I've often wondered how Charles Lamb came up with the form of this week's anthology favourite, The Old Familiar Faces. It's a rare anthologist who includes any other of Lamb's poems, in fact. The poem seems to be a one-off, an unusually-shaped but fully-formed parlour piece among the more fine-grained ornaments of the better-known Romantic poets – several of whom, incidentally, were among Charles Lamb's closest friends. But can the poem be without any ancestors?

The chance discovery of a short article written by Duncan Wu for the Charles Lamb Society offered a surprising answer: the blank verse of the Elizabethan playwright, Philip Massinger. Perhaps it shouldn't have been a surprise: Lamb, after all, was a devoted student and populariser of Shakespeare's minor contemporaries. I followed the trail and, rewardingly enough, found Lamb had enthusiastically quoted Massinger's play A Very Woman in a letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (June 13 1796), particularly noticing "the fine effect of his double endings".

"You will by your ear distinguish the lines, for I write 'em as prose," Lamb adds, proceeding to do just that: "Not far from where my father lives, a lady, a neighbour by, blest with as great a beauty as nature durst bestow without undoing, dwelt, and most happily, as I thought then … "

Those repeated feminine endings (a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, as in "lady") have a haunting, perhaps addictive quality. It's almost certain that their rhythm was in Lamb's head when he sat down to compose The Old Familiar Faces – to be published later on in the collection he produced with Charles Lloyd, Blank Verse (1798). And it's probably not coincidental that feminine endings and the maternal should connect in Lamb's imagination. The family tragedy in which his sister Mary, temporarily insane, murdered their mother, is well-known. The first published version of the poem begins: "Where are they gone, the old familiar faces? / I had a mother, but she died, and left me, / Died prematurely in a day of horrors – / All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." Lamb suppresses the reference to the "day of horrors" in his revision, but its emotional charge drives the poem's unique and compelling form.

The basic prosodic pattern is iambic pentameter, with frequent substitution allowing for an almost conversational flexibility to the rhythm. The absence of rhyme contributes to the informal tone, while parallelism heightens the voice's urgency. Stanza six will in fact reveal that a specific listener is being addressed.

The first tercet reminds us that young people may feel nostalgia just as sharply as the old. Here, the 23-year-old poet looks beyond the horrible day to childhood and earlier youth – and an innocent happiness, irrevocably lost.

A different compound verb-tense in the second stanza evokes the more recent past: "I have been laughing, I have been carousing … " With these activities, set in the present continuous aspect of the verb, the convivial young literary man comes into focus, wining and dining in a glad escape from deeper regrets. Those "bosom cronies" (the term suggests irony) perhaps share and subdue the speaker's memories, but only temporarily. They leave at the end of the evening. They're not lost permanently, but their absence plunges the speaker into his own shadows again. Tercets one and two complement each other by situating loss in different time-frames.

Lamb doesn't supress all autobiography: part of the poem's attraction lies in the hints of back story: the failed love affair, the friend abandoned. The refrain's syntax is tweaked for the first time in the fourth tercet to produce a clever interweaving with the preceding lines. The fifth is uniquely unpeopled, the speaker "ghost-like" and the earth a desert. As if the desolation isn't to be borne any longer, the next stanza directly summons the "Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother … " Lamb had many friends – friendship was among his gifts – and several addressees are possible, but the most likely is Coleridge. The two had been at school together, and Lamb regarded him as both confidante and mentor. "You first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, beauty and kindliness," he wrote in dedication in 1818.

Innovatively, Lamb carries the syntax of the sixth tercet over into the last one, building a melancholy climax. "So we might talk of the old, familiar faces – // How some they have died, and some they have left me … " The jolt of that extra, grammatically inessential pronoun, "they", resembles a sob. Lamb is in full mourning, now, for the absent living as well as the dead. I think the phrase about those "taken from me" encodes another allusion to the mother he had so greatly loved. However, Lamb's biographer, EV Lucas, considers it to be a reference to a further "seizure" Mary suffered, leading to another temporary incarceration. Lucas notes that "the last stanza began with the word 'For', and italicised the words, And some are taken from me." He considers this seizure to have been the immediate occasion of the poem.

I'm not an expert on Lamb's poems, and there may be others as powerful as this elegy. Perhaps you can find them. Of the few handfuls I've read, I particularly enjoyed a cheerier poem of friendship, To Charles Lloyd: An Unexpected Visitor.

But it doesn't, of course, have the originality or passion of The Old Familiar Faces, nor fulfil so well the criteria which Lamb himself praised in the sonnets of Philip Sydney. "They are full, material and circumstantiated. Time and place appropriates every one of them."

Perhaps, born into an autobiographically franker age, Lamb might have found his metier as a poet, to add to his reputation as a superb prose writer – and a delightful friend.

The Old Familiar Faces
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing,
Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I loved a Love once, fairest among women:
Closed are her doors on me, I must not see her -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have a friend, a kinder friend has no man;
Like an ingrate, I left my friend abruptly;
Left him, to muse on the old familiar faces.

Ghost-like I paced round the haunts of my childhood,
Earth seem'd a desert I was bound to traverse,
Seeking to find the old familiar faces.

Friend of my bosom, thou more than a brother,
Why wert not thou born in my father's dwelling?
So might we talk of the old familiar faces -

How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed -
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.