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

Fiction

• The Marbles Incident
  

Poems

• Note: these poems are also available in PDF format, which may produce better printed output than the HTML.

Longer poems

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

Early

• To Hera

Date unknown

• [Seen from the hill the hazy plain]
• [Restoration of innocence in a dream]
• [I find it difficult to forgive Tom Moore]
• [Lancelot’s blood must run in Guinevere’s bed]
• [When the moment comes to forget]
• [Time is enough]
• Entropy
• Two Serenities
• H.A.R.P.
• Royal Family
• Great Britain
• Night-piece
• In my beginning is my end
• Nadia
• A Hoard
• Dulce et Decorum
• [A long steep road to climb]

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
• [Some exiles know]
• [What words are there for Spring?]

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”
• Winter Recalled
• 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
• Hymn
• Hymn
• [Now of threescore and ten]
• [Housman was old beyond his years]
• Sixtieth Summer
• [Threescore and ten or so]

1977-88

• Haiku:  Paedophilia
• Bury My Heart
• Two Summer Songs
• Death
• For Cecil
• Two Poems from a New Life
• [Late October hedges]
• [The bare, beautiful borders]
• [White foam sweeps]
• [Feelings of guilt]
• War-time Anecdote
• [Our lives are in other hands]
• May Day, 1986
• [Wind is chilly on shoulders]
• [Living alone is lonely]
• Ten Seconds on a Tube Platform
• [Time is a child]
• Vignette
• [Yes, you’re right]
• [Most of us, somewhere along the road]
• [I have (what seemingly you do not see)]
• [The track up the wild stream]
• [Fall rainbows the forest-acred mountains]
• Los Altos Hills
• [High boughs arch over the half-dry creek]
• [Golden, red, brown]
• [Noon.  But the sun is low]
• [Released from cloud the low sun at my back]
• [My grandchildren are stamping the ice-puddles]
• [Age’s bony knuckle]
• [Bare trees black]
• [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]
• Magic
• Caring
• Body
• How not to listen to music
• Treasure
• What goes up must come down
• From the Air
• Pavements
• Content
• Antipodes
• Makherás
• Blind
• Tombstone
• Spells and Love
• Dream under a Carob-tree
• Return
• Hermes of Olympia
• Glimpse
• Bat
• Renewal
• Tourist
• Otherworld
• Desert Island?
• Judgement
• Dreams
• Love…  No
• Disability
• Betrayals
• Epoch
• Dimension
• Miscarriage
• Death
• Voyage
• Living and Dying
• Grace
• Two Poems for G
• What am I?
• Omens
• Heron and Gulls
• Wounds
• Thoughts on the Lavatory
• Acropolis
• England, 1981
• The Difference
• Upward Turn
• Touch
• Balance Sheet
• Two Cultures?
• Winter Garden
• Choice
• Greenham Common
• September Cruise
• Bicycle Ride
• This Time
• Gratitude
• Summers
• Consider
• Buttercups
• Villevieille
• Credo
• Green World
• Biblical conversation
• Another Summer

1989-2003

• [Why do I dream this pause]