Poems for Happiness

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.

• Introduction - i: Introduction Unit - 1: Happy Thought Poem - 1: Happy Thought - Robert Louis Stevenson Poem - 2: Happy the Man - John Dryden Poem - 3: New Sights - Anon Poem - 4: On a Quiet Conscience - Charles I Poem - 5: Leisure - W.H. Davies Poem - 6: High Flights - John Gillespie Magee Jr. Poem - 7: May the Road Rise Up to Meet You - Anon. Poem - 8: If - Rudyard Kipling Poem - 9: Now May Every Living Thing - Anon. Poem - 10: Hurt No Living Thing - Christina Rossetti Poem - 11: from Auguries of Innocence - William Blake Poem - 12: To Every Thing There Is a Season - Book of Ecclesiastes Poem - 13: from Endymion - John Keats Poem - 14: Shining Things - Elizabeth Gould Poem - 15: The Quiet Life - Alexander Pope Poem - 16: Song of Apollo - Percy Bysshe Shelley Poem - 17: My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is - Sir Edward Dyer Poem - 18: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer - John Keats Poem - 19: Eternity - William Blake Poem - 20: A Farewell - Charles Kingsley Poem - 21: A Vision - Henry Vaughan Poem - 22: Gratefulnesse - George Herbert Poem - 23: Thanks in Old Age - Walt Whitman Poem - 24: A Little Health - Anon. Unit - 2: Glory Be To God For Dappled Things Poem - 1: Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem - 2: Amazing Grace - John Newton Poem - 3: God Be In My Head - Sarum Missal Poem - 4: ‘Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace’ - St Francis of Assisi Poem - 5: Miracles - Walt Whitman Poem - 6: Father, We Thank Thee - Ralph Waldo Emerson Poem - 7: African Canticle - Anon Poem - 8: The Thanksgivings - Iroquois, Traditional tr. Harriet Maxwell Converse Poem - 9: Harvest Home - Henry Alford Poem - 10: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - Wallace Willis Poem - 11: Desiderata - Max Ehrmann Poem - 12: The Iroquois Prayer - Iroquois, Traditional Poem - 13: Jewish Prayer - Service of the Orthodox Synagogue for the Festival of Tabernacles Poem - 14: from His Pilgrimage - Sir Walter Raleigh Poem - 15: When the Heart is Hard - Rabindranath Tagore Poem - 16: The Selkirk Grace - Robert Burns Poem - 17: Epitaph - Winifred Holtby Unit - 3: I Sing of Brooks, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers Poem - 1: The Argument of His Book - Robert Herrick Poem - 2: The Song of Wandering Aengus - W. B. Yeats Poem - 3: Spring - William Blake Poem - 4: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth Poem - 5: I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose - Emily Dickinson Poem - 6: The Happy Child - W. H. Davies Poem - 7: from Pippa Passes - Robert Browning Poem - 8: A Greeting - W. H. Davies Poem - 9: February Twilight - Sara Teasdale Poem - 10: Adoration - Christopher Smart Poem - 11: The Sun Rising - John Donne Poem - 12: Sowing - Edward Thomas Poem - 13: A Dumb Friend - Christina Rossetti Poem - 14: My Heart Leaps Up - William Wordsworth Poem - 15: The Throstle - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Poem - 16: May - Thomas Dekker Poem - 17: Moonlight, Summer Moonlight - Emily Brontë Poem - 18: The Lake Isle of Innisfree - W. B. Yeats Poem - 19: Where the Bee Sucks - William Shakespeare Poem - 20: To Make a Prairie - Emily Dickinson Poem - 21: from A Midsummer Night’s Dream - William Shakespeare Poem - 22: Careless Rambles - John Clare Poem - 23: Magna Est Veritas - Coventry Patmore Poem - 24: Rest and Be Thankful! - William Wordsworth Poem - 24: Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 - William Wordsworth Poem - 25: Moonlit Apples - John Drinkwater Poem - 26: Harvest Hymn - John Greenleaf Whittier Poem - 27: To Autumn - John Keats Poem - 28: Pleasant Sounds - John Clare Poem - 29: ‘See yonder leafless trees against the sky’ - Ralph Waldo Emerson Poem - 30: Evening Quatrains - Charles Cotton Poem - 31: Ode - Joseph Addison Poem - 32: ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ - William Wordsworth Poem - 33: God’s Grandeur - Gerard Manley Hopkins Unit - 4: Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth Poem - 1: Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth - Arthur Hugh Clough Poem - 2: Freedom - Olive Runner Poem - 3: New Every Morning - Susan Coolidge Poem - 4: Will - Ella Wheeler Wilcox Poem - 5: Invictus - W. E. Henley Poem - 6: Ain’t I a Woman? - Sojourner Truth and Erlene Stetson Poem - 7: This, Too, Shall Pass Away - Lanta Wilson Smith Poem - 8: ‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers - Emily Dickinson Poem - 9: Shut Not Your Doors to Me, Proud Libraries - Walt Whitman Poem - 10: Courage - Amelia Earhart Poem - 11: The Call - Charlotte Mew Poem - 12: A Pebble - James W. Foley Poem - 13: from Henry V - William Shakespeare Poem - 14: The New Colossus - Emma Lazarus Poem - 15: The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln Poem - 16: The Star-Spangled Banner - Francis Scott Key Poem - 17: I Hear America Singing - Walt Whitman Poem - 18: No Coward Soul Is Mine - Emily Brontë Poem - 19: A Summing Up - Charles Mackay Unit - 5: Friendship is Love Without his Wings Poem - 1: L’Amitié Est L’Amour Sans Ailes - Lord Byron Poem - 2: Outwitted - Edwin Markham Poem - 3: We Two Boys Together Clinging - Walt Whitman Poem - 4: Friendship - Dinah Maria Craik Poem - 5: Forbearance - Ralph Waldo Emerson Poem - 6: Friendship - Aztec, Traditional Poem - 7: Travelling - William Wordsworth Poem - 8: Love and Friendship - Emily Brontë Poem - 9: New Friends and Old Friends - Joseph Parry Unit - 6: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven Poem - 1: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - W. B. Yeats Poem - 2: How Do I Love Thee? - Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poem - 3: Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare Poem - 4: Meeting at Night - Robert Browning Poem - 5: To a Friend - Amy Lowell Poem - 6: A Birthday - Christina Rossetti Poem - 7: Upon Julia’s Clothes - Robert Herrick Poem - 8: Rose- cheeked - Laura Thomas Campion Poem - 9: In an Artist’s Studio - Christina Rossetti Poem - 10: ‘It was a lover and his lass’ - William Shakespeare Poem - 11: Love Lightly Pleased - Robert Herrick Poem - 12: Invitation to Love - Paul Laurence Dunbar Poem - 13: from Paradise Lost - John Milton Poem - 14: Fulfillment - William Cavendish Poem - 15: from Sonnets from the Portuguese - Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poem - 16: Camomile Tea - Katherine Mansfield Poem - 17: When I Heard at the Close of the Day - Walt Whitman Poem - 18: Song - George Peele Poem - 19: To Althea, from Prison - Richard Lovelace Poem - 20: A Decade - Amy Lowell Unit - 7: The Shape of a Good Greyhound Poem - 1: The Shape of a Good Greyhound - Anon Poem - 2: The Lurcher - William Cowper Poem - 3: Dog - Harold Monro Poem - 4: The Windhover - Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem - 5: A Winter Bluejay - Sara Teasdale Poem - 6: from To a Skylark - Percy Bysshe Shelley Poem - 7: ‘Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day’ - Thomas Heywood Poem - 8: from Jubilate Agno - Christopher Smart Poem - 9: Pangur Bán - Anon. tr. Robin Flower Poem - 10: The Owl and the Pussycat - Edward Lear Poem - 11: Seal Lullaby - Rudyard Kipling Index - ii: Index of Poets Index - iii: Index of Titles Index - iv: Index of First Lines