![]() That final line, devastatingly and desolatingly set aside from the other stanzas, is especially powerful.ġ0. But it nevertheless takes a poet of real skill to recreate that feeling of blank and senseless loss within the reader, and Heaney, in this early tour de force, does so with masterly description that never spills into sentimentality, as he writes about the death of his young brother, who was killed when a car hit him in 1953. The closing lines are mesmerisingly good.Īs demonstrated by Philips’ poem which began this selection of moving poems, elegies written about the death of young children are often moving because the subject-matter is so upsetting. Here, it’s the memory of childhood visits to the cinema with his father in the 1940s, where they bonded over their shared love of James Cagney films. ![]() Stephen Spender once said that Harrison’s poems written about the deaths of his parents were the kinds of poem he had waited all of his life to read, and Harrison reminds us in this Meredithian sonnet of 16 lines that the death of a parent can move us as we remember earlier times spent with them. We have analysed this poem in a separate post. The final stanza has been admired by many people, including another great poet, Seamus Heaney. ‘The Fall of Rome’ was the result, a poem which responds to the chaos at the end of the Second World War by looking back to the fall of the Roman Empire some 1,500 years earlier. ‘Write me a poem that will make me cry,’ Cyril Connolly challenged Auden in 1940. He tells the narrator that they should sleep now and forget the past: such forgiveness and acceptance make this poem especially moving. This other soldier then reveals to the narrator that he is the enemy soldier whom the narrator killed in battle yesterday. This other man tells the narrator that they both nurtured similar hopes and dreams, but they have both now died, unable to tell the living how piteous and hopeless war really is. There he meets a man whom he identifies as a ‘strange friend’, in a masterly oxymoron. ![]() The poem is narrated by a soldier who dies in battle and finds himself in Hell. Fellow war poet Siegfried Sassoon called ‘Strange Meeting’ Owen’s passport to immortality, and this poem may be the most moving of all of Owen’s poems. No other English poet of the First World War can move readers to tears quite like Wilfred Owen, who himself stated that his aim was to reflect ‘the pity of war’. Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless.Īnd by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,-īy his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell … Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, The noted evolutionary biologist (and atheist, like Housman), Richard Dawkins, has described how this poem moves him to tears. Housman reflects on his relationship with nature, before concluding that, although nature does not care or even know about him, he feels a close bond with it. Housman’s second volume of poetry, Last Poems (1922). This is one of the most famous poems from A.
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