Thomas Wyatt
William Shakespeare
John Donne
Andrew Marvell
Richard Lovelace
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
William Blake
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Christina Rossetti
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy
John Keats
Ernest Dowson
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Robert Frost
Charlotte Mew
Elizabeth Jennings
Louis MacNeice
Anne Sexton
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Seamus Heaney
Keith Douglas
Tony Harrison
Carol Ann Duffy
Paul Muldoon
Wendy Cope
‘Timer’, deals with the relationship of the poet with his parents. It is one of a sequence from his 1981 collection, The School of Eloquence. When his mother died and was cremated her wedding ring would not burn. This prompts a range of emotions, most notably that of the poet’s father for his dead...
Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough
to make you ashes in a standard urn.
An envelope of course official buff
contains your wedding ring that wouldn’t burn.
Dad told me I’d to tell them at St. James’s
the ring should go in the incinerator.
That “eternity” inscribed with both their names is
his surety that they’d be together, “later”.
I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,
the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress-
The clerk phoned down, 6- 8- 8- 3- 1?
Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!
It’s on my warm palm now, your burnished ring!
I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,
sift through its circle slowly, like that thing
you used to let me watch to time the eggs.