I just pulled one of my grandmother’s poetry books from the shelf. There aren’t that many of them, but they are all inscribed “Midsummer Day” and were gifts from her husband on her birthday. This particular book – Poems by Thomas Hood – is dated exactly 100 years ago.
My favourite Hood poem is The Bridge of Sighs, but that’s too long to post here, so I’ll settle for one that’s appropriate to the time as well as the date:
Midnight
Unfathomable Night! how dost thou sweep
Over the flooded earth, and darkly hide
The mighty city under thy full tide;
Making a silent palace for old Sleep;
Like his own temple under the hush’d deep,
Where all the busy day he doth abide,
And, forth at the late dark, outspreadeth wide
His dusky wings whence the cold waters sweep!
How peacefully the living millions lie!
Lull’d unto death beneath his poppy spells;—
There is no breath—no living stir—no cry
No tread of foot—no song—no music-call,—
Only the sound of melancholy bells—
The voice of Time,—Survivor of them all!
don't confuse the narrator 
Repeating “living” from line 9 in line 11 is lazy, and also symptomatic of the generally poor use of adjectives and adverbs.
“darkly hide”? – as opposed to “brightly hide”?
I like The Bridge of Sighs (and The Song of the Shirt too), but this tidy and correct little sonnet is hack-work in comparison.
I have my paternal grandmother’s AV Bible, which ought to count as a poetry book, since it has plenty of poetry in it. And I have her husband’s complete (but of course bowdlerised) Burns. And my father was quite a fan of Robert W Service. But otherwise the idea of having relatives, living or dead, who are willing to read poetry is foreign to me.
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Sonnets can easily become arithmetical exercises, but are usually superficially impressive if they scan and make reasonable sense. Still, I don’t think Hood can really be judged by modern standards.
Not sure why I never learned Song of the Shirt, but I remember, I remember is so familiar it must have been one of the first pieces I memorised.
When I did some decorating for my mother a few years ago, she made coffees and read poems aloud from Palgrave while I painted – a fine division of labour! The AV would have been other suitable reading matter, of course.
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