Another Valentine
Wendy Cope (1945 - )

Wendy Cope’s poem, commissioned by the Daily Telegraph in 2009, explores the frequent criticisms levelled at the most romantic day of the year. Yet as the narrator muses on the obligation behind Valentine’s Day, romantic feelings are conjured.

Today we are obliged to be romantic
And think of yet another valentine.
We know the rules and we are both pedantic:
Today’s the day we have to be romantic.

Our love is old and sure, not new and frantic.
You know I’m yours and I know you are mine.
And saying that has made me feel romantic,
My dearest love, my darling valentine

poem of love after love

Love after Love
Derek Walcott (1930 - )

For anyone who has recently suffered a separation or unhappy relationship, this is perhaps the ideal Valentine’s Day poem. The poem explores the idea of learning to re-love one’s self after trauma and loss. The Caribbean poet and playwright received the 1992 Nobel Prize for literature and won the TS Eliot Prize for his book of poetry, White Egrets in 2011.

The poem ends:

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life

poem of For the Fallen

For the Fallen

Poem by Robert Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), published in The Times newspaper on 21^st September 1914.

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.

one of the best ten novels you need to read

one of the best ten novels you need to read

 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
 Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.