Fifty Shades of November

By Herman Melville, A E Housman and Emily Bronte

The eleventh month of the Gregorian year brings the change from Autumn into Winter. Landscapes are scrubbed of colour and all their frills, the statued forms of trees are the grammar, the structure of her ways. Days shorten, nights lengthen and for our classic poets there is work to be done.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including illuminate the month, the natural world and the human condition. In their words our experiences are reshaped, our views are rethought and our place in the world made a little more sense of.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Sep 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835471920

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. Following a period of financial trouble, the Melville family moved from New York City to Albany, where Allan, Herman’s father, entered the fur business. When Allan died in 1832, the family struggled to make ends meet, and Herman and his brothers were forced to leave school in order to work. A small inheritance enabled Herman to enroll in school from 1835 to 1837, during which time he studied Latin and Shakespeare. The Panic of 1837 initiated another period of financial struggle for the Melvilles, who were forced to leave Albany. After publishing several essays in 1838, Melville went to sea on a merchant ship in 1839 before enlisting on a whaling voyage in 1840. In July 1842, Melville and a friend jumped ship at the Marquesas Islands, an experience the author would fictionalize in his first novel, Typee (1845). He returned home in 1844 to embark on a career as a writer, finding success as a novelist with the semi-autobiographical novels Typee and Omoo (1847), befriending and earning the admiration of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and publishing his masterpiece Moby-Dick in 1851. Despite his early success as a novelist and writer of such short stories as “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” Melville struggled from the 1850s onward, turning to public lecturing and eventually settling into a career as a customs inspector in New York City. Towards the end of his life, Melville’s reputation as a writer had faded immensely, and most of his work remained out of print until critical reappraisal in the early twentieth century recognized him as one of America’s finest writers.

Book preview

Fifty Shades of November

An Introduction

The eleventh month of the Gregorian year brings the change from Autumn into Winter.  Landscapes are scrubbed of colour and all their frills, the statued forms of trees are the grammar, the structure of her ways.  Days shorten, nights lengthen and for our classic poets there is work to be done.

Across fifty poems our classic poets including    illuminate the month, the natural world and the human condition.  In their words our experiences are reshaped, our views are rethought and our place in the world made a little more sense of.

Index of Contents

November by John Clare

November Findings, November 1862 by Janet Hamilton

November by William Cullen Bryant

To a Mouse by Robert Burns

To a Robin in November by William Wilfred Campbell

The TWA Corbies by Anonymous

Bird's Nests by Edward Thomas

We Plough the Fields and Scatter by Mattias Claudius

A Hymn on the Seasons (An Extract) by James Thomson

A Shropshire Lad XXVII - Is My Team Ploughing by A E Housman

At Day Close in November by Thomas Hardy

A November Night by Sara Teasdale

In November by Archibald Lampman

Who Has Seen the Wind by Christina Rossetti

Autumn Song by Katherine Mansfield

November Song by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love in Autumn by Sara Teasdale

The Wind's Lament by John Morris-Jones

By the Hearth by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

A Calendar of Sonnets - November by Helen Hunt Jackson

November Blind by Phillip Henry Savage

In This Fog by Daniel Sheehan

November by Thomas Hood

Among the Rocks by Robert Browning

November by John Payne

Mild the Mist Upon the Hill by Emily Bronte

The Storm by George Herbert

Pray To What Earth Does This Sweet Cold Belong by Henry David Thoreau

November by Amy Lowell

Frost At Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Dupont's Round Fight (November 1861) by Herman Melville

A Thanksgiving Poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar

In November by Phillip Henry Savage

November Days in Ireland by Alice Guerin Crist

November 1806 by William Wordsworth

A Shropshire Lad XXXVIII - The Winds Out of the West Land Blow by A E Housman

November 1847 by Henry Alford

Sonnet 73 - That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold by William Shakespeare

The Going of the Battery (Wives Lament November the 2nd 1899) by Thomas Hardy

The Melancholy Year is Dead with Rain by Trumbell Stickney

A November Note by Alfred Austin

November by Lucy Hamilton Hooper

November 1813 by William Wordsworth

A Thought on Death, November 1814 by Anna Laetitia Barbauld

On the Death of Princess Borghese, at Rome, November 1840 by Richard Monckton Milnes Houghton

Paris. November the 11th, 1918 by Mary Wedderburn Cannan

In Memoriam by Ewart Alan Mackintosh (Killed in Action 21st November 1917, Aged 24)

November by John Keble

For the Fallen by Lawrence Binyon

Rugby Chapel, November 1857 by Matthew Arnold

FIFTY SHADES OF NOVEMBER

November by John Clare

The village sleeps in mist from morn till noon

& if the sun wades thro tis wi a face

Beamless & pale & round as if the moon

When done the journey of its nightly race

Had found him sleeping & supplyd his place

For days the shepherds in the fields may be

Nor mark a patch of sky—blind fold they trace

The plains that seem wi