The rarity, the root, the flower,
The things themselves, not the abouts,
The magic wand of naming, power
That dreads away the darks, the doubts –
                        from ‘In Itself’

The Collected Poems is a new and definitive edition of the poetry of one of the best-loved and most enduringly popular modern poets.

Almost all of Jennings’ published poetry (including work never before collected) and a large selection of her unpublished poems are included here, together with resources detailing her poetry, prose, essays, plays and correspondence. An afterword draws on her unpublished autobiography As I Am and her unpublished theological prose to illuminate the religious faith at the heart of her poetry. Two previously unseen photographs of Jennings and reproductions of two of her little-known ‘picture poems’ complete the volume.

Emma Mason, Reader at the University of Warwick who has written extensively on religion and poetry, suggests that Jennings’ achievement is ‘her ability to translate the intensity and happiness of her Christian faith into a canon of accessible poems that reach out to a community of readers’. The Collected Poems enables Jennings’ poetry to speak to a new community of readers.

Preface


The Elements
Estrangement
The Lucky
Modern Poet
Time
The Clock
Deception
Warning
John the Baptist
Tuscany
Cave Dwellers


Poems (1953)

Delay
Winter Love
Woman in Love
Weathercock
The Substitute
The Meeting
The Infatuation
The Three
Two Voices
The Exchange
Sequence from Childhood
Adopted Child
The Alteration
Reminiscence
Fantasy
Jealousy
Italian Light
A View of Positano
A Tuscan Village
The Place Between
Afternoon in Florence
Deepsea Diver
The Planners
The Harbour
The Arrival
The Stranger
Identity
The Geologist
The Settlers
The Seer and the Blind
The Idler
Bell-Ringer
The Climbers
Fishermen
From the Cliff
The Island

A Way of Looking (1955)

A Way of Looking
Reflections on Southern Light
Florence: Design for a City
Fiesole: The Search
A Sense of Place
The Image and the View
Not in the Guide-Books
Fisherman in the Arno
Children in the Square
Poem in Winter
Song at the Beginning of Autumn
Music and Words
Astronomer: A Song
Different Visions
Kings
Map-Makers
The Enemies
Napoleon
In This Time
New Worlds
The Lost Symbols
The Nature of Tragedy
The Rescuer
The Conqueror
The Humanists
Missing the Point
Beyond Possession
On Making
Tribute
Looking Forward
For a Child Born Dead
Communication
Mirrors
The Recognition
The Return
Escape and Return
In the Night
The Acknowledgement
Recapitulation
Answers

A Sense of the World (1958)

The Child and the Shadow
Old Woman
Old Man
The Child and the Seashell
The Dandy
Young Boy
Taken by Surprise
The Storm
Her Garden
The Bird Catchers
Five Poems from ‘Sequence in Venice’
Summer and Time
At Noon
Still Life
The Dancers
Ghosts
During the Hungarian Uprising
Absence
Disguises
The Parting
Resemblances
A Death
The Misunderstanding
The Shot
Song for a Departure
Choices
Telling Stories
A Fear
In a Foreign City
The Roman Forum
A Conversation in the Gardens of the Villa Celimontana, Rome
Companions
A Roman Window
Strangers
Fountain
Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome
San Paolo Fuori Le Mura, Rome
Letter from Assisi
The Annunciation
The Visitation
Agony in any Garden
Gift of Tongues
Statue and Candlelight
The Virgin at Noon
Augustine
Teresa of Avila

Song for a Birth or a Death (1961)

Song for a Birth or a Death
Family Affairs
A Game of Chess
My Grandmother
Passage from Childhood
In Praise of Creation
World I have Not Made
Harvest and Consecration
A World of Light
Notes for a Book of Hours
A Confession
A Requiem
At a Mass
John of the Cross
Catherine of Siena
The Resurrection
The Counterpart
Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden
The Retreat
Visit to an Artist
The Clown
Lazarus
The Diamond Cutter
Stargazers and Others
To a Friend with a Religious Vocation
Children and Death
A Kind of Understanding
Visit to a Friend in Hospital
Greek Statues
The Pride of Life: A Roman Setting
Men Fishing in the Arno
An English Summer
The Room
Two Deaths
About These Things
No Reply
The Unfulfilled
No Child
The Instrument
Remembering Fireworks

The Sonnets of Michelangelo (1961)

I On Dante Alighieri
II On Dante Alighieri
III To Pope Julius II
IV On Rome in the Pontificate of Julius II
V To Giovanni da Pistoja on the Painting of the Sistine Chapel
VI Invective against the People of Pistoja
VII To Luigi del Riccio
VIII To Liugi del Riccio After the Death of Cecchino Bracci
IX (‘Your gifts – the sugar, candles and the mule’)
X To Gandolfo Porrino on his Mistress Faustina Mancina
XI To Giorgio Vasari on The Lives of the Painters
XII To Vittoria Colonna
XIII To the Same
XIV (i) To the Same
XIV (ii) (‘If noble concepts have a birth divine’)
XV (‘The marble not yet carved can hold the form’)
XVI (‘Just as in pen and ink, the high and low’)
XVII (‘Lady, how can it be that what is shown’)
XVIII (‘With heart of sulphur and with flesh of tow’)
XIX (‘More precious am I to myself than ever’)
XX (‘How much a garland pleases when it lies’)
XXI (‘To others merciful and only to’)
XXII (‘If in the face, if in the gazing eyes’)
XXIII (‘Both near and far my eyes can see your face’)
XXIV (‘Well-born spirit, in whom we see reflected’)
XXV (‘“Tell me, I beg, Love, if my eyes indeed’)
XXVI (‘Grace, Lady, equally with sorrow may’)
XXVII (‘I cannot shape an image or acquire’)
XXVIII (‘The living portion of my love is not’)
XXIX (‘The first day I beheld so much unique’)
XXX To Tommaso de’ Cavalieri
XXXI To Tommaso de’ Cavalieri
XXXII (‘If love is chaste, if pity comes from heaven’)
XXXIII (i) (‘So that your beauty may not lose its power’)
XXXIII (ii) (‘In order that your beauties may endure’)
XXXIV (‘Eternal fire is kindly to cold stone’)
XXXV (‘This fire, which burns me fiercely and consumes’)
XXXVI (‘If the immortal longing which inspires’)
XXXVII (‘If someone has been favoured with a great’)
XXXVIII (‘Give to my eyes a natural stream or spring’)
XXXIX (‘Reason is sympathetic when I claim’)
XL (i) (‘I know not if it is the longed-for night’)
XL (ii) (‘I know not if it is imagination’)
XLI (‘He who from nothing made all things ordained’)
XLII (‘Each shuttered room and every covered place’)
XLIII (‘Since Phoebus does not stretch his shining hands’)
XLIV (‘Oh night, oh sweetest time although obscure’)
XLV (‘When a lord thrusts his servant into prison’)
XLVI (‘If a small, steady flame can quickly dry’)
XLVII (‘If any fire could equal that great light’)
XLVIII (‘Though long delay breeds greater tenderness’)
XLIX (‘From gloomy laughter and delicious tears’)
L (‘Too late I realised that from your soul’)
LI (i) (‘Now give me back that time when love was held’)
LI (ii) (‘Now give me back that time which held my passion’)
LII (‘I do not need to look on outward forms’)
LIII (‘An ardent love of a great beauty is’)
LIV (‘I see in your fair face, my dearest Lord’)
LV (‘My Lord, you know that I know that you know’)
LVI (i) (‘When you came back into this earthly prison’)
LVI (ii) (‘I know not whence it came and yet it surely’)
LVII (i) (‘It passes from the eyes into the heart’)
LVII (ii) (‘It passes from the eyes into the heart’)
LVIII (‘When to my inward eyes, both weak and strong’)
LIX (‘Only through fire can the smith pull and stretch’)
LX (i) (‘Sometimes hope rises strongly with desire’)
LX (ii) (‘At times, pure love may justly be equated’)
LXI On the Death of Vittoria Colonna
LXII On the Death of the Same
LXIII On the Death of the Same
LXIV On the Death of the Same
LXV To Giorgio Vasari
LXVI (‘By the world’s vanities I’ve been distracted’)
LXVII (‘There is no lower thing on earth than I’)
LXVIII To Monsignor Lodovico Beccadelli
LXIX (‘My death is certain but the hour unsure’)
LXX (‘Loaded with years and full of all my sins’)
LXXI (‘Now that I need men’s pity and compassion’)
LXXII (‘Then let me see you everywhere I go’)
LXXIII (‘Unburdened by the body’s fierce demands’)
LXXIV (i) (‘Simply the longing for more years to live’)
LXXIV (ii) (‘Often, I think, a great desire may’)
LXXV (‘I wish, God, for some end I do not will’)
LXXVI (‘Those souls for whom you died were sad as well’)
LXXVII (‘Although it saddens me and causes pain’)
LXXVIII (‘Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone’)

Recoveries (1964)

Sequence in Hospital
Nerves
Old Man Asleep
Works of Art
Man in a Park
Still Life and Observer
Father to Son
For a Visionary Poet
Domestic Dramas
Exodus
Retort to the Anti-Abstractionists
The Confidence
Warning to Parents
Happy Families
Darkness
Mah Jong
Not at Home
The Storm House
Problems of Viewing
Admonition
The Nightmare
Parts of a Zodiac
The Young Ones
Bewilderment
Planck’s Theory of Chance
The Sumach Tree
‘Wedding Rites at Tipasa’
For Albert Camus
A Picture
The Shells
Eighty-one Years Old
A Thought from Aquinas
The Destroyers
Pigeons
A Game of Cards
A New Pain

The Mind Has Mountains (1966)

In a Mental Hospital Sitting-room
Diagnosis and Protest
Madness
Reflections on a Mental Hospital
The Interrogator
Van Gogh
The Jump
Attempted Suicides
Lisa
Questions
Night Sister
The Illusion
Hysteria
Words From Traherne
A Nurse Gone Sick
Final Considerations
Samuel Palmer and Chagall
On a Friend’s Relapse and Return to a Mental Clinic
Old Age
Night Garden of the Asylum
A Baby Born in Hospital
Personal Easter
A Depression
Grove House, Iffley
Suicides
Caravaggio’s Narcissus in Rome
Chinese Art
Late Child
Love Poem
One Flesh
Thinking of Love
Van Gogh Again
A Birthday in Hospital
New Poem Simply
Blue Candles
My Room
Trees
Just Another Poem
Unkind Poem about People who are Mildly Deranged
A Limerick and So On
Poem about the Breakdown of a Breakdown
Sea

The Secret Brother and Other Poems for Children (1966)

The Secret Brother
Thomas the Ginger Cat
Holidays at Home
Kites
A Sort of Chinese Poem
The Ginger Cat
The Hamster
My Animals
The Ugly Child
Chop-Suey
The Radio Men
The Ark
Tiffany: a Burmese Kitten
London
Friends
At Night
Rhyme for Children
Mirrors
Old People
Chocolate Adam and Eve
Love Poem
Clothes
Mary
The Dead Bird
Christmas
Lullaby

New Poems from Collected Poems (1967)

For Love
The Circle
The Shaking World
A Dream of Birth
The Boy
The Operation
The Novice
Shock
The Bonfire
Volcano and Iceberg
Gale

The Animals’ Arrival (1969)

The Animals’ Arrival
The Day
Sculptor
A Pattern
First Man
A Simple Sickness
The Plough
Fire
Of Languages
The Soldiers
The Unknown Child
Never to See
Resolve
Birth
Hospital Garden
Interviews
The Source
The Broken Minds
Cold Winter
Loving
Hunting
Ago
Waking
Bonnard
Matador
Sand
This Summer
The Sea
Demands
Lodgings
The Nightmares
Outside
Silence of Winter
Transfigurations
A Letter to Peter Levi
These Silences
Congo Nun Raped
Motor-Racer
Mediterranean
Any Poet’s Epitaph

Lucidities (1970)

Light
For My Dead Father
Considerations
Literary Fashions
Port Meadow, Oxford
For George Seferis, Greek Poet
Moving In
Revival
Forebodings
Weeping
Harsh Words
In Retrospect and Hope
A Decision
Revelation
An Experience
Evening Prayer, by Rimbaud
The Sly One, by Rimbaud
Sensation, from Rimbaud
First Evening, by Rimbaud
My Bohemian Life, after Rimbaud
The Rooks, by Rimbaud
Bedsitters
Mrs Porter
To One Who Read My Rejected Autobiography
Vocations
Analysis of a Situation
This World
Rouault
The Future
This Darkness
Doubts
Rain
Stillness
Passions
I Am Myself
Longings
The Children
Misfits
Journey through Warwickshire to Oxford

Relationships (1972)

Relationships
Friendship
Upon a Thread
A Sonnet
Let Things Alone
Narcissus
For Emily Dickinson
The Sea
A Wonder
In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me
Water
All Quarrels
Making a Silence
Sympathy
A Very Young Mother
Hurt
Rembrandt
The Seven Deadly Sins
A Dream Undreamt
Sea Love
Fear
Of Love
Skies
From the Heights
Missing a Mirage
Italian Memories
Happiness in Rome
Quiet Wars
Kinds of Tears
Blame Yourself
Tears
Not Counting Time
The Drunk
Craftsmanship with Fish
Almost Falling Asleep
The Climb
The Wood
The Caves
Sheer Rage
The Roses
A Paradox

Growing Points (1975)

Beech
Growing
Transformation
To the Core
A Quartet
Rhetoric
Trance
In a Garden
Grapes
Among Strangers
The Quality of Goodness
No Rest
For the Mind Explorers
Thunder and a Boy
Freshness
A Quiet Enemy
I Feel
Bird Study
Towards a Religious Poem
After a Time
The Lord’s Prayer
Meditation on the Nativity
Christ on the Cross
Lent Beginning 1974
Easter Duties
Whitsun Sacrament
Out of the Heights
The Nature of Prayer
Thomas Aquinas
Open to the Public
In a Picture Gallery
Mondrian
Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits
Mozart’s Horn Concertos
A Scholar Emperor of the Tang Dynasty
Wonder
A Chinese Sage
Elegy for W.H. Auden
Prospero
Hopkins in Wales
Performer
A Play at Avignon
Opera
After a Play
Creators in Vienna
Orpheus
Persephone
Snake Charmer
The Minotaur
Not Abstract
Little Peace
Spy
Prisoner
Behind All Iron Curtains
Happenings
Not for Use
Wishes
Ends
Particular
Childhood in Lincolnshire
Losing and Finding
An Event
Usage
A Third
Need
Accepted
An Abandoned Palace
Rather like a Peacock
Given Notice
Leaving a Room
Deaf
Night Worker by Nature
An Attempt to Charm Sleep
The Poem at Times
Box-Room
Cancer
Observing
Celebration of Winter
To Go with a Present
A Little More
Comfort
This is
Never Going
A Gentle Command
In Itself
Gained

Consequently I Rejoice (1977)

Lighting a Candle
Restlessness
Almost Drowning
Invocation and Incantation
Inevitable
Fragment for the Dark
Tempered
Morning Decision
Better than a Protest
Drama
My Seasons
Winter Night Wish
Meditation in Winter
Bird Sunrise in Winter
Let There Be
Song for the Swifts
Song
For Their Own Sake
Hatching
Much to be Said
Instinct for Seasons
The Sleep of Birds
Star Midnight
Decision on a July Night
July Island
Sonnet for Late Summer
Towards Migration
To the Ground
November Sun
Ways of Dying
Winter Testimony
Associations
Old People’s Nursing Home
To My Mother At 73
Elegy for My Father
Death of an Old Lady
Her Hands
For an Old Lady of 96
A Disabled Countryman
Military Service
The Hoarder
Ballad
War
Childbirth
A Child in the Night
Cradle Catholic
A Reflection from Pascal
Meditation on the Fall
A Magnificat
Mary the Huntress
Mary Speaks
Mary’s Magnificat
Christmas Request
Words for the Magi
Our Lady’s Lullaby
Christ Recalls ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’
Christ on His Loneliness
The Holy Fool
One Who Was Healed
Christ’s Final Temptation
Christ’s Agony in the Garden
In Christ’s Place
Prayer to Christ Suffering
Christ Surprised
Christ Seen by Flemish Painters
Christmas Poem 1974
One Creed and Many
Michelangelo’s First Pietà
Sufism
A Meditation on D.H. Lawrence
Tolstoy
Elegy for Aldous Huxley
Change of Plan
In a Violent Time
For Edward Thomas
Questions to Other Artists
Reflections on a Still Life
Klee’s Last Years
Portrait Painting
Cézanne
For Virginia Woolf
A Painter’s Wife
Spring
Chinese Poem
Night Concert at Taormina
Ariel’s Song
The Aegean
Poems for a New Greek Anthology

After the Ark (1978)

The Animals’ Chorus
The Fish’s Warning
The Ladybird’s Story
The Cabbage White Butterfly
The Moth’s Plea
The Spider’s Confession
Wasp in a Room
The Snake’s Warning
The Earthworm’s Monologue
The Frogs’ History
The Bats’ Plea
The Swallows’ Speech
Gull Thought
The Rooks’ Chorus
The Robin’s Song
The Sparrows’ Chorus
The Thrush Confides
The Owl’s Request
The Cuckoo’s Speech
The Cockerel Proclaims
The Fieldmouse’s Monologue
The Hedgehog’s Explanation
The Rabbit’s Advice
The Sheep’s Confession
The Deers’ Request
The Riding School
The Black Cat’s Conversation
The Lion Cub
Finale for the Animals

Moments of Grace (1979)

Into the Hour
An Answer to Odd Advice
A Meditation in March 1979
The Sermon of Appearances
Among Farm Workers
To be a Sunflower
Cypresses
Outside Greece
The Whole Bestiary
Flies
Goldfinch
Friesian Cows
Rook
Cat in Winter
The Shoot
A Beseeching
Watcher
A Christmas Carol for 1978
Forgiveness
Never Such Peace
The Way of it
Channel Port Night
A Weather Spell
Thought and Feeling
I Count the Moments
Love Needs an Elegy
On its Own
Death
An Elusive One
Haunted House
Spirits
The Dangerous Ones
Spell of the Elements
A Chorus of Creation
A Chorus
An Education
A New Patience
Euthanasia
The Wrong Subject
Some Never Forgotten Words of My Mother’s
The Gardens Stretch
Summer Scene
Sea Song
Sea-Drunk
Spring Twilight
Night Moment
Night Power
The Apt Phrase
A Proustian Moment
A Chinese Poem
Braque’s Dream
Christmas Suite in Five Movements

Winter Wind (1979)

Near the End
A Happy End
The Deepest Love
Winter Wind
A Widow
Van Gogh
The Only Child
The Rake
Eurydice

A Dream of Spring (1980)

Winter Argument
The Snow
A Dream of Spring
Instead of an Elegy
More Than Spring
A Moment of Childhood
From Light to Dark
Lent and Spring
A Difficulty
Turn
Horse
Spring’s Annunciation
Into Spring
Sermon of the Clouds
One Man, One Voice
English Wild Flowers
A Way to a Creed

Celebrations and Elegies (1982)

Goings
Autumn
Sermon of the Hills
The Heart of Night
Arrival in Bibbiena, Tuscany
Remembering Bibbiena in Tuscany
A Kind of Catalogue
Sparrow
Field-Mouse
Blackbird Singing
Not Mine
Over and Over
Rescued
An Elegy before Death
Children at Play
Landscapes and Figures
Heyday
Leaves in the Wind
Afterwards
Images of Love
First Admirers
The Near Perfection
Given an Apple
A Place to Walk In
Song of Love and Peace
Land of Plenty
What we Remember
Peace
An Unnerving Lesson
Imperfection
A Dark Passion
Recovering from a Death
Words about Grief
For a Gentle Friend
A Hand Lifting
Is it Dual-Natured?
Painter from Life
Words for Music
A Kind of Magic
The One Drawback
I Came Once
As the Rooks Are
Sources of Light

Extending the Territory (1985)

The Child’s Story
The Features of a House
A Bird in the House
Green World
An Absolute
Family History
For My Sister
The Circuses
A Serious Game
A Sky in Childhood
Love-Story
The Last
Over and Over Again
A Class-Room
A Time Ago
Passed
Partly Tamed
The Inheritors
Elegy in Spring
Friday
The Advance of Spring
In April
Spell for Spring
A Supposition
Worth
A Forgetting
Let Summer Thrive
A Kind of Magnet
Falling
Sundowning
Into the Clouds
Endings
Betrayal
Ballad of War
Clarify
A Condition
Seasonal Reverie
Nothing
Confession
Ariel
Caught
As We Wish
The Great Mover
Missed Chances
Two by the Sea
Remembering
Years Ago
Tell Me
Love in Three Movements
Ways
Certain Lessons
Anger
A Death Alive
Eye to Eye
Bitter Fruit
Pain
The Alteration
Lovesick
Growing Ahead
Shall All the Loves
I Climbed a Ladder
Our Neighbour
Mother and Daughter
Ages
Awake in the Siesta
Rome – A Quarter of a Century Ago
Particular Music
Memories of Rome
The Way of Words and Language
A Performance of Henry V at Stratford-upon-Avon
Song of Time
Dawn Not Yet
Frail Bone
Dust
Enough
By the Sea
Song
Water Music
Imagination
From the Coast
Precursors

Tributes (1989)

A Letter of Thanks
Tributes
For George Herbert
Notes to The Winter’s Tale
For Charles Causley
For Philip Larkin
Tribute to Turner
Caravaggio
Goya
Chardin
After a Painting is Finished
Tate Gallery
The Arts
A Roman Trio
Spain
Once in Greece
Anzio
The Gulf of Salerno
Some Words of My Mother’s in Childhood
Fairground
Psalm of Childhood
Psalm of Discrepancies
By Themselves
Spring and a Blackbird
True Spring
Dusk
Cloudscape
Moon in December
Newcomer
Aubade
A Music Sought
Arrival and Preparation
Enough
Two Together
At the Source
Always
Presences
Friendship
Total
Landscape and Wild Gardens
Winter Piece
In Such Slow Sweetness
For Melody
Two Musics
All that Departing
A Living Death
Time for the Elegy
Gone
The Spirit Lifts
One Minute
Young Love
The Feel of Things
Some Solitude
Fifteen Years After a Death
Legacies and Language
The House of Words
The Early Work
Think Of
Art and Time
Pigeons Suddenly
The Luck of It
The Start of a Story
Against the Dark
The Sea as Metaphor
I Heard a Voice
Parts
Let It Be
Waiting
The Prodigal Son
The Hours
Saint Augustine
For Easter 1986
Easter Vigil and Mass
Gloria
In Good Time
A Reproach
Moving Together
Only
Snooker
Group Life
First Six Years
A Childhood Religion
The Essential
Talking of Hume
Thinking of Descartes
The Force of Time
Of Time
Distractions
There is Time
Passion
Mastery
Energy
Turning Inland
Resolve
On the Edge of My Mind
Justice
Question
Nocturne
A Happy Death
Beginning

Times and Seasons (1992)

Grammar
Parts of Speech
For My Mother
The Smell of Chrysanthemums
On the Tongue
Protest after a Written Interview
A Christmas Sequence
In Green Times
A Child Destroyed
Shapes and Surfaces
A Litany for Contrition
My Ships
Springtime and Easter
An Easter Sequence
For Restraint
A Childhood Horror
Beyond the Horoscope
For Louise and Timothy
Romantic Love
The Word
Meditation
An Age of Doubt
First Love
For the Young
The Start of the Universe: April 1992
Inner and Outer
Curtains Undrawn
Time in Summer
First Confession
Green
Think Of
Spell for a Dead Baby
Cold Words
Ordination
Star-Gazing
Light Between Leaves
A Question of Form
Song
Death
In the Beginning
In Praise of Giotto
For the Times
The Way They Live Now
The Poem in Itself
Parents
Innocence
Two Sonnets of Art and Age
Two Sonnets for a Czech Friend
Poetry Sometimes …
November Sonnet
Water and Air
Beyond
In the Nursery
Out of Time and Season
Time and Love
Subject and Object
Left in Charge
Trees
August Heat
Living by Love
An Old Story
When I Was Young
Movement and Meaning
Leavings
Witchery
A Father after his Daughter’s Wedding
The Happy Regrets

Familiar Spirits (1994)

The World We Made
The First Music
An Uncle and Godfather
Our Maids
Slow Movement: Autumn
A Cliff Walk in North Devon when I was Twelve
Sky in Childhood
Camp
First Love
A Way to Imagine
My Father’s Father
Blood Bonds, Family Feelings
Cousins, Aunts, Uncles
Old Friends
A Realisation
A Coffee House
Bicycles in Summer
Sea Music
Among the Stars
It is not True?
Cities: Their Beginning
Unto the Hills
Love Whispered
Almost
Squares and Circles
Genes, Likenesses
After a Film called The Bridge
September
Still Life
The Roots
Overture to Spring
Steps Towards Poems
Passed Down
Unsaid
Katie: A Portrait
In Praise of Anonymity
‘Music of the Spheres’
Two Sonnets on Love and Lust
For Louise Aged 12, My Great-Niece
My Sister
Death of a Father who was a Poet
A Very Great Friend and Influence
Fables, Lessons
The Modes of Love

In the Meantime (1996)

The Right Givers
Prawning
Wisdom of the Fields
Spring Love
The Liberation
Dream
Their First Snow
A House in Nottingham
For Charlotte
Children in Summer
Child of Seven Questions
The Need to Praise
Oxford, Heatwave, Tourists
Somerset
Among Late-Teenagers
Welcoming Spring
The Great Spirits
Story Tellers
Seers and Makers
Hermits and Poets
The Sitter
Act of the Imagination
For Paul Klee
Order
Sonnets to Narcissus
Having it Both Ways
Touch
Telling the Time
Two Sonnets
A World of Love
Loss of Loss
At Mass (I)
Which is Which?
After Dark
At Mass (II)
Bread
Consecration (I)
Consecration (II)
Ash Wednesday 1995
A Touch of Existentialism
Holy Communion
The Spirit’s Power
Rome
Time’s Element
Calvary
The Assumption of Our Lady 15th August
Flesh and Spirit
Spirit and Flesh
Lazarus
Good Friday
Age of Doubt
With the Migrants
In the Meantime

Praises (1998)

For my Sister, now a Widow
A View of Lazarus
Walking in the Dark
In and Out of Time
The Words are Pouring
Rapture of Spring
A Unique Gift
An Apple Tree
A Full Moon
Song Just Before Autumn
Harvest Home
Alone Over Christmas
No Visions or Prayers
Apology to a Friend
Round and Round
Famous Parents
Childhood Christmas Parties
Ballad of a Thinker
Teenagers
Boston
Theatre
Praises
Reasons for Not Returning
Carol for 1997
Makings
Two Sonnets on Words and Music
Mid-May Meditation
Small Hours
Myths Within Us
Song of Welcome
A Metaphysical Point About Poetry
Pain
Prayer for Holy Week
Love’s Struggle
‘Hours’ and Words
Song
Craftsmen
For Seamus Heaney
The Book of Love
In a Bar
The First Time
The Limits of Love
After an Elegy
A Gift of Gratitude
At Our Best
The Largest Question
Concerning History

Timely Issues (2001)

Regions of Memory
A Company of Friends
Dance
Mozart in the Middle of the Night
Dream: A Ballad
The Story
Country Sounds
Out in the Country in 2000
Caring
Well-Being
Vigour
Lullaby for the Old
Rage of the Moon
October 2000
The Thinker
For Any Newish Poet
Prayer: Homage to George Herbert
Homage to Thomas Traherne
Homage to Gerard Manley Hopkins: After Receiving Communion in Hospital
Homage to Robert Graves
Reflection
Looking at Pictures
Concerning Imagination (I)
Concerning Imagination (II)
Concerning Imagination (III)
Diagnosis
An Awareness
Some Months After Anaesthetics
Tenderness
Lost Time
After Four Months of Illness
One More Place of Memory
Assurance
Advice
The Hours
Prophets
Girl at Prayer
Advent
At Mass
All Saints 2000
All Souls
Song in November 2000
Carol for 2000
New Year Song
Epiphany 2001
Night Song
Whitsun
Hope
Eden
Perfection
Assurance Beyond Midnight


Juvenilia

Wings of the War (BL, MS Add 52598 A, pp. 3–4)
The Friend (BL, MS Add 52598 C, p. 1)
A Snail Universe (BL, MS Add 52598 C, p. 3)
The Cuckoo (BL, MS Add 52598 C, p. 14)
To Our Lady (BL, MS Add 52598 C, back of p. 20)
A Thought (BL, MS Add 52598 C, p. 21)
The Call of the Sea, c.1940 (UDEL, 186/7/87)
Moonlight on the Oxus, c.1940 (UDEL, 186/7/87)

1957–1966

Roman Noon, 15 June 1957 (UD, 284/1)
The Adversaries, 1957–58 (WUL, 8)
Elegy, January 1958 (WUL, 9)
Towards Contemplation, 1 April 1958 (WUL, 9)
Adolescence, July 1958 (WUL, 1)
‘No Worse, There is None’ 3 October 1962 (UD, 186/1/36)
Acceptance (Perversity), c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/17)
As I See It, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/18)
Before the Interview (Surprise), c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/18)
Breakfast in a Mental Hospital, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/19)
The Dead Selves, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/22)
Discharge from Hospital, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/22)
Divers Gifts, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/23)
Duty Doctor, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/23)
A Father, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/24)
Hospital, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/27)
Heat Wave: Melons, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/29)
Imagined Honeymoon, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/28)
Incompatibilities, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/28)
A Lesson, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/30)
A Memory, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/32)
The Mind Has Wounds, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/33)
Miro, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/33)
The Mountain, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/34)
Naming the Stars, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/1/43)
On the Telephone, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/37)
Order, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/37)
Philosophy in Springtime, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/39)
Revaluation, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/42)
Spaceman, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/45)
Suicide, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/46)
The Treatment, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/47)
Two Ways, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/48)
A Year Later, c.1963–66 (UD, 186/2/50)
A Recollection, June 1964 (UD, 186/2/41)
Homage to Jung and Freud, 10 October 1964 (UD, 186/1/27)
Making in a Mental Clinic, 13 October 1964 (UD, 186/1/31)
After a Catastrophe, 17 October 1964 (UD, 186/1/17)
For Jung, 25 October 1964 (UD, 186/1/25)
Despair in a State of Nerves, 8 November 1964 (UD, 186/1/22)
Nativity, 4 December 1964 (WUL, 4)
The Question, 4 December 1964 (WUL, 5)
Security, 1964 (UD, 186/2/51)
The Builders, 1964 (UD, 186/2/51)
Prayer, 7 June 1965 (WUL, 8)
A Surprise in a Mental Hospital, 11 June 1965 (WUL, 8)
A Haunting, 18 June 1965 (UD, 284/1)
A Mood of Near-Despair, 22 June 1965 (WUL, 8)
Dependence, 23 June 1965 (WUL, 8)
Words, 28 June 1965 (WUL, 8)
A Kind of Villanelle, 1 July 1965 (WUL, 8)
I am afraid …, 3 July 1965 (WUL, 3)
Rilke, 12 July 1965 (WUL, 8)
Old Inhabitant, 14 August 1965 (WUL, 5)
Bon Voyage, 19 August 1965 (WUL,1 )
Thinking of My Father’s Future Death, 27 August 1965 (WUL, 6)
Anomalies in Love, 5 September 1965 (WUL, 1)
Adumbrations, 12 September 1965 (WUL, 1)
Admissions, 2 October 1965 (WUL, 1)
To My Father, 10 December 1965 (WUL, 6)
Love and the Looking-Glass World, 13 February 1966 (WUL, 4)
Tapestry, 27 March 1966 (WUL, 6)
An Evening in the South, 19 June 1966 (WUL, 3)
Ambiguities, 11 July 1966 (WUL, 1)
Episode, 13 August 1966 (WUL, 3)
A Briefness, 23 August 1966 (WUL, 1)
September, 8 September 1966 (WUL, 5)
The Aquarium, 17 September 1966 (WUL, 1)
The Wedding Cake, 18 September 1966 (WUL, 6)
October, 1 October 1966 (WUL, 5)
Words, 30 October 1966 (UD, 186/2/49)
Waking in Tears, 18 December 1966 (UD, 186/2/49)

1972–1987

Suddenly, 1972 (GU, 2/1/1)
Fever, 1972 (GU, 2/1/4)
Rubinstein Playing Brahms’s Intermezzo, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Christ Speaks to the Other Persons of the Trinity, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Thinking of Ireland in January, 1976, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Artur Rubinstein Playing in Old Age, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Skier, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Bach, 1976 (GU, 2/2/12)
Francis Bacon’s Paintings, 1976 (GU, 2/2/13)
Christ Speaks to his Father of Homesickness, 1976 (GU, 2/3/2)
End of Winter, 1976 (GU, 2/3/2)
Ten Years After My Father’s Death, 1979 (GU, 2/8/10)
A Hidden King, 1979 (GU, 2/8/10)
Give Me Colours, 1979 (GU, 2/8/10)
Losing, 1979 (GU, 2/8/11)
The Drift, 1979 (GU, 2/8/11)
For My Father Again, 1979 (GU, 2/8/11)
Ashore, 1979 (GU, 2/8/11)
Music for Italy, 1979 (GU, 2/8/11)
A Prepared Elegy, 1980 (GU, 2/14/2)
A Special Sound, May, 1981 (WUL, 11)
Changings, May 1981 (WUL, 11)
A Song and a Question, May 1981 (WUL, 11)
The Mother of a Hunger-Striker who Died in Ireland on
May 4th, 1981, May 1981 (WUL, 11)
Words in the Small Hours, May 1981 (WUL, 11)
Wordsmiths, August 1981 (WUL, 11)
A Smile and a Country, August 1981 (WUL, 11)
Unity, August 1981 (WUL, 11)
Night Song, August 1981 (WUL, 11)
On My Sixtieth Birthday, c.1986 (GU, 2/31/15)
Patience, 1987 (GU, 2/27/1)
Near Despair, 1987 (GU, 2/27/1)
An Elegy After Twenty Years, 1987 (GU, 2/27/1)
Elegy for Myself, 1987 (GU, 2/27/2)
C.S. Lewis Lecturing in Magdalen Hall in 1946, 1987 (GU, 2/27/3)
Sleep Shanty, 1987 (GU, 2/27/5)

1992–2000

In a Taxi, 24 February 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
A Fleck, A Breath, 9 July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Reading Poetry at a School, 9 July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Two Griefs, 9 July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
[Untitled], 9 July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Romanticism, July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Skyscrapers, July 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
A Realisation, August 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Two Sonnets on Death, August 1992 (GU, uncatalogued)
Love and Friendship, 1996 (UD, uncatalogued)
Boston, Lincolnshire Childhood, 1996 (UD, uncatalogued)
Last Night, 1996 (UD, uncatalogued)
A Litany, 1996 (UD, uncatalogued)
A Trance of Spring, 1996 (UD, uncatalogued)
Banish, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Blaming, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Being, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
The Sea, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Inheritance, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Dawn, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Abuse of a Sacrament, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
English Lesson, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
The Vocation, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
After the Fall, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
An Impertinent Interviewer, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Child in a Café, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Clocks Back, 1998 (UD, uncatalogued)
Afterword, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Assisi after the Earthquake, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
The Farmer’s Lot, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Three Attempts at an Aesthetic, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
A Mood for Painting, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
The Perky Flowers, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Betrayer, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
The Receivers, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Early Rituals, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Pietà, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Rilke’s Angels, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Friendship, 1999 (UD, uncatalogued)
Prose, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Picture Galleries, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to Wallace Stevens, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to W.B. Yeats, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Hope, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to Chaucer, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to Henry Vaughan, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to Robert Browning, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to W.H. Auden, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
Homage to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)
With My Hands, 2000 (UD, uncatalogued)

Undated Poems

Actors (UD, 282/2)
The City (UD, 282/2)
Contemplation (UD, 282/2)
Meaning (UD, 282/2)
Thoughts on Dying (UD, 282/2)
A Vision (UD, 282/2)
The Wood (UD, 282/2)
For a Painter (UD, 282/2)
‘Easter in us’ (GU, 2/31/7)
For Russian Poets in Prison (GU, 2/31/8)
For Seamus Heaney (GU, 2/31/8)
Going Back (GU, 2/31/8)
Only in Fragments (GU, 2/31/15)
Psalm on Contemporary Philosophers (GU, 2/31/17)
Remembering Plato’s Symposium (GU, 2/31/17)
Where Words Fail (GU, 2/31/22)
It’s Magic (GU, uncatalogued)
After Thirty Years (GU, 2/25/5)
Schizophrenia (GU, 2/26/1)
On the Edge of Sleep (GU, 3/7/93)
Waking to the Sea (GU, 3/7/93)
Abstraction (WUL, 1)
Act of Unreason (WUL, 1)
Apology to a Psychotherapist (WUL, 1)
Approaches to Fear (WUL, 1)
Bells (WUL, 1)
The Big City After a Year (WUL, 1)
A Bowl of Stocks (WUL, 1)
A Boy Dying (WUL, 1)
By the Fire (WUL, 1)
Case-books (WUL, 2)
Crucifixions (WUL, 2)
A Cure (WUL, 2)
Day Patient (WUL, 2)
For Sylvia Plath (WUL, 3)
For Van Gogh (WUL, 3)
Haiku (WUL, 3)
In the South (WUL, 4)
Jargon (WUL, 4)
Love Song (WUL, 4)
My Friend (WUL, 4)
On a Text by Sartre (WUL, 5)
Roman Wine (WUL, 5)
The Silenced (WUL, 5)
Sonnet at Nightfall (WUL, 5)
Thoughts from Abroad (WUL, 6)
Transitional Poem (WUL, 6)
The Weapons (WUL, 6)
The Tormentors (WUL, 10)

Afterword
Sources
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines


Elizabeth Jennings, c. 1950
Elizabeth Jennings as a young girl
‘Poem Like a Picture’