This green and poetic land
We love our countryside here in Britain with a passion few nations can match. We treasure our peerless views; we ramble; we flock in our thousands to our country’s cherished wild places, from Snowdonia to the Dales and from the Highlands to the South Coast. The infi nite variety of our landscape has inspired many of our greatest writers throughout the ages and, in turn, their words have taken root in the national psyche, as I discovered when putting together an anthology of our favourite countryside poems.
The poems most frequently requested by listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please include many that celebrate the British landscape, and these same poems appear again and again among the favourites of my friends, too. Romantic love is represented, of course, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 (‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’) and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’ – a solid choice for a wedding reading that advises you to lie in the bed you have gleefully made).
There’s a whiff of sabre-rattling as well as an exhortation to personal bravery in Kipling’s If. But half of the poems that listeners most want to hear are set in the countryside. From Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, with its patient horse and snow-muffl ed stillness, through Arnold’s Dover Beach, its rhythm evoking the tides lapping this island nation, to Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, one of many cherished verses that ring with birdsong, nature poems have always enchanted us.
Edward Thomas – undervalued until after his tragic death on the Western Front in 1917 – makes the top ten with his much-loved poem Adlestrop. His trilling blackbird, backed by the feathered choir of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, is so powerfully evocative of a quiet minute on a June afternoon that this short, simple poem has been taken into the nation’s heart. His words act as an escape hatch parachuting us into a peaceful moment that he has been able to share with us across the decades.
Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill – a personal favourite of mine since studying it at school – is also much requested. A boisterous poem full of movement and the energy of boyhood, it fi lls the mind’s eye with gold and green. Fern Hill is also a testament to how the British notion of childhood is inextricably bound to our feelings about the countryside. Our children’s literature boasts only a handful of urbanites and a disproportionate amount of messing about on boats. Few British schoolchildren escape muddy walks, and an unshakeable belief in the benefi ts of healthy fresh air is a noted national trait. Our childhoods see us at our closest to nature wherever they are spent – it’s a time replete with frogspawn, long summer days, conkers and snowballs, and it is perhaps because poetry often chooses to evoke these small nostalgic pleasures that so many of our favourites take nature as their theme.
Collecting poems about the British countryside threw up a few unanticipated questions. I was interested to learn how many of the poets were Londoners by birth or by residence. Literary life has long centred on the capital, but I felt that I also detected a real yearning for country air and birdsong in the words of these urban poets. Keats – whose To Autumn is the most iconic of seasonal poems – was even derided as being part of a ‘Cockney’ literary school when he first published.
The urban sprawl has been creeping into the countryside for generations. Wordsworth, perhaps the most cherished of our nature poets, was horrified by the way in which the Industrial Revolution encroached on the landscape, and the need to preserve our green spaces is a theme many poets have taken up.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Binsey Poplars is a moving example of this, as he reproves those who seek to interfere with nature – ‘even where we mean / To mend her we end her... Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty been’. (Incidentally, it was poplars that William Cowper was mourning in The Poplar Field, also included in the anthology. Perhaps there is a particular link between the poplar and poetic inspiration?)
We are a nostalgic nation, and our idea of Britain tends to be a rural one of fi elds, woods and cottages no matter where we actually spend our days. Much of the poetry we love best harks back to this land of lost content, and in some ways it is the poems themselves that have created this communal memory of a green and pleasant land.
At times of calamity we turn back to the comforts of nature, as the outpouring of work celebrating beautiful Blighty from the trenches of World War I showed. In an increasingly secular age the great outdoors has become a talisman and a touchstone, and a breath of fresh country air is restorative spiritually as well as physically. Recent studies have even proved that there are extra benefi ts to be reaped from exercising in the green outdoors as opposed to a gym: the countryside is literally good for you.
We, then, are a fortunate nation – not just because our countryside is picturesque and much-loved, but because for all those times when a brisk country walk is impossible, we have the incantations of generations of British poets to take us there in a moment.
Green And Pleasant Land: Best- Loved Poems Of The British Countryside, by Ana Sampson, is published by Michael O’Mara Books, priced £9.99.
How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Sonnet 116 (Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds) by William Shakespeare
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
Remember by Christina Rossetti
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell
The poems most frequently requested by listeners to BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please include many that celebrate the British landscape, and these same poems appear again and again among the favourites of my friends, too. Romantic love is represented, of course, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 (‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’) and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments’ – a solid choice for a wedding reading that advises you to lie in the bed you have gleefully made).
There’s a whiff of sabre-rattling as well as an exhortation to personal bravery in Kipling’s If. But half of the poems that listeners most want to hear are set in the countryside. From Frost’s Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening, with its patient horse and snow-muffl ed stillness, through Arnold’s Dover Beach, its rhythm evoking the tides lapping this island nation, to Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush, one of many cherished verses that ring with birdsong, nature poems have always enchanted us.
Edward Thomas – undervalued until after his tragic death on the Western Front in 1917 – makes the top ten with his much-loved poem Adlestrop. His trilling blackbird, backed by the feathered choir of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, is so powerfully evocative of a quiet minute on a June afternoon that this short, simple poem has been taken into the nation’s heart. His words act as an escape hatch parachuting us into a peaceful moment that he has been able to share with us across the decades.
Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill – a personal favourite of mine since studying it at school – is also much requested. A boisterous poem full of movement and the energy of boyhood, it fi lls the mind’s eye with gold and green. Fern Hill is also a testament to how the British notion of childhood is inextricably bound to our feelings about the countryside. Our children’s literature boasts only a handful of urbanites and a disproportionate amount of messing about on boats. Few British schoolchildren escape muddy walks, and an unshakeable belief in the benefi ts of healthy fresh air is a noted national trait. Our childhoods see us at our closest to nature wherever they are spent – it’s a time replete with frogspawn, long summer days, conkers and snowballs, and it is perhaps because poetry often chooses to evoke these small nostalgic pleasures that so many of our favourites take nature as their theme.
Collecting poems about the British countryside threw up a few unanticipated questions. I was interested to learn how many of the poets were Londoners by birth or by residence. Literary life has long centred on the capital, but I felt that I also detected a real yearning for country air and birdsong in the words of these urban poets. Keats – whose To Autumn is the most iconic of seasonal poems – was even derided as being part of a ‘Cockney’ literary school when he first published.
The urban sprawl has been creeping into the countryside for generations. Wordsworth, perhaps the most cherished of our nature poets, was horrified by the way in which the Industrial Revolution encroached on the landscape, and the need to preserve our green spaces is a theme many poets have taken up.
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Binsey Poplars is a moving example of this, as he reproves those who seek to interfere with nature – ‘even where we mean / To mend her we end her... Aftercomers cannot guess the beauty been’. (Incidentally, it was poplars that William Cowper was mourning in The Poplar Field, also included in the anthology. Perhaps there is a particular link between the poplar and poetic inspiration?)
We are a nostalgic nation, and our idea of Britain tends to be a rural one of fi elds, woods and cottages no matter where we actually spend our days. Much of the poetry we love best harks back to this land of lost content, and in some ways it is the poems themselves that have created this communal memory of a green and pleasant land.
At times of calamity we turn back to the comforts of nature, as the outpouring of work celebrating beautiful Blighty from the trenches of World War I showed. In an increasingly secular age the great outdoors has become a talisman and a touchstone, and a breath of fresh country air is restorative spiritually as well as physically. Recent studies have even proved that there are extra benefi ts to be reaped from exercising in the green outdoors as opposed to a gym: the countryside is literally good for you.
We, then, are a fortunate nation – not just because our countryside is picturesque and much-loved, but because for all those times when a brisk country walk is impossible, we have the incantations of generations of British poets to take us there in a moment.
Green And Pleasant Land: Best- Loved Poems Of The British Countryside, by Ana Sampson, is published by Michael O’Mara Books, priced £9.99.
POETRY PLEASE: THE MOST REQUESTED POEMS
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert FrostHow Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Sonnet 116 (Let Me Not To The Marriage Of True Minds) by William Shakespeare
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
Remember by Christina Rossetti
To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell