The University of the Third Age - Welwyn Hatfield
Poetry Study Group
Meetings are held on alternate Thursday mornings, from 10am 'til noon, at various locations - currently "Zoom".
Group Leader: Hazel Bell, 01707 265201; hkb@aidanbell.com
We don’t write poetry: we just indulge in it, choosing a topic or poet for each meeting (those selected so far are listed below) and each bringing six or so poems on that theme or by that poet, to read aloud to the group, which then discusses them. So much enjoyment is to be had by the reading of poetry. You can be moved by the simplest, shortest of poems – for instance, A. E. Housman’s untitled war poem:
Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
The density of poetry can imply so much meaning in few words, in such lines as the opening of W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby”:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm.
A poem may create a work of art using words instead of paint or musical notes, as in Swinburne’s greeting of the Spring:
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
We are now full, with enthusiastic members: but if you would like to become one, I could put your name on a waiting list, or help you to start a new group.
Meetings for 2022 will be:
- April 7
- April 21
- May 5
- May 19
- June 2
- June 16
- June 30
- July 14
- July 28
- July 11
- July 25
- July 8
- July 22
- October 6
- October 20
- November 3
- November 17
- December 1
- December 15
Past subjects
2011
- Milton, Donne
- Bible, favourites
- Emily Dickinson
- Elizabeth Jennings
- G Mackay Brown
- Pat McMahon
- Norman Mackay
- Louis McNeice
- Love and betrayal
- Trees/fruit
- Yeats
- Autumn
- love
- war (abroad)
- age
- animals
- winter, Christmas
2012
- Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes
- ships, boats
- love
- travel
- Laurie Lee, Christina Rossetti
- Rudyard Kipling, Maya Angelou
- G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc
- Robert Frost, Wilfred Owen
- mountains, lakes
- Irish poets
- dwellings, buildings
- poems with names of real people
- women
- Dylan Thomas, Edward Thomas
- John Clare, children
- music, singing
- animals
- Under Milk Wood
- people
- Longfellow & Philip Larkin
- Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke
- Thomas Hardy, favourites
- Christmas, travel
2013
- winter, seasons
- mythology, heroes
- all creatures great and small
- Spring
- foreign poems
- dwellings
- humorous / funereal
- professions
- Tennyson, T S Eliot
- Algernon Swinburne, W. H. Auden
- Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling
- William Shakespeare
- Matthew Arnold
- Robert Graves
- Ezra Pound
- John Betjeman
- Louis McNiece
- Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson
- Seamus Heaney
- Kahlil Gibran, William Blake
- Walter de la Mere. R. S. Thomas
- S. T. Coleridge - Christabel
- War
- Female poets
- Christmas
2014
- Tennyson - The Coming of Arthur
- Gerard Manley Hopkins & Norman McCaig
- Favourite poems
- Milton - Paradise Lost (Book 1)
- Yeats
- The Mersey Group
- A.E. Housman, Walter de la Mare
- Derek Walcott
- Swinburne, Andrew Motion
- John Donne (CD of his love poems)
- Metaphysical poets
- Journeys
- Nostalgia / Fruit
- Celebration
- Nations
- Landscapes
- Cities
- War and Peace
- The 4 elements
- Freedom and persecution
2015
- T. S. Eliot
- Modernism
- sonnets
- Spring and Easter
- water
- human habitation
- Pope and the Augustans
- the pursuit of love
- characters and craftsmen
- Kings, Queens heroes and magic
- places
- North America (US & Canada)
- colour and treasure
- Autumn
- Scottish poets
2016
- Transport
- Friendship
- Norman McCaig / animal kingdom
- poems with names in
- relatives (extended family)
- Royalty
- heat and cold
- youth and age
- mountains and seas
- delight and despair
- journeys
- poems written in the first person
- cities, towns and villages
- sleep and dreams
- colourful characters
- ends and beginnings
- rivers and brooks
- sailors and sailing
- food and drink, taste and smell
- gardens
- winter
- time
2017
- Getting from here to there
- Childhood and childish things
- The letter 'M': subject matter - e.g. Moors, Magic or Mystery; or in the title - e.g. Maud, Memoriam; or some significant word within the poem.
- The end of Winter and the beginning of Spring
- Sun, moon, stars and the heavens
- Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and Alun Lewis
- Birth and renewal
- People
- Ireland, Scotland and Wales
- Walter de la Mare
- Summer
- Poets or poems beginning with the letter R
- Artifacts
- Communication: language, writing, poetry, books
- Prayer and Worship
- journeys and travel
- animals
- nostalgia
- colours
- farming
- Seamus Heaney
- water
2018
- memories
- landscape
- birds
- adventure
- 19c women poets
- wildlife
- narrative poems
- anonymous poems
- childhood and adolescence
- ghosts
- comic poetry
- music
- war and peace
- town and country
- poetic effects
- death
- colours
- wind and storm
- “found” poems
- ships and sailors
- illumination
- visual imagery
- war
- Christmas, frost and snow
2019
- Hardy, Herrick & Housman
- American poetry
- Birds
- Youth and age
- “Found” poetry
- Women’s perspective on war
- love
- forms of poetry
- English place names
- meetings/partings, beginnings/endings
- outdoors / fathers
- Poets Laureate
- favourite poets and poems
- delight and despair
- romance
- Larkin & Hughes
- the five senses
- adventure
- poetic effects
- trades and professions
- Poetry and Song
- animals
- looking up at the sky
- poets' references to other poets
- Winter
2020
- Fruit and vegetables
- contrasts
- beginnings and endings
- birds
- addressed to 2nd person
(Zoom meetings)
- favourites
- myths and magic
- Spring
- John Clare, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes
- places we would like to visit
- mountains and seaside
- four seasons
- poetic effects
- Swinburne and Tennyson
- music
- weather
- flowers
- ethnic minorities
- tension of opposites
- nostalgia
- categories of rhyme
- dead or alive
- humour
- winter
- birds
2021
- Poems that help us get through 2020
- Ancient and modern
- Rudyard Kipling, Norman MacCaig
- childhood
- John Betjeman, Thomas Hardy
- metre
- spiritual
- E. Dickinson, Byron, Simon Armitage
- C. Duffy, G. Clarke, D. O’Driscoll
- rivers
- things remembered
- movement
- Sleep, dreams and dreaming
- Irish poets
- Form
- The Dymock Poets
- The five senses
- Autumn
- Adventure
- Strong emotions
- Time
- Useful verse
- Polemical poetry
- Birth
- dramatic scenes
2022
- Dramatic scenes
- The 9 muses
- Woman poets of the 20th/21st centuries
- Scots, Scotland, all things Scottish
- Professions, trades and their gear
- Mothers and Fathers
- Idling, being idle
- Travel
- Metaphysical poets
- Reflections
- Countryside
Click here to see a Youtube video of a poetry group meeting.
Web-site created by Roger Swaine.