Arrows Of Desire celebrates English verse through the ages. Love poems, satires, nature poems, elegies, devotional poems and comic verse from the sixteenth century to the present are explored.

Contemporary poets read and evaluate a single work from some of England's greatest poets, sharing their personal views and points of interest. Photographs, paintings, archive film and, where possible, draft manuscripts of the written text provide a rich visual accompaniment to bring each piece to life.

Episodes are structured so that each poet can be viewed as a single module.

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Date	Episode Information
Tuesday 22 July 10.35am	01. Program 8 Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith What Were They Like? by Denise Levertov Piano by DH Lawrence The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde
Tuesday 29 July 10.35am	02. Program 9 You will be hearing from us shortly by UA Fanthorpe This living hand, now warm and capable by John Keats Front Lines by Gary Snider Illuminations by Tony Harrison
Tuesday 5 August 10.35am	03. Program 10 My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne by William Shakespeare On the Farm by RS Thomas This is a Hymn by Lorna Goodison Lines on the Death of Dr Swift by Jonathan Swift
Tuesday 12 August 10.35am	04. Program 11 Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria by Langston Hughes Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins Of Many Worlds in This World by Margaret Cavendish The Arrival of the Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
Tuesday 19 August 10.35am	01. Program 1 The Tyger by William Blake The rhythm, rhyme, imagery and theme of The Tyger are each considered closely by the programs contributors: Kate Clanchy, Michael Donaghy, Jamie McKendrick, Tom Paulin and Clare Pollard. Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll This child like verse of Victorian author Lewis Carroll is often described as the greatest of English nonsense poems. the suggestive effects of its internal and end rhymes, repetition, alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia, together with tantalising word inventions, hold an immediate charm. in Just/spring by ee cummings The happy springtime innocence of little children is recreated by the poem's playful form, punctuation, semantic usage and, at times, breathless syntax. However, a contrasting asymmetric rhythm and altogether slower pace create an ominous backdrop. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson Tennyson composed this poem after reading an account in 'The Times' (December 1854) of a suicidal British cavalry charge at Balaclava during the Crimean War. The poem's memorable and dramatic rhythm - which effectively magnifies both the danger and the courage - arises from the rarely used 3 foot dactylic metre.
Tuesday 26 August 10.35am	02. Program 2 Prayer Before Birth by Louis MacNeice MacNeice's work, written amid the 1944 bombing of London, expresses foreboding about the menace of modern living, which is every bit in tune with the tenor of our own lives. Through the persona of an unborn child, the monologue makes an anxious plea for individuality. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost The immense popularity of this work is perhaps due to sentimental reading at the expense of the irony that it contains. It has often been read as a gentle, conversational reflection on the critical significance of incidental, impulsive choices in shaping one's life. As Frost once warned an audience, 'it's a tricky poem - very tricky'. How Pleasant to Know Mr Lear by Edward Lear This poem pokes fun at the poet's own life with seemingly nonsensical whimsy. Lear had an eye and an ear for the absurd, reflected not only in what he said but also in the outrageous liberties he would take with rhythm and rhyme. The Red Wheelbarrow and To a Poor Old Woman by William Carlos Williams Williams' imagist approach focuses attention directly and concisely to capture the individuality of things and their organic interrelationships. Meaning resides intrinsically within his uses of poetic form and diction.
Tuesday 2 September 10.35am	03. Program 3 Eden Rock by Charles Causley Causley's gentle and intensely personal visualisation of idyllic life has endearing, nostalgic warmth. His simplicity of language and powerful sensory appeals wistfully evoke an angelic, childlike vision of a life beyond death. In Westminster Abbey by Sir John Betjeman Given the imposing setting, the poem launches loftily and the tone is at once deliberately undermined by selfish sentiment in this ironic impersonation of a pompous, egocentric 'worshipper'. Satirical anti-climax catches the nuance of character and effectively exposes prejudices, triviality and sanctimonious hypocrisy. The jaunty rhythm and easy rhyming also challenge any pretence of sincerity. Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley Shelley's deeply ironic sonnet exposes and cautions against such futile human vanity and arrogance as the pretentiousness of Ozymandias (also known as Rameses III). After its irregularity of assonantal half rhymes, the alliterative and monosyllabic conclusion allows the sonnet to dissolve quietly and tellingly. Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen Owen's great reactionary poem bitterly challenges and refutes the pretence of popular ideology that warfare is something heroically romantic. The vision of war that emerges from the appalling poison gas attack that obscenely brutalises and annihilates young life - making even Owen complicit in its horror - conveys the pity that war distils.
Tuesday 9 September 10.35am	04. Program 4 Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas Distressed at the imminent death of the father with whom he shared an intimate intellectual relationship, Thomas passionately invades the perspective of men approaching their death, frantically urging his father to resist the call to death. At Grass by Philip Larkin Larkin gently and wistfully contemplates a seemingly idyllic existence with contrasting memories of a more active lifestyle. Poet Wendy Cope reveals how Larkin drew inspiration from a film about a retired racehorse. Meanwhile, poet Owen Shears finds himself responding filmically to the poem. Musée des Beaux Arts by WH Auden In the casual, conversational style of free verse, Auden describes how, generally and astonishingly, man allows his habitual everyday personal preoccupations to blind him to the suffering of others. I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died by Emily Dickinson Dickinson's poem offers a dispassionate experience of the moment of death. She describes her intense, heightened awareness of contrasts between the stillness in the room and the activity of the fly; the final meticulous attention paid to arranging one's estate and the 'uncertain stumbling' of the fly, and the silent breathing of mourners against the fly's loud buzzing.
Tuesday 16 September 10.35am	05. Program 5 The Ruined Maid by Thomas Hardy Follower by Seamus Heaney In Mrs Tilscher's Class by Carol Ann Duffy Gypsies by John Clare
Tuesday 23 September 10.35am	06. Program 6 The Willing Mistress by Aphra Behn An Irish Airman Foresees his Death by WB Yeats Composed Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Tuesday 14 October 10.35am	07. Program 7 The Flea by John Donne A Letter from Marie Curie by Lavinia Greenlaw Naming of Parts by Henry Reed A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim by Walt Whitman
Tuesday 21 October 10.35am	12. Program 8 (Repeat)
Tuesday 28 October 10.35am	13. Program 9 (Repeat)
Tuesday 4 November 10.35am	14. Program 10 (Repeat)
Tuesday 11 November 10.30am	15. Program 11 (Repeat)