Samuel Taylor Coleridge*

Samuel Tayler Coleridge (1772—1834) is describe by the Poetry Foundation as “the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse.” As a religious thinker his writings influenced philosophical views in the areas of aesthetics, theology, and the philosophy of the mind. His focus on the imagination, and the importance of well-chosen metaphors for influencing the way we view ourselves impacted English intellectual life.

His first collection, Poems on Various Subjects, appeared in 1796. During the preceding year he met William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. In 1797 and 1798, Coleridge lived in Nether Stowey, Somerset, just three miles from Wordsworth. This was the most productive poetic period of his life, in which Coleridge wrote such poems as “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Frost at Midnight”, and “The Nightingale”.

Coleridge’s great work of literary criticism Biographia Literaria appeared in 1817.

from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely 'twas, that God himself
Scarce seemèd there to be.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!—

To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends
And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom's door.

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Samuel Taylor Coleridge: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Gerard Smyth*

Gerard Smyth is above all else, a Dublin poet. He was born in Dublin in 1951, and lives there still. He is the author of eleven books of poetry. In his most-recent collection The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026), he has several poems about his city featuring various Dublin poets and artists, including Thomas Kinsella, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, and Luke Kelly (founding member of the folk group The Dubliners).

Smyth’s enriching nostalgia also reflects on musical greats from his youth, tributes to the beat poets, and acknowledgements of foreign-language poets he admires, such as Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva.

This May, my wife and I had the privilege of having lunch with Gerard Smyth, and John F. Deane, at a Dublin pub called “The Downing Well”. There we exchanged our latest poetry collections and talked of poetry — both in Ireland and Canada.

The following poem is from The Turn for Ithaca (Dedalus Press, 2026).

What the Young Saint Said

for John F Deane

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not Roman, not Greek,
or belonging only to pilgrim and conqueror
but the God of all things: the Judas Tree
and hornet’s nest, songthrush and garden slug.

Let God be God, not the bearer of so many names
or the judge who sits in the court of angels.
Let him not be the gatekeeper at the Gates of Wrath,
the tormenter of an innocent conscience.

Let God be God, the young saint said,
not the cause of holy wars
or one who sends his proxies to rob our mirth
but a God unbothered by heresies of dogma,
His presence heard in the singer’s voice,
sound of the orchestra, the iron gate
when it creaks, the bells on Paternoster Street.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Gerard Smyth: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Ella Higginson

Ella Higginson (c.1861—1940) is an early literary voice of the Pacific Northwest. She was born in Kansas, and was taken to Oregon by her parents in her early childhood. She began publishing poetry and short stories in national magazines shortly after she and her husband had settled in (what is now) Bellingham, Washington.

Among other things, she published six books of poetry, including When the Birds Go North Again (Macmillan, 1898), and The Vanishing Race and Other Poems (1911). She helped found Bellingham’s first library, was active in supporting women’s rights, and has been described as a “Protestant Ecofeminist”

Ella Higginson was the first Poet Laureate of Washington State.

She Prays

Lord God, Lord God, while perfect Love
--------Sits my hearthstone beside,
And Joy and Rapture are my guests,
--------And I am all untried,
And all my hours are blissful hours—
--------With me abide!

And Lord, Lord God, if Grief must come,
--------And friendship break away;
If I must drink Love’s quassia-cup
--------With trembling lips and gray,
And all my hours are bitter hours—
--------Be Thou my stay!

Yea, let me keep unto the end
--------My perfect faith in Thee,
And bow, submissive, when Thou sayest,
--------“It cannot be!”
Thou, only, knowest all my heart—
--------Be merciful to me!

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Patrick Kavanagh *

Patrick Kavanagh (1904—1967) is one of Ireland’s best-loved poets. He was born in County Monaghan, and published his first collection Ploughman and Other Poems (MacMillan) in 1936. In 1938 he briefly moved to London in search of literary work, finally settling in Dublin in 1939.

The folk group The Dubliners put Kavanagh’s poem “On Raglan Road” to music (released in 1971). It has since been recorded many times, perhaps most-significantly on the Van Morrison and the Chieftains album Irish Heartbeat (Mercury Records, 1988). The Irish Times surveyed ‘the nation’s favourite poems’ in 2000, and ten of Kavanagh’s poems were in the first fifty.

Last month my wife and I visited Dublin for the first time, and I had the chance to seek out his sculpture on a bench along the Grand Canal. It is there to honour him for his poems “Canal Bank Walk” (which can be read here), and “Lines Written On a Seat On the Grand Canal. Dublin”.

On the back of my Penguin paperback of his Selected Poems, there’s a quote from Seamus Heaney regarding Kavanagh’s verse: “These poems… make you feel all over again a truth which the mind becomes adept at evading… ‘You must change your life’”.

Ploughman

I turn the lea-green down
Gaily now,
And paint the meadow brown
With my plough.
I dream with silvery gull
And brazen crow.
A thing that is beautiful
I may know.
Tranquillity walks with me
And no care.
O, the quiet ecstasy
Like a prayer.
I find a star lovely art
In a dark sod.
Joy that is timeless! O heart
That knows God!

Sanctity

To be a poet and not know the trade
To be a lover and repel all women
Twin ironies by which great saints are made
The agonising pincer-jaws of Heaven

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Patrick Kavanagh: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Christina Rossetti*

Christina Rossetti (1830—1894) is one of the Victorian age’s most significant poets. Besides poetry she also wrote fiction and devotional reflections. From 1870 to 1872 she was dangerously and violently ill with Grave’s Disease, which caused her hair to fall out, and for her to lose consciousness.

After she recovered, Rossetti published six volumes of devotional prose. According to the Poetry Foundation: “In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols.” In the first of these books Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874) she shared 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ.”

In 1892 Rossetti published her book The Face of the Deep — an in-depth meditation on the Book of Revelation which included many poems. The following poem is her response to the opening verses of Revelation 5:
---“Then I saw in the right hand of him who sat on the throne a scroll
---with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals. And I saw
---a mighty angel proclaiming in a loud voice, ‘Who is worthy to break
---the seals and open the scroll?’”

None Other Lamb

None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other hope in Heav’n or earth or sea,
None other hiding place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee!

My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
Nor Heav’n have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.

*This is the fifth Kingdom Poets post about Christina Rossetti: first post, second post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

A.F. Moritz*

A.F. Moritz is one of Canada’s leading poets. Even so, I heard him reading from his new collection last month — to a slight Saturday afternoon gathering of poetry lovers — at a tiny independent bookstore in London, Ontario — coincidentally called Little Wren Books.

His 24th poetry collection (depending on how you count) The Wren is a bit of a departure for him, in that this writer of longer, long-lined poems has deliberately created a book of short poems. More than sixty of the poems are shorter than sonnets, and some even shorter than haiku. What this offers, in my view, is a stripped-back collection that affords greater accessibility, and personal interaction with the poems. Novelist Michael Helm has said “In The Wren we meet essential poetry. The address is direct, the lines narrow, poems short. With subtle, turning movements the book offers arrival and furtherance, findings and beautiful modifications toward ideas and figures of rare exactness…”

The following poems are from The Wren (House of Anansi, 2026)

The Central Moment
(Homage to William Blake)

Troubles must come but woe to those
through whom they come. Better to have a millstone
fastened around your neck and be flung into the sea
than to disturb the faith of even one
of these little ones. So said angry love and peace—
what we might call the real real. And now
I am the little ones lolling, white and diseased
In ever-repeated questioning, and I am
the one who injected it into me. I am the neck
and the millstone. I am thrown from myself.
I am perpetually suffocating in the glory
or is it the horror of the shoreless sea.

Faithfulness

Time will run out on you,
they say. No. Time never
runs out.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the third Kingdom Poets post about A.F. Moritz: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow*

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) is a poet who achieved international success before other American writers had. He supported the abolitionist cause through his slim 1842 book Poems on Slavery, which he allowed the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society to reprint and distribute free of royalties.

His verse romance Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847), written in Virgilian dactylic hexameter, expounds the legend of Acadian lovers separated on the day they were to be wed when the English expelled French Canadian Acadians from Nova Scotia. The book won admiration on both sides of the Atlantic, and became the most celebrated American poem of the century.

The following poem, published in 1838, is one of several from Longfellow widely shared in classrooms and anthologized in school textbooks — making it well known to a wide readership. It appeared in his early collection, Voices of the Night (1839).

Longfellow is honoured in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, which few other Americans have been.

A Psalm of Life

What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
---Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
---And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
---And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
---Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
---Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
---Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
---And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
---Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
---In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
---Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
---Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
---Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
---We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
---Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
---Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
---Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
---With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
---Learn to labor and to wait.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of six poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), plus three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is now available from Paraclete Press.