Poetry Codex

Victorian

William Watson

1858–1935

William Watson (1858–1935) was an English poet, born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, Yorkshire. He made his reputation in the 1890s with poems on public themes and with elegant, formal lyrics, and was often spoken of as a possible poet laureate.

He was knighted in 1917. His volumes include Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems and The Hope of the World (1897). The poems here come from Untermeyer's Modern British Poetry (1920).

Major Works (1)

  1. The Prince's Quest — Narrative poem, 1880

Poems (152)

  1. Ode in May
  2. Estrangement
  3. Song
  4. Prelude
  5. Autumn
  6. World-Strangeness
  7. "When Birds Were Songless"
  8. The Mock Self
  9. "Thy Voice from Inmost Dreamland Calls"
  10. In Laleham Churchyard
  11. The Flight of Youth
  12. "Nay, Bid Me Not My Cares to Leave"
  13. A Child's Hair
  14. The Key-Board
  15. "Scentless Flow'rs I Bring Thee"
  16. On Landor's "Hellenics"
  17. To ----
  18. On Exaggerated Deference to Foreign Literary Opinion
  19. England to Ireland
  20. Mensis Lacrimarum
  21. "Under the Dark and Piny Steep"
  22. The Blind Summit
  23. To Lord Tennyson
  24. Sketch of a Political Character
  25. Art Maxims
  26. The Glimpse
  27. The Ballad of the "Britain's Pride"
  28. Lines
  29. The Raven's Shadow
  30. Lux Perdita
  31. England and Her Colonies
  32. History
  33. The Empty Nest
  34. Ireland
  35. The Lute-Player
  36. "And These--Are These Indeed the End"
  37. The Russ at Kara
  38. Liberty Rejected
  39. Life Without Health
  40. To a Friend, Chafing at Enforced Idleness from Interrupted Health
  41. "Well He Slumbers, Greatly Slain"
  42. An Epistle
  43. To Austin Dobson
  44. To Edward Clodd
  45. To Edward Dowden
  46. Felicity
  47. The Soudanese
  48. Hasheen
  49. The English Dead
  50. Gordon
  51. Gordon (Concluded)
  52. The True Patriotism
  53. Restored Allegiance
  54. The Political Luminary
  55. Foreign Menace
  56. Home-Rootedness
  57. Our Eastern Treasure
  58. Reported Concessions
  59. Nightmare
  60. Last Word: to the Colonies
  61. 'Tis human fortune's happiest height to be
  62. The statue--Buonarroti said--doth wait
  63. To keep in sight Perfection, and adore
  64. If Nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st
  65. The Poet gathers fruit from every tree
  66. Brook, from whose bridge the wandering idler peers
  67. To Art we go as to a well, athirst
  68. In youth the artist voweth lover's vows
  69. Immured in sense, with fivefold bonds confined
  70. Love, like a bird, hath perch'd upon a spray
  71. Think not thy wisdom can illume away
  72. In mid whirl of the dance of Time ye start
  73. The beasts in field are glad, and have not wit
  74. Momentous to himself as I to me
  75. The gods man makes he breaks; proclaims them each
  76. The children romp within the graveyard's pale
  77. Our lithe thoughts gambol close to God's abyss
  78. Lives there whom pain hath evermore pass'd by
  79. Say what thou wilt, the young are happy never
  80. Onward the chariot of the Untarrying moves
  81. A deft musician does the breeze become
  82. I follow Beauty; of her train am I
  83. Toiling and yearning, 'tis man's doom to see
  84. For metaphors of man we search the skies
  85. One music maketh its occult abode
  86. Enough of mournful melodies, my lute
  87. I pluck'd this flower, O brighter flower, for thee
  88. To be as this old elm full loth were I
  89. Ah, vain, thrice vain in the end, thy hate and rage
  90. His rhymes the poet flings at all men's feet
  91. On Longfellow's Death
  92. Byron the Voluptuary
  93. Antony at Actium
  94. Art
  95. Keats
  96. After Reading "Tamburlaine the Great"
  97. Shelley and Harriet Westbrook
  98. The Play of "King Lear"
  99. To a Poet
  100. The Year's Minstrelsy
  101. The Ruined Abbey
  102. Michelangelo's "Moses"
  103. The Alps
  104. The Cathedral Spire
  105. An Epitaph
  106. The Metropolitan Underground Railway
  107. To a Seabird
  108. On Dürer's Melencolia
  109. Tantalus
  110. A Maiden's Epitaph
  111. To James Bromley
  112. Wordsworth's Grave
  113. Lachrymæ Musarum
  114. Dedication of "The Dream of Man"
  115. The Dream of Man
  116. Shelley's Centenary
  117. A Golden Hour
  118. At the Grave of Charles Lamb, in Edmonton
  119. Lines in a Flyleaf of "Christabel"
  120. Lines to Our New Censor
  121. Reluctant Summer
  122. The Great Misgiving
  123. "The Things That Are More Excellent"
  124. Beauty's Metempsychosis
  125. England My Mother
  126. Night
  127. The Fugitive Ideal
  128. "The Foresters"
  129. Song (Lightly we met in the morn)
  130. Columbus
  131. Angelo
  132. The Questioner
  133. The River
  134. Changed Voices
  135. A Sunset
  136. A Song of Three Singers
  137. Love's Astrology
  138. Three Flowers
  139. Three Eternities
  140. Love Outloved
  141. Vanishings
  142. Beethoven
  143. God-Seeking
  144. Skyfaring
  145. Vita Nuova
  146. The First Skylark of Spring
  147. Song in Imitation of the Elizabethans
  148. Dawn on the Headland
  149. Sonnets to Miranda: VIII
  150. O, Like a Queen
  151. Leavetaking
  152. The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue

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