Desert Island Poetry

If Tom Sleigh were marooned on a desert island, what would keep him happy? Here he tells of five poems he couldn't live without.

■ As You Came from the Holy Land of Walsingham at- tributed to Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618;). .'This is a carnal love poem masquerading as a sacred love poem. A compares his mistressto Mary The final stanza is hair-raising: But Love is a durablefire/In the mind ever buming/Meversick, never old, never dead/From itself never turning."

■ Canto II by Ezra Pound (1885-1972). "This is a poem about a pagan World that makes you think a sensual paradise is possible, if only for the duration of the poem."

Cuchulain Comforted by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). "In this poem, set in the world of the dead, a mythical hero-learns his final lesson, about other worldliness, from wretched people he would have scorned in the world of the living. It has a great last line about death and song becoming one: They kail change% their throats and hud thethroats of birds."

■ The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). "In this beautiful love poem the poet asserts that'God and the/imagination are one.' I lave the poems intimacy and assertion of faith when you know there's small reason to have faith about anything at all."

Lament''by Thorn Gunn (1929-). "A heartbreaking poem about a friend who died, a friend who made a life out of the hospital experience, despite what was being taken from him. The ending is devastaungly sad." :