THE HUMAN HEART

Part of ‘The exequy’, by Henry King, printed in Poems, elegies, paradoxes, and sonnets, London, 1657. Keynes A.4.2. (Printed document not on display.)

Its capacity for expressing deep emotion is the quality for which poetry is most widely cherished. Poems in which stirring aural effects are combined with precise exposition of the writer’s human circumstances can give voice to profound personal truths, and create in the reader the sensation of a direct communication between minds.

Powerful accounts of grief or love may be cathartic or exhilarating, but poets have also sought to evoke gentler varieties of reflective contentment or melancholia. Even the contemplation of age and mortality may be pleasurable, when the beauty of the language sweetens its message.

Items on display:

MS T-S NS 143.46: “Will her love remember…” and “Is it my last breath you seek…” (poems exchanged between Dunash Ibn Labrat and his wife), tenth century. MS Add. 8471: poems of Henry King, c. 1648, open at ‘An exequy: to his matchles never to bee forgotten friend’. MS Add. 4510: Omar Khayyám, rubáiyát, two nineteenth-century collections owned by Edward FitzGerald from which he made his translation, with annotations in his hand.