Latest questions: 10 August 2021

This week, by way of a change, we have a themed quiz. It's about the UK's 100 favourite poems – according to a poll conducted by the BBC in 1995.

I'll give you the title of a poem, the year it was written or published, and a quotation from it (or other clue), if I think it'll help. You just have to give the name of the author. The poems are in descending order of popularity – in other words, they get more difficult as you go down through the list.

1	If ("If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you")	1910		Rudyard Kipling
2	The Lady of Shalott	1833		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
3	The Listeners ("'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller / Knocking on the moonlit door")	1912		Walter de la Mare
4	Not Waving but Drowning	1957		Stevie Smith
5	The Daffodils (a.k.a. I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud)	1804		William Wordsworth
6	To Autumn ("Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness")	1819		John Keats
7	The Lake Isle of Innisfree	1888		W. B. Yeats
8	Dulce et Decorum Est	1817		Wilfred Owen
9	Ode to a Nightingale	1819		John Keats
10	Aedh (ee or ay) Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven	1899		W. B. Yeats
11	Remember ("Remember me when I am gone away ... ")	1849		Christina Rossetti
12	Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	1750		Thomas Gray
13	Fern Hill ("Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs")	1945		Dylan Thomas
14	Leisure ("What is this life if full of care / We have no time to stand and stare")	1911		W. H. Davies
15	The Highwayman	1906		Alfred Noyes
16	To His Coy Mistress	1650		Andrew Marvel
17	Dover Beach	1851		Matthew Arnold
18	The Tyger ("Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night ")	1794		William Blake
19	Stop All the Clocks	1936		W. H. Auden
20	Adlestrop ("Yes. I remember Adlestrop ... ")	1914		Edward Thomas
21	The Soldier ("If I should die, think only this of me ... ")	1914		Rupert Brooke
22	Warning ("When I am an old woman I shall wear purple")	1961		Jenny Joseph
23	Sea–Fever	1902		John Masefield
24	Upon Westminster Bridge ("Earth has not anything to show more fair")	1802		William Wordsworth
25	Sonnets from the Portuguese XLIII ("How Do I Love Thee?")	1845		Elizabeth Barrett Browning
26	The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock	1910		T. S. Eliot
27	Cargoes	1903		John Masefield
28	Jabberwocky	1871		Lewis Carroll
29	The Rime of the Ancient Mariner	1797		Samuel Taylor Coleridge
30	Ozymandias of Egypt	1818		Percy Bysshe Shelley
31	Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening	1922		Robert Frost
32	Abou Ben Adhem ("Abou Ben Adhem – may his tribe increase! / Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace")	1838		Leigh Hunt
33	Everyone Sang (about the end of World War I)	1919		Siegfried Sassoon
34	The Windhover	1918		Gerard Manley Hopkins
35	Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night	1951		Dylan Thomas
36	Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")	1609		William Shakespeare
37	When You Are Old	1893		W. B. Yeats
38	Naming of Parts – from Lessons of the War (to Alan Mitchell)	1942		Henry Reed
39	The Darkling Thrush	1899		Thomas Hardy
40	Please Mrs. Butler	1983		Allan Ahlberg
41	Kubla Khan	1797		Samuel Taylor Coleridge
42	Home–Thoughts, From Abroad ("Oh, to be in England / Now that April's there")	1845		Robert Browning
43	High Flight (An Airman's Ecstasy)	1941		John Gillespie Magee
44	Journey of the Magi	1927		T. S. Eliot
45	The Owl and the Pussy–Cat	1871		Edward Lear
46	The Glory of the Garden	1911		Rudyard Kipling
47	The Road Not Taken	1915		Robert Frost
48	The Way Through the Woods	1910		Rudyard Kipling
49	Anthem for Doomed Youth ("What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?")	1917		Wilfred Owen
50	Bloody Men ("Bloody men are like bloody buses ... ")	1987		Wendy Cope
51	Emmonsail's Heath in Winter	1828		John Clare
52	La Figlia Che Piange	1917		T. S. Eliot
53	The Whitsun Weddings	1964		Philip Larkin
54	The Ballad of Reading Gaol	1897		Oscar Wilde
55	I Remember, I Remember ("I remember, I remember / The house where I was born")	1844		Thomas Hood
56	This Be the Verse	1971		Philip Larkin
57	Snake	1923		D. H. Lawrence
58	The Great Lover	1914		Rupert Brooke
59	A Red, Red Rose	1794		Robert Burns
60	The Sunlight on the Garden	1936		Louis MacNeice
61	The Old Vicarage, Grantchester	1912		Rupert Brooke
62	Diary of a Church Mouse	1975		John Betjeman
63	Silver	1913		Walter de la Mare
64	Pied Beauty ("Glory be to God for dappled things")	1877		Gerard Manley Hopkins
65	Prayer Before Birth ("I am not yet born; O hear me ... ")	1944		Louis MacNeice
66	Macavity: The Mystery Cat	1939		T. S. Eliot
67	Afterwards	1917		Thomas Hardy
68	The Donkey (" ... The Devil's walking parody / on all four–footed things")	1927		G. K. Chesterton
69	My Last Duchess	1842		Robert Browning
70	Christmas ("The bells of waiting Advent ring ... ")	1954		John Betjeman
71	The Thought–Fox	1957		Ted Hughes
72	Preludes ("The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways")	1911		T. S. Eliot
73	Love (III) ("Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back / Guilty of dust and sin")	1633		George Herbert
74	The Charge of the Light Brigade	1854		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
75	I Am! ("I am: yet what I am none cares or knows")	1845		John Clare
76	The Hound of Heaven	1893		Francis Thompson
77	The Passionate Shepherd to his Love ("Come live with me and be my Love")	1599		Christopher Marlowe
78	The Song of Wandering Aengus ("I went out to the hazel wood / Because a fire was in my head")	1897		W. B. Yeats
79	She Walks in Beauty	1814		George Gordon, Lord Byron
80	Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now	1895		A. E. Housman
81	The Flea ("Marke but this flea, and marke in this ... ")	1595		John Donne
82	Ducks (" ... All God's jokes are good - even the practical ones!")	1919		F. W. Harvey
83	An Arundel Tomb ("Side by side, their faces blurred / The earl and countess lie in stone")	1956		Philip Larkin
84	Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments")	1609		William Shakespeare
85	Ulysses (last line: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield")	1833		Alfred, Lord Tennyson
86	Snow (last line: "There is more than glass between the snow and the roses") 1935	1935		Louis MacNeice
87	Let Me Die a Youngman's Death	1967		Roger McGough
88	The Ruined Maid	1866		Thomas Hardy
89	Toilet ("I wonder will I speak to the girl / Sitting opposite me on this train")			Hugo Williams
90	Futility ("Move him into the sun ... If anything might rouse him now / The kind onld sun will know")	1918		Wilfred Owen
91	The Raven ("Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'")	1845		Edgar Allan Poe
92	Tam o'Shanter	1790		Robert Burns
93	Love's Philosophy (ends: "What are all these kissings worth / If thou kiss not me?")	1819		Percy Bysshe Shelley
94	The Song of Hiawatha	1855		H. W. Longfellow
95	God's Grandeur ("The world is charges with the Grandeur of God")	1877		Gerard Manley Hopkins
96	Chocolate Cake (I love chocolate cake / And when I was a boy / I loved it even more")	1983		Michael Rosen
97	Jenny Kissed Me	1838		Leigh Hunt
98	Blackberry–Picking	1966		Seamus Heaney
99	The Prelude	1850		William Wordsworth
100	Warming Her Pearls	1987		Carol Ann Duffy

© Haydn Thompson 2021