poem for the day: Spleen by Ernest Dowson

 

 

I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,

And all my memories were put to sleep.

 

I watched the river grow more white and strange,

All day till evening I watched it change.

 

All day till evening I watched the rain

Beat wearily upon the window pane.

 

I was not sorrowful, but only tired

Of everything that ever I desired.

 

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me

The shadow of a shadow utterly.

 

All day mine hunger for her heart became

Oblivion, until the evening came,

 

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,

With all my memories that could not sleep.

 

 

Born into an eminent family at Belmont Hill in Kent, Dowson left Queen's College, Oxford, without finishing his studies, and became part of Wilde's and Beardsley's set in London.  He inherited a dry dock from his father, but, having become a heavy drinker, he lived there in squalor, later moving to France and converting to Roman Catholicism.  He died at the age of 32.

poem for the day: To My Mother by George Barker

 

 

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,

Under the window where I often found her

Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,

Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,

The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her, -

She is a procession no one can follow after

But be like a little dog following a brass band.

 

She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend

To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,

But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain

Whom only faith can move, and so I send

O all my faith, and all my love to tell her

That she will move from mourning into morning.

 

 

George Barker's mother was Irish but his father was English and he was born in Loughton, Essex.  He was educated at the Regent Street Polytechnic and was always aware of poverty and deprivation.  He was a youthful prodigy, with a book of poems and a novel published at the age of 20.  Yeats described him as "a lovely subtle mind", whose poetry showed a "rhythmical invention comparable to Gerard Hopkins".

poem for the day: Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

 

 

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house.

 

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

 

 

Robert Hayden was born in Detroit and educated at Wayne State University.  His poetry books included Heart-Shape in the Dust and Words in the Mourning Time.  He was the editor of Kaleidoscope-Poems by American Negro Poets.  In this book, he warned against the black writer being consigned to a "kind of literary ghetto" where he would be "not considered as a writer but a species of race-relations man".

poem for the day: from 'Preludes' by T.S. Eliot

 

 

 

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.

And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about your feet

And newspapers from vacant lots;

The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney-pots,

And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

 

 

Eliot insisted that "The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory."  Preludes was the first of Eliot's poetry to be published in the magazine Blast in July 1915.

poem for the day: New Every Morning by Susan Coolidge

 

 

 

Every day is a fresh beginning,

Listen my soul to the glad refrain.

And, spite of old sorrows

And older sinning,

Troubles forecasted

And possible pain,

Take heart with the day and begin again.

 

 

This poem has been used in a UK hospice to bring comfort to patients.  Susan Coolidge (the pseudonym of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in January 1835.  She composed three volumes of verse, wrote the Katy books and other unsentimental stories in a natural style for girls, and edited the letters of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney.

Poem for the day: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


This was Frost's favourite poem, he termed it "my best bid for remembrance".  In John Ciardi's account, one night Frost "had sat down after supper to work at a long piece of blank verse.  The piece never worked out, but Mr. Frost found himself so absorbed in it that, when next he looked up, dawn was at the window.  He rose, crossed to the window, stood looking out for a few minutes, and then it was that "Stopping by the Woods" suddenly 'just came', so that all he had to do was cross the room and write it down."

Poem for the Day: The Voice by Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.


Hardy's strained marriage to his first wife Emma Gifford nevertheless resulted in moving love poetry after her death in 1912.  At his own death in 1928, his heart was buried with Emma in Dorset and his ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey next to those of Charles Dickens.