FIRST LINE: They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
LAST LINE: I fain would know what she hath deserved?

* Songs and Lyries 111* by Sir Thomas Wyatt

Selected by Quentin Blake (b.1932), illustrator and teacher,
formerly Head of Illustration at the Royal College of Art,
and first Children's Laureate. Or - balding, badly shaven,
overweight, but still cheerful.

FIRST LINE: They paved paradise

LAST LINE: And put up a parking lot.

*Big Yellow Taxi* by Joni Mitchell

Selected by Lee Stannard (b.1961), illustrator, designer
whose many interests include travel, music and physical
exercise!

FIRST LINE: They sing their dearest songs -

LAST LINE: Down their carved names the rain-drop
ploughs.

*During Wind and Rain* by Thomas Hardy

Selected by Mel Gooding (b.1941), writer and critic.

FIRST LINE: They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

LAST LINE: And they went to sea in a Sieve.

*The Jumbles* by Edward Lear

Selected by Alice Alvi Coe (b.1998), has just started
at Wimbledon Park Primary School.

FIRST LINE: This is the weather the cuckoo likes

LAST LINE: And so do I.

*Weathers* by Thomas Hardy

Selected by Roderick Conway Morris (b.1954), writer and
journalist living in Venice.

FIRST LINE: This unimportant morning

LAST LINE: Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

*The Unimportant Morning* by Lawrence Durrell

Selected by Andrew Lambirth (b.1959); 'quite a decent
bloke for an art critic'.

FIRST LINE: Though my mother was already two years dead

LAST LINE: and the disconnected number I still call

*Long Distance* by Tony Harrison

Selected by Pat Wickremeratne (b.1925) I am a seventy-
seven-year-old Englishwoman married forty years to a
Sri Lankan.

FIRST LINE: Tide be runnin' the great world over,

LAST LINE: Than the wind goin' over my hand.

*Sea Love* by Charlotte Mew

Selected by Barbara Hosking (b.1926), a life-long
communicator.

FIRST LINE: Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
LAST LINE: We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.

*1916 Seen from 1921* by Edmund Blunden

Selected by Elisabeth Fairman (b.1954), curator of rare
books; haunted by the poetry of the First World War.