The New Penguin Book of English Verse

ed Paul Keegan

1139pp, Allen Lane/ The Penguin Press

£20
Buy it at BOL

As the scorpion, in the famous fable, cannot help being a scorpion, so anthologies cannot help canonising. Even the anti-canonical ones canonise. The slightest anthologised poem has the blush of inclusion on it. Of course, it is not only the anthology's nature, but its task, to canonise. A major anthology such as Paul Keegan's fine new Penguin book, or Christopher Ricks's excellent recent Oxford selection, should first of all include enough of the canonical poets that an unversed reader, limited only to the anthology in question, would not starve amidst frail unknowns, but get a decent, representative sense of the centuries of English verse. The second, less important - if more interesting - task is that the anthology surprise us with the discovery or rediscovery of formerly uncanonical poems and poets.

Paul Keegan's selection acquits itself very well on the first front, and brilliantly on the second. It offers a fuller choice of the canonical poems than does Ricks's (it is a much bigger, almost unwieldy book). Readers will have their own fond and foolish complaints and delights. There are three marvellous selections from the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, from 2 Samuel (David's lament over the death of Jonathan), from Job ("Why is light given to a man, whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?"), and the famous passage from Ecclesiastes ("Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth").

An inevitable arbitrariness attends the Biblical selections, since there is such richness from which to choose. But a case can be made for the poetic status of the Psalms, and at the very least Psalms 39 and 90 should have been included. Psalm 90, from which Macbeth borrows some of his final soliloquy, resounds throughout English verse: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." Isaac Watts's familiar hymn, "Our God, our help in ages past", which Keegan includes, is a version.

Comparatively little of Shakespeare is here: a decision was clearly made not to excerpt very much from the plays. I would have liked more George Herbert (who is, curiously, missing from the index) and more Vaughan (no one ever includes his extraordinary poem "Distraction"), and would have traded more Browning for the extract from Webster's The White Devil. Keegan, like Ricks, omits Hopkins's poem "Felix Randal," so that, peculiarly, neither of our major new anthologies has one of the language's loveliest elegies. Like Ricks, Keegan includes only an excerpt of The Waste Land, which is a mistake, but one perhaps having to do with financial considerations: it is too expensive for anthologies to make fuller selections from contemporary work. Perhaps this is also the reason for the omission, in both books, of "The Whitsun Weddings"?

Keegan's book is rich with discoveries and reclaimings, however. Like Ricks, he includes Isaac Watts's "When I survey the wond'rous Cross"; unlike Ricks, he has chosen Charles Wesley's "Morning Hymn": "Christ, whose glory fills the skies." And Keegan has found an extraordinary anonymous inscription, from St Mary Magdalene Church, in Milk Street, from 1609:

Grass of levity

Span in brevity,

Flowers' felicity,

Fire of misery

Winds' stability,

Is mortality.

The book's jewel, for me, is a simple, heartbreaking epitaph by Katherine, Lady Dyer, for her husband, Sir William Dyer, dated 1621. In it, Lady Dyer imagines herself dying and merging with her dead husband. It begins, arrestingly: "My dearest dust," and ends yearningly (I have modernised the spelling):

Mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old

The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold;

Draw, draw the closed curtains: and make room;

My dear, my dearest dust; I come, I come.

It is a beautiful lyric, a simpler version of Henry King's later "Exequy", and one of those poems that once encountered, forever modify one's sensibility. I did not know it; it appears to be one of Keegan's great discoveries: Ricks does not include it, and neither does Alastair Fowler in his New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse .

Keegan's innovation - which, he tells us, is actually an old method - is to arrange the poems not by author, but by year, moving chronologically through the centuries. The anchoring year is the date of publication. Thus, for 1640, we find Henry King's "Exequy", along with poems by Thomas Carew and Ben Jonson. Or in 1919, we read Laurence Binyon's war poem "For the Fallen" next to Yeats's "The Wild Swans at Coole" and Eliot's "Sweeney Among the Nightingales".

This is not a gimmick, but a bold and inspired mingling. The conventional approach, gathering poems by author, suddenly seems dry; Keegan's book, by contrast, sprinkles each poem with a little of the water of history. Writers are not formally compacted, but chronologically stretched: one will come across, naturally, several different Wordsworths or Yeatses over several decades. Keegan writes in his introduction that the effect is to make his anthology a thematic one, whose theme is chronology itself. He is right, of course, and the reader can see the language changing, and read it almost as if it were a musical score, with its curling dynamics.

But he is perhaps too modest. For he also pays great attention to the ways that poems echo and reprise each other, and his mode of selection allows us to do this in enlivening ways. For instance, if one wanted, after coming upon Lady Dyer's "dearest dust" (1621), to trace the use of this word as a religious metonym for mortality and the mortal body, one could move forward to 1633, and find Herbert's "Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,/ Guiltie of dust and sinne". 1640 provides a variation: Henry King's elegiac phrase "For Thee (Lov'd Clay)"; and 1650 brings a poem by James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, with the line "I'm hopeful, once Thou'lt recollect my Dust". Charles Cotton, in 1689, has a poem called "An Epitaph on M.H.", in which he saucily elegises a seductive woman. He admits that his memory of her, and his poem, is masturbatory, almost necrophiliac in impulse:

And now her Memory pursue

With such a superstitious Lust,

That I could fumble with her Dust.

And so on, all the way to 1922, and Eliot's "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" from The Waste Land.

Needless to say, such travels are not themselves dusty in spirit, but are adventures on the paths of etymology. Keegan makes us picaros of poetry, and this very exciting, bold new book becomes our happy carriage.