Four Poems

This book is an English poetry anthology printed by the Canadian publisher Copp Clark in 1920, containing four long poems for recitation, annotation, and instruction in secondary school and lower-level university English literature courses. According to the original subtitle, the four poems are Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village," Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine," Wordsworth's "Ode to Duty," and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." "The Deserted Village" uses the tone of a pastoral elegy to describe a village falling from prosperity into desolation, with much satire on the displacement caused by enclosure and overseas emigration; "Lancelot and Elaine" is drawn from Arthurian legend, telling a tragedy of loyalty and love among the Knights of the Round Table, and is a representative Victorian narrative poem; "Ode to Duty" discusses moral law and inner obedience in the ode form, with a solemn tone; "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" reflects on wealth and poverty, fame, and death in a graveyard at dusk and is regarded as a model of the English elegiac tradition. The four poems belong to the 18th and 19th centuries, with styles ranging from satire, narrative, and ode to meditation, yet all revolve around classic themes of rural life, duty, love, and death, thus forming a small-scale history of poetry from the late Enlightenment to the Victorian era. The original book includes editor's headnotes and endnotes to help readers identify allusions, meter, and historical background; it is a typical teaching text for English literature classrooms of its time. The book is No. 26 in the "Copp Clark Literature Series," published in Toronto. As a teaching anthology from a century ago, its value today lies more in the documentary and pedagogical-history dimensions: it shows how the English-speaking world selected and annotated poems in the early twentieth century and also provides a complete comparative edition for readers who want to read these four famous works together today.