Fifty Shades of February: 50 of the best poems about the month of February

Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dollie Radford and 5 more

Narrated by Richard Mitchley, Ghizela Rowe and David Shaw-Parker

The second month adds tiny dashes of colour. Nature begins to gently rouse herself for the coming season. Winter begins to withdraw its raw and elemental fingers in soft remembered surrender to the natural cycle that welcomes Spring.

Our classic poets, in 50 poems of inky verse, reveal all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Longfellow, Coleridge, Dickinson, Teasdale, Clare and a wealth of many others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of revelation.

1 - Fifty Shades of February - An Introduction

2 - February by John Clare

3 - Lines on Observing a Blossom on the First of February 1796 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

4 - February by Dollie Radford

5 - On the Death of Ms Burnite Who Died February the 2nd 1878 by David John Scott

6 - The Snowdrop by Henry James Pye

7 - February 3rd, 1830 by Henry Alford

8 - February by Arthur Christopher Benson

9 - February by Edward Ward

10 - February by Louisa Sarah Bevington

11 - February 10th, 1840 by Henry Alford

12 - A Calendar of Sonnets by Helen Hunt Jackson

13 - Hymn Written Sunday February 11th, 1798 by Robert Anderson

14 - In February by Alice Meynell

15 - A Valentine's Song by Robert Louis Stevenson

16 - A Valentine by Matilda Betham Edwards

17 - February by Edwin Arnold

18 - Meeting in Winter by William Morris

19 - Valentine by Elinor Wylie

20 - Sonnet I - Go Valentine and Tell That Lovely Maid by Robert Southey

21 - A Valentine by Lewis Carroll

22 - St Valentine's Day by Edith Nesbit

23 - The February Hush by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

24 - Snow Flakes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

25 - In February by John Addington Symonds

26 - London Snow by Robert Seymour Bridges

27 - The Snow Storm by Ralph Waldo Emerson

28 - Snow Beneath Whose Chilly Softness by Emily Dickinson

29 - The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

30 - Woods in Winter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

31 - The Brook in February by Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

32 - Before You Thought of Spring by Emily Dickinson

33 - Winter - My Secret by Christina Georgina Rossetti

34 - Winter Calls by Daniel Sheehan

35 - February by George Walter Thornbury

36 - To Susanna, February 1824 by Eliza Acton

37 - To A Primrose by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

38 - To Primroses Filled With Morning Dew by Robert Herrick

39 - February by Sara Teasdale

40 - February by James Berry Bensel

41 - February Morning by Laurence Binyon

42 - The Thrush in February by George Meredith

43 - February Twilight by Sara Teasdale

44 - Evening in February by Francis Ledwidge

45 - Rainy Midnight by Ivor Gurney

46 - The Rain and the Wind by William Ernest Henley

47 - February by Edith Nesbit

48 - To a Locomotive in Winter by Walt Whitman

49 - Ode to France, February 1848 by James Russell Lowell

50 - To H W L on His Birthday 27th February, 1867 by James Russell Lowell

51 - February. An Elegy by Thomas Chatterton

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781803540597

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was an American poet. Born in Portland, Maine, Longfellow excelled in reading and writing from a young age, becoming fluent in Latin as an adolescent and publishing his first poem at the age of thirteen. In 1822, Longfellow enrolled at Bowdoin College, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and published poems and stories in local magazines and newspapers. Graduating in 1825, Longfellow was offered a position at Bowdoin as a professor of modern languages before embarking on a journey throughout Europe. He returned home in 1829 to begin teaching and working as the college’s librarian. During this time, he began working as a translator of French, Italian, and Spanish textbooks, eventually publishing a translation of Jorge Manrique, a major Castilian poet of the fifteenth century. In 1836, after a period abroad and the death of his wife Mary, Longfellow accepted a professorship at Harvard, where he taught modern languages while writing the poems that would become Voices of the Night (1839), his debut collection. That same year, Longfellow published Hyperion: A Romance, a novel based partly on his travels and the loss of his wife. In 1843, following a prolonged courtship, Longfellow married Fanny Appleton, with whom he would have six children. That decade proved fortuitous for Longfellow’s life and career, which blossomed with the publication of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), an epic poem that earned him a reputation as one of America’s leading writers and allowed him to develop the style that would flourish in The Song of Hiawatha (1855). But tragedy would find him once more. In 1861, an accident led to the death of Fanny and plunged Longfellow into a terrible depression. Although unable to write original poetry for several years after her passing, he began work on the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and increased his public support of abolitionism. Both steeped in tradition and immensely popular, Longfellow’s poetry continues to be read and revered around the world.