do you also love any of these poems, hymns, or songs? If you do, let me know in the comments, and please do suggest others you think I might also appreciate.
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"loved into memory"— what a perfect description! I can certainly identify with this. Love your list.
This is wonderful! In exchange (though it's hardly a fair trade as you've pointed me to so many!), here's a poem by Anne Bradstreet I love (the ending in particular gets me): https://allpoetry.com/Upon-my-Son-Samuel-his-goeing-for-England,-Novem.-6,-1657.