Fifty Shades of the British Countryside: 50 of the best poems about the British countryside

Written by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Patrick Branwell Bronte and 8 more

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Ghizela Rowe and Gideon Wagner

Over many centuries poets have drawn inspiration and solace from the land that surrounds us. From mountain high to valley floor from sea cliffs to sandy shore through wood and field, across rivers, brooks and streams through sunlight, raging storms and the cloak of night these shores have some of the most beautiful natural treasures to be found anywhere.

1 - Fifty Shades of the British Countryside - An Introduction

2 - On a Lane in Spring by John Clare

3 - It Was An April Morning Fresh and Clear by William Wordsworth

4 - The Lambs of Grassmere by Christina Georgina Rossetti

5 - Memorials of a Tour in Scotland August 1803 by William Wordsworth

6 - High Waving Heather 'Neath Stormy Blasts Bending by Emily Jane Bronte

7 - Hop Picking by Edith Nesbit

8 - I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud by William Wordsworth

9 - Summer by Alexander Pope

10 - Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins

11 - Loveliest of Trees, The Cherry Now by A E Housman

12 - The Oak by Alfred Lord Tennyson

13 - The Chestnut by Robert Laurence Binyon

14 - Wood Rides by John Clare

15 - In Sutton Woods by Alfred Austin

16 - There Is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods by Lord Byron

17 - Dirge in Woods by George Meredith

18 - The Hill Pines Were Sighing by Robert Seymour Bridges

19 - There is a Hill by Robert Seymour Bridges

20 - Grongar Hill by John Dyer

21 - The Malvern Hills by Radclyffe Hall

22 - Sonnet XLIII. The Malvern Hills, March 12th 1835 by Henry Alford

23 - The Downs by Robert Seymour Bridges

24 - In March by Archibald Lampman

25 - The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy

26 - Autumn in Sussex by Radclyffe Hall

27 - Autumn in Cornwall by Algernon Charles Swinburne

28 - October by George Arnold

29 - Autumn Dawn by Charles Sorley

30 - To a Robin in November by William Wilfred Campbell

31 - Autumn - A Dirge by Percy Bysshe Shelley

32 - November by John Clare

33 - By Severn by Ivor Gurney

34 - The Waterfall by Henry Vaughan

35 - Penmaien Pool by Gerard Manley Hopkins

36 - Beachey Head by Charlotte Smith

37 - Sonnet At Dover Cliffs July 20th 1787 by William Lisle Bowles

38 - Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

39 - Floating Island by Dorothy Wordsworth

40 - On the Sea by John Keats

41 - Llyn Y Gadair by T H Parry-Williams

42 - Penmaenmawr by Patrick Branwell Bronte

43 - from Chepstow - A Poem - Tinturn Abbey by Edward Davies

44 - Glastonbury by Michael Drayton from Poly-Olbion

45 - The Rolling English Road by G K Chesterton

46 - Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

47 - Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

48 - The Old Vicarage of Grantchester by Rupert Brooke

49 - In Springtime by Rudyard Kipling

50 - Home Thoughts From Abroad by Robert Browning

51 - Jerusalem by William Blake

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839678899

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth, in the English Lake District, the son of a lawyer. He was one of five children and developed a close bond with his only sister, Dorothy, whom he lived with for most of his life. At the age of seventeen, shortly after the deaths of his parents, Wordsworth went to St John’s College, Cambridge, and after graduating visited Revolutionary France. Upon returning to England he published his first poem and devoted himself wholly to writing. He became great friends with other Romantic poets and collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads. In 1843, he succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate and died in the year ‘Prelude’ was finally published, 1850.