Jenny Joseph, ‘ The Sun Has Burst the Sky’. ‘You give for ever.’ (Physicists would quibble over that ‘for ever’, since the sun will eventually run out of fuel, but we get Larkin’s point.) Many who accuse Larkin of being grumpy and anti-social might find this laudatory lyric a surprise – and it shows just how many strings Larkin actually had to his poetical bow.ġ0.

One of Philip Larkin’s most lyrical poems, ‘Solar’ – as the title suggests – celebrates the sun as a force of energy giving us life and light. This poem demonstrates MacNeice’s skilful use of form, with the rhyme on the first and third lines of each stanza providing the sounds for the beginnings of the second and fourth lines. Like many of Louis MacNeice’s greatest poems, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ focuses on one moment, in an attempt to ‘cage the minute’ when the sunlight falls on the garden. Louis MacNeice, ‘ The Sunlight on the Garden’. Rather than dealing with the summer sun, Thomas considers the late autumn sun: ‘November has begun, / Yet never shone the sun as fair as now …’Ĩ. So begins this poem by one of the early twentieth century’s greatest nature poets. With spangles of the morning’s storm drop downīecause the starling shakes it, whistling what While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough The south wall warms me: November has begun, Whether on mountains side or street of town. To all things that it touches except snow

To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies, Kind as it can be, this world being made so, There’s nothing like the sun as the year dies,

Edward Thomas, ‘ There’s Nothing Like the Sun’. The final line gave the crime author Colin Dexter the title of his last Inspector Morse novel.ħ. We can ‘non-great’ because Housman’s range is often considered too narrow to warrant the term ‘great’ however, he uses language beautifully, especially in this moving poem about the rising, noonday, and setting sun (treated respectively in each of the poem’s three stanzas). Housman, ‘ How clear, how lovely bright’.Īlthough this poem doesn’t mention the word ‘sun’, for us it’s one of the greatest poems about the sun by one of the best ‘non-great’ poets in English verse.

Nothing like the sun novel