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    Poems for Happiness
    Poems for Happiness
    Poems for Happiness
    Ebook206 pages2 hours

    Poems for Happiness

    By Richard Coles and Gaby Morgan

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    About this ebook

    Poetry is the perfect medium to capture the elusive nature of happiness and this beautiful anthology explores happiness in all its forms – whether it be a fleeting moment, the promise of freedom and adventure, surviving adversity or the comfort of nature.
    Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library, featuring expert introductions for your favourite classics. This edition includes an introduction by writer, broadcaster and parish priest, the Reverend Richard Coles.

    Poems for Happiness     is an inspiring and life-affirming collection that features writing by some of our greatest poets whose work is still widely read today. It includes famous poems such as ‘How Do I Love Thee?’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling, ‘My Heart Leaps Up’ by William Wordsworth and ‘Invictus’ by W. E. Henley. In addition to these well-known verses, this beautiful volume includes lesser-known poems to discover and enjoy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateOct 3, 2019
    ISBN9781529013221
    Poems for Happiness
    Author

    Richard Coles

    The Reverend Richard Coles is a musician, writer, Church of England priest and co-presenter of Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4. He read Theology at King’s College London, then worked as a curate in Lincolnshire and London before going to Finedon in Northamptonshire, where he is now the vicar. He partnered Jimmy Somerville in the 1980s band The Communards, which achieved three top ten hits, including the number one record and bestselling single of 1986, ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’. His books include Bringing in the Sheaves and Lives of the Improbable Saints. He lives in the Vicarage at Finedon with his civil partner and four dachshunds.

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      Book preview

      Poems for Happiness - Richard Coles

      CONTENTS

      Title Page

      Introduction

      HAPPY THOUGHT

      Happy Thought

      Happy the Man

      New Sights

      On a Quiet Conscience

      Leisure

      High Flight

      May the Road Rise Up to Meet You

      If

      Now May Every Living Thing

      Hurt No Living Thing

      from Auguries of Innocence

      To Every Thing There Is a Season

      from Endymion

      Shining Things

      The Quiet Life

      Song of Apollo

      My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is

      On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

      Eternity

      A Farewell

      A Vision

      Gratefulnesse

      Thanks in Old Age

      A Little Health

      GLORY BE TO GOD FOR DAPPLED THINGS

      Pied Beauty

      Amazing Grace

      God Be In My Head

      ‘Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace’

      Miracles

      Father, We Thank Thee

      African Canticle

      The Thanksgivings

      Harvest Home

      Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

      Desiderata

      The Iroquois Prayer

      Jewish Prayer

      from His Pilgrimage

      When the Heart is Hard

      The Selkirk Grace

      Epitaph

      I SING OF BROOKS, OF BLOSSOMS, BIRDS, AND BOWERS

      The Argument of His Book

      The Song of Wandering Aengus

      Spring

      I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

      I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose

      The Happy Child

      from Pippa Passes

      A Greeting

      February Twilight

      Adoration

      The Sun Rising

      Sowing

      A Dumb Friend

      My Heart Leaps Up

      The Throstle

      May

      Moonlight, Summer Moonlight

      The Lake Isle of Innisfree

      Where the Bee Sucks

      To Make a Prairie

      from A Midsummer Night’s Dream

      Careless Rambles

      Magna Est Veritas

      Rest and Be Thankful!

      Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

      Moonlit Apples

      Harvest Hymn

      To Autumn

      Pleasant Sounds

      ‘See yonder leafless trees against the sky’

      Evening Quatrains

      Ode

      ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’

      God’s Grandeur

      SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH

      Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth

      Freedom

      New Every Morning

      Will

      Invictus

      Ain’t I a Woman?

      This, Too, Shall Pass Away

      ‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers

      Shut Not Your Doors to Me, Proud Libraries

      Courage

      The Call

      A Pebble

      from Henry V

      The New Colossus

      The Gettysburg Address

      The Star-Spangled Banner

      I Hear America Singing

      No Coward Soul Is Mine

      A Summing Up

      FRIENDSHIP IS LOVE WITHOUT HIS WINGS

      L’amitié Est L’amour Sans Ailes

      Outwitted

      We Two Boys Together Clinging

      Friendship

      Forbearance

      Friendship

      Travelling

      Love and Friendship

      New Friends and Old Friends

      HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN

      He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

      How Do I Love Thee?

      Sonnet 18

      Meeting at Night

      To a Friend

      A Birthday

      Upon Julia’s Clothes

      Rose-cheeked Laura

      In an Artist’s Studio

      ‘It was a lover and his lass’

      Love Lightly Pleased

      Invitation to Love

      from Paradise Lost

      Fulfillment

      from Sonnets from the Portuguese

      Camomile Tea

      When I Heard at the Close of the Day

      Song

      To Althea, from Prison

      A Decade

      THE SHAPE OF A GOOD GREYHOUND

      The Shape of a Good Greyhound

      The Lurcher

      Dog

      The Windhover

      A Winter Bluejay

      from To a Skylark

      ‘Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day’

      from Jubilate Agno

      Pangur Bán

      The Owl and the Pussycat

      Seal Lullaby

      Index of Poets

      Index of Titles

      Index of First Lines

      Introduction

      RICHARD COLES

      Happiness writes white, observed Montherlant, meaning I suppose that it is the drama of weal and woe that excites and captivates us rather than happiness, a state of contentment that is cloudless, bland even. You can see this difficulty in Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy, drawn in the fifteenth century. The pilgrim’s progress through Hell and Purgatory is vividly shown, each circle of Hell as busy and complex as Piccadilly Circus; by the time he has stepped into Paradise, however, it all gets a bit abstract, and in the end he and his guide, Virgil, float around geometric shapes as they enter a perfect state of bliss.

      Floating ecstatically around a giant circle is all very well, but I think there is more to say about happiness than that. Happiness, even if white, is not just white: it is off-white, ivory, cream, kid, glacier, imperial ermine – and you need only glance at the colour chart for a posh paint company to see how inventive one has to be to capture its range.

      These poems are, then, Fifty Shades of White. They explore the range of the human experience of happiness: as a passing moment that vanishes the second one settles on it; as the reward for luck and good choices; as the steady contentment which the truly fortunate may find.

      For the first category poetry is especially apt, for nothing captures so delicately, and perhaps fatally, the passing moment. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied Beauty’ is one of my favourites, not least because the poet is associated with my parish at Finedon. The love of his life – in this world – was Digby Dolben, son of its squire, an extraordinarily eccentric youth so easily bored that he did away with the necessity of visiting a barber when he was at Eton by singeing off his surplus locks with a candle. He was a precociously gifted boy too, leaving a collection of verse which is as surprisingly vivid as it is arch. He was also a religious maniac, affected the name Brother Laurence and wandered the parish in a Benedictine habit until, aged nineteen, he drowned playing with his tutor’s son in the River Welland. I digress. But there is something mercurial about Dolben which Hopkins captured in this breathtaking poem in praise of kaleidoscopic variety, those shifts of surface and light that flash unexpectedly and illuminate. When I read this I recall a period of intense happiness in my own life, the summer of 1990 on the island of Ibiza, when the memories that are still intelligible are precisely that, flashes of light from the glittering sea, strobe-frozen tableaux from Amnesia and Ku, and the party people, ragtag and bobtail, hurled together by ecstasy, House and the energy of being young. For Hopkins, that pied beauty is not only the play of light and reflection, nor perhaps over-stimulated synapses on a party isle in the second summer of love, but also the knotty particularities of a trade, a calling, a proficiency, which angle those skilled in them to the mainstream. It is a very peculiar juxtaposition, the stipple on a trout and a plough horse’s bridle – what could be more different? – yet for Hopkins they both speak of the glory of God: various, unexpected, textured.

      For Hopkins, in the end, that dazzling and surprising variety is the creativity of God breaking forth in the world; others have no need of such a hypothesis.

      Hopkins would have argued that happiness lies in aligning our desires to the

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