October | 2025 | David Sutton
4 posts published by davidjsutton during October 2025| David Sutton
A timely celebration of our sadly threatened rivers featuring a rich accumulation of images that in other hands might seem a little over the top but which Ted Hughes carries off by sheer brio. The syntax of the last two lines is a bit elliptical, and I’m not clear if we’re talking about an actual … … Continue reading →| David Sutton
This week one of the greatest and most magical of the Scottish border ballads, Child 39. It’s quite long, so I give just the more dramatic second half; the whole is readily available online, though…| David Sutton
The perennial force and freshness of this short poem, that first appeared in the 1798 collection ‘Lyrical Ballads’, reminds us of how William Wordsworth may have become a bit of a bore in his later years but once blew like … Continue reading →| David Sutton
These rather tart quatrains by the Austrian writer Ada Christen (1839-1901) may be seen as a useful corrective to last week’s piece by Heine and also as a reflection of the way in which mid-nineteenth century German literature was reacting … Continue reading →| David Sutton
This famous poem by the German poet Heinrich Heine, dealing with the hopeless love of a slave for a sultan’s daughter, first appeared in print in 1846 and was subsequently included in his 1851 coll…| David Sutton
Clifford Dyment (1914-1971) was only four years old when he lost his father in the First World War. This quietly effective piece commemorates him and all the others like him. It reminds us how great a rip war tears in … Continue reading →| David Sutton
One has to be careful these days with humour at the expense of ethnic minorities, but I hope that this week’s offering by Robert Graves can be seen for what it is, as a piece of affectionate teasin…| David Sutton
There is a famous passage in the writings of the physicist Richard Feynman in which he takes issue with poets for their perceived lack of engagement with the realities of science: ‘Poets say science takes away from the beauty of … Continue reading →| David Sutton
‘The Other’ is one of Edward Thomas’s earliest poems, written towards the end of 1914, and also one of his longest, about his sense of there always being a doppelganger or alter ego somewhere ahead of him that he can … Continue reading →| David Sutton
This week what I consider to be one of the most beautiful of English folksongs, and which I was prompted to feature by the news of the death of the actor Terence Stamp: many will remember how in th…| David Sutton
This week an affecting expression of the kind of regret that seems sadly common to poets as they age, a regret for, as T.S.Eliot puts it, ‘things ill done or done to others’ harm’, or in Philip Lar…| David Sutton
This is a rather strange poem, and really it just won’t do. Chesterton’s idea of a hero is apparently a psychopathic loner who carries off women by force and can relate to his fellow men only when …| David Sutton
