Matching British Poets and Poems Quiz

Answer: Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a Victorian poet, school inspector and Oxford University professor. 'Dover Beach' was first published in his 1867 anthology 'New Poems' but is believed to have been written around 1850. It is a lyric poem with four stanzas of unequal length that describe one of the most famous views of southern England - the white chalk cliffs of Dover that look out across the narrow stretch of the English Channel towards France, and the beach that they tower over.

The poem has made appearances in various other works of popular culture. It is quoted by Ray Bradbury in 'Fahrenheit 451' and referenced in Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' and the musical 'Cabaret'.

Answer: John Dryden

John Dryden's poem 'Alexander's Feast' is about Alexander the Great, who ruled the ancient kingdom of Macedonia during the 4th century BC and is noted for his military prowess - particularly for his defeat of the Persian King Darius III. The poem tells the story of the celebrations following that battle where a musician named Timotheus uses the power of song to influence the King's emotions, eventually inspiring him to burn down Darius' palace in a last act of revenge against his defeated enemy.

The focus on the power of music in this poem was a deliberate choice by Dryden who was commissioned to produce it for the Musical Society of London's annual festival in honour of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. The poem is also known by the alternative title 'The Power of Music'.

Answer: Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' is actually a collection of 44 poems, but arguably the most famous of them is the penultimate one that begins with the iconic line "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways". The sonnets tell the story of her love affair and marriage to fellow poet Robert Browning; the earlier ones are more about the discovery of blossoming love, while the later ones (such as number 43) describe more established feelings.

Despite the title, the poems were not translations from Portuguese editions or originally written by a Portuguese poet; the name actually came from one of her husband's pet nicknames for her.

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was first published in 'Literary Ballads', a collection of poems by both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This poem was by the latter and was one of just four that Coleridge contributed to its original edition. While Coleridge may have written far less of the poems, his works did tend to be longer - 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has seven parts and over 140 stanzas.

It is about an old sailor telling the story of his exploits at sea to an unsuspecting bystander who was on his way to a wedding. The famous lines about the lack of drinking water in the middle of the ocean can be found in the second part where the sailor is describing a time when his ship got stuck in the doldrums. The other famous theme from the poem relates to the part of the tale where the mariner shoots dead an albatross and is forced by his crewmates to wear the dead bird around his neck as punishment. It is this act that also compels him to wander the land, telling his tale to random people, in the first place.

Answer: A. E. Housman

'When I was One-and-Twenty' is one of the poems included in A. E. Housman's famous collection 'A Shropshire Lad'. It is officially listed as the otherwise untitled 'XIII' and the title it is now commonly given is taken from its first line. It is a short poem consisting of just two verses and dispenses advice to a 21-year-old about not falling in love too young. At the end of the second verse it is revealed that the narrator of the poem is reflecting on the value of said advice from the grand old age of... 22:

"And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true."

'A Shropshire Lad' was Alfred Edward Housman's first published work of poetry, appearing in 1896 when he was 37 years old. He was initially better known as a Latin scholar and was also a Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge. Interestingly, he was not a "Shropshire lad" (he was born in Worcestershire) and wrote most of his famous work without having even visited the county.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

'Gunga Din' by Rudyard Kipling is a narrative poem that deals with the mistreatment of a native servant by white British soldiers and the guilt felt by one of them when the titular character loses his own life while defending that of his master. The quote "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" is the poem's final line and sums up the soldier's realisation that a person's value is not measured by their race or social position, but by their actions.

Kipling was born in India and spent his early working life there before returning to London in 1889 - just one year before he wrote 'Gunga Din'. The poem appeared in an 1892 collection named 'Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses'.

Answer: Edmund Spenser

'The Faerie Queene' by Edmund Spenser is one of the longest poems ever written in English (albeit the older form of English in use during the Tudor period), but if Spenser had managed to complete it in his lifetime it could in theory have turned out twice as long! The original publication in 1590 described it as being "disposed into twelve books" but only three were actually written by that time, with another three added when it was republished in 1596. Spenser died in 1599 aged about 46 and therefore the final six never appeared, leaving the poem with around 4,000 stanzas. Each book was intended to tell the story of a knight representing a specific virtue, with the first six covering holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy.

The title character is also referred to as Gloriana and is a (somewhat less than subtle) representation of Queen Elizabeth I of England, to whom the work was also dedicated. This was probably a shrewd political and financial move on the part of Spenser as his presentation of an early manuscript to the queen gained him both a regular pension and the cachet of royal approval.

Answer: William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth's 'My Heart Leaps Up' also has the alternative title of 'The Rainbow' and is a simple, single stanza poem about how the pleasure to be gained from spotting "a rainbow in the sky" persists throughout a lifetime. It was written during the time that Wordsworth lived with his wife, children and sister Dorothy at Dove Cottage, Grasmere in the heart of England's Lake District and was first published in his simply-titled 1807 collection 'Poems, in Two Volumes'. This collection also included his more famous work 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (aka 'The Daffodils').

The final three lines of this poem were also later used by Wordsworth as an epigraph for his longer work 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality':
"The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."

Answer: Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson first published his poem 'Locksley Hall' in his 1842 collection 'Poems', but it was likely written during the mid-1830s. It is a monologue in which an unnamed narrator tells the story of being abandoned by his childhood sweetheart after she was convinced by her parents to instead marry for wealth and prestige. It is written in a recurring pattern of rhyming couplets, one of which includes the poem's most famous line:

"In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love."

Other lines from the poem have also appeared in a range of other works, perhaps most unexpectedly on the dedication plaque of the starship USS Voyager in 'Star Trek: Voyager':

"For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;"

Answer: Robert Browning

'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' is poet Robert Browning's version of the classic German legend about a gaudily dressed piper who used his magical pipe to lure away the rats that were infesting the town of Hamelin (a real-life place in the German state of Lower Saxony). Unfortunately the greedy town mayor refused to pay the mysterious piper, who retaliated by repurposing his tunes to lure away the town's children - with the exception of one who was blind, one who was deaf and one who was lame.

The tale has several alternative endings, but Browning's poem uses the one where the piper leads the children to the top of the nearby Koppelberg Hill and through a mysterious door to a beautiful land, never to be seen again. (Also, in Browning's version it was only one lame child who either escaped or missed out - depending on your point of view of which place was the preferable one in which to spend a lifetime.)

The poem was published in 'Dramatic Lyrics', the third volume of Browning's 'Bells and Pomegranates' series.