Contents

Now and Then

About Martin Robertson and his published work
Introduction to A Hot Bath at Bedtime by Peter Levi
About this site
Copyright Notice

Alternative Formats

These poems are also available in PDF format, which may produce better printed output than the HTML.

Poems

Longer poems

• The Black-out
• The Sleeping Beauty’s Prince

1933-41

• The Grass Road
• A Window
• Waiting
• Chrysalis
• Scheme
• The Party
• The Lilies of the Field
• Lamps
• Happiness
• The Embankment
• Country and Town
• May Day
• Wedding Night
• Inscription for a Convent
• Nijinsky
• That Way Madness Lies
• Lady into Fox
• The Twenties
• Prayer to Truth
• Presage
• Quo Vadis

1942-6

• Wind
• Winter Solstice
• Becoming
• Love’s Eyes and Hands
• Separation
• Parted
• Letters
• Dialogue
• Back Room, 1944
• Gunnar of Lithend
• Prayer to Time
• On the Border
• Greece
• Vision Between Waking and Sleep
• Cosmology
• [Today we feel behind us]
• [We lived and sang, my brother]

1947-60

• Interrogation
• Responsibility
• Moment and Memory
• Tristi Fummo
• What Do They Feel?
• Scorched Earth
• A Dream
• Patience
• Lost
• I, Who Know My Inner Man
• Joan of Arc
• Out from the Cliff
• Stones
• Joy
• The Sea
• Law Report
• And Then
• Original Sin
• Early Train
• “Life is sweet, brother”
• Fossils
• Prayer
• Through the Looking-Glass
• Freedom
• Merrie England
• Shadow and Substance
• Fairy Story
• Hebona
• Delos in Spring
• Cassandra’s Song
• Headline
• In the Audience
• Macrocosm
• John Ruskin’s Wedding Night
• Against Pedestals
• Another Spring
• Revisited
• Ballad
• La Fontaine et le Déluge
• Where?
• Shipwreck
• Two Poems in Memory of Anne Frank
• On the Towpath
• For Rachel
• End of Fairy-Story
• Elegy for the Dead at Sharpeville
• Masque
• Problem

1961-8

• Naples
• A Wreck
• Change Places…
• The West of Ireland
• Dark Age
• Other World
• Block 21
• What Hope?
• Summer
• Man’s Seasons
• Poetry
• Virgil’s Farewell to Dante
• Recessional
• Albatross
• Reflection
• Lopped
• Mariana in Miniature
• [The municipal building stood square in my dream]
• Age
• Sur le Pont d’Avignon
• Dinner
• Spring Morning
• Causes
• Teach Us…
• Another Summer
• Curvature of Space
• Progress
• Divinity
• Epithalamium
• Sea Cliff
• Stray Thoughts at a Wedding
• Catharsis
• Dance of the Seasons
• Fair Exchange
• Finis
• “Tell Lady Byron…”
• A Ballad
• Black
• Advent
• Athens, Hill of the Muses; Evening

1969-77

• Man in Nature
• Pelopia and Thyestes
• Relax
• Cedar
• Parenthood
• The Betrayal
• Beethoven
• Summer Vision
• Beyond Measure
• “Gale is Dead”
• The Green Children of Woolpit
• Varangian in Mickelgard
• Ecology
• Holes in Space
• The Shepherdess of Cahuzac
• Eugénie de Guérin
• Die Weisse Rose
• The Sirens
• George Jackson
• Odysseus
• Aeschylus’ Epitaph
• Blind
• Meeting
• Greek Folk Song
• Night
• Seasons
• The Game
• Full Circle
• Again
• Five Poems for Roni
• Two Glimpses from Dante’s Hell
• Villon’s Epitaph
• Dr Faustus
• A Hot Bath at Bedtime
• Beauty
• Anniversaries
• Love Scene
• Two Songs of a Mercenary
• Woodpeckers
• Against Anorexia:  For Cathy
• The Reckoning
• Song
• Pietà
• Question
• Yeats and Water-Birds
• News of a Death
• Whom the Gods Love
• A Prayer
• Survival
• Swallows
• The Last Oracle
• Exchange
• Label
• Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
• Late Spring
• No Complex
• Climacteric by the Sea
• From a Train
• Shelved
• The Fall
• The Rift
• Homage
• The Two Ways
• Mother’s Malison
• Time’s Reach
• Change
• Anniversary
• Music is Landscape
• Machismo
• Against Deterrents
• Water in a Wood
• Shepherd’s Song
• Gratitude
• Drought
• Uncertain
• The Wave
• New Year
• For Cecil

1977-88

• Haiku:  Paedophilia
• Bury My Heart
• Two Summer Songs
• Death
• For Cecil
• [The grass in the next field]
• Leap Year
• A poem you may like to see
• Sibling
• Words from a Dream
• [The clouds that pressed the air]
• [I have you always in my mind]
• Spells and Love

1989-2003

• [Why do I dream this pause]