Status Updates From Poem for the Day One

Leisure

W. H. Davies
(April 20th 1871 — September 26th 1940)

... Most of the people he called upon were poor. The looked at the poet in amazement when he offered them a printed sheet for threepence. One richer woman, with a servant, gave him a penny, but refuse to accept the poems in return. When he reached his doss-house again that evening, he burnt every copy."

So We'll Go No More A-roving

George Gordon, Lord Byron
(January 22nd 1788 — April 19th 1824)

Writing to Thomas Moore some days later he reported that he had found "'the sword wearing out the scabbard; though I have just turned the corner of twenty nine...If I live ten years longer, you will see, however, that it is not over with me —...

6 A.M. Thoughts

Dick Cavis
(April 18th 1945 — )

He has edited a new edition of Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and his own poetry has been published in London under the title Devices and Desires. Thom Gumm commented on his work: "It is wonderful to find a poet (English) whose poetry lives through its metre. His handling of it is masterful, and you are never aware of effort."

From The Night

Henry Vaughan
(April 17th 1622 — Aril 23rd 1695)

Henry Vaughan termed himself a 'Silurist', a native of Brecon, the land of the ancient tribe of Silures.. His twin brother was an alchemist show interest in Hermeticism and magic Henry shared, although he himself was a country doctor.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 — April 23rd 1850)

William's sister Dorothy described these daffodils by Ullswater in her Grasmere Journal for April 15th 1802: "We set off after dinner from Eusemere ... The wind was furious and we thought we must have returned ... The wind seized our breath, the Lake was rough ,..

Dover Beach

...

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
...

Matthew Arnold
(December 24th 1822 — April 15th 1888)

From Memories of President Lincoln
(in Leaves of Grass)
O Captain! My Captain!

...

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exalt, O shores! and find, O bells!

Walt whitman
(May 31st 1819 — March 26th 1892)

From Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
For Mari Heaney
Sunlight

Seamus Heaney
(April 13th 1939 — )

He won a scholarship to St Columbus College, and in 1965 became a lecturer and married Marie Devlin. The next year saw the publication of his first book of poems, Death of a Naturalist. Some of his recent poetry, The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991), has been concerned with the death of his parents.

James Schyler, American poet who won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize, died on April 12th 1991

From A Song to David

Christopher Smart
(April 11th 1722 — May 21st 1771)

...By the age of 25 he was deeply in debt and in fear of his creditors. At the age of 34 he was admitted to the Bedlam asylum. There he was visited by Samuel Johnson, who concluded that Smart's behaviour was "not noxious to society.

On April 10th 1791, Burns' third son was born — a few days before his illegitimate daughter by Anne Park

Love's Immaturity

E. J. Scovell
(April 9th 1907 — October 19th 1999)

E(with) J(oy) Scovell was born in Sheffield, received a degree from Somerville College, Oxford, worked as an ecological field assistant in Brazil and Panama, had two children and lived in Oxford,

From The Jungle Books
Mowgli's Brothers (chapter heading)

Rudyard Kipliong
(December 30th 1865 — January 18th 1936)

...
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
The jackal may follow the tiger, but, Cub, when thy whiskers are grown,
Remember the wolf is a hunter — go forth and get food of thine own.

From Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 — April 23rd 1850)

... The time of my infancy and early boyhood, was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with my mother's parents at Penlrith, where my mother, in the year 1778, died of a decline, brought on by a cold ...

Love And Sleep

Algernon Charles Swinburne
(?April 5th 1837 — Ariel 10th 1909)

...But his constitution became too frail for his Bohemian lifestyle — Rossetti would have to pin Swinburne's address to his coat collar as the only way to ensure his safe return from drinking bouts. For the last forty years of his life he lodged with his friend Theodore Watts-Dnton at No. 2 The Pines, Putney.

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou
(April 4 1928 — )

Maya Angelou has a volume of verse with the title And Still I Rise. Her spirit and joie de vivre seem intact despite a difficult upbringing — her parents broke up, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, became mute for five years and was for a time a prostitute...

Virtue

George Herbert
(Apri 3rd 1593 —‚ March 3rd 1633)

...As a young man, Herbert was ciricised for placing too much value one his noble ancestry, but as a priest he was noted for his humility and popularity, befriending all his parishioners and encouraging them to read. He wrote, "The Country Parson preachers constantly, the Pulpit is his joy and his throne." He died of consumption, aged 40.

On April 2nd 1849, Tennyson read Palgrave songs for The Princess and poems on Hallam; "some exquisite," said Palgrave

A Song of a Young Lady
to Her Ancient Lover

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
(April 1st 1647 — July 26th 1680)

John Wilmot was born in Ditchley in Oxforshire, ,with a Royalist father and a mother with a Parliamentarian background, who was nevertheless in the 1650s forced into exile with her children.

Death, Be Not Proud

John donne
(c. June 1572 — March 31st 1631)

... getting dressed in his shroud to have his portrait painted, and then, according to Izaak Walton, "he was so happy to have nothing to do but to die ,,, As ... his last breath departed from him, he closed his own eyes, and then disposed his hands and body into such a posture, as required not the least alteration by those that came to shroud him."

Frances Comford born March 30th 1886

Thou art indeed just, Lord

Gerard Manley Hopkins
(July 28th 1844 — June 8th 1889)

Hopkins wrote this sonnet in the spring of 1889. Several months before he had felt a sense of despair whilst on a retreat of St Stanislaus's College, Tulamore: "What is my wretched life? Five wasted years almost have passed in Ireland...

My Heart Leaps Up

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 —April 23rd 1850)

Their friend Coleridge considered this poem an expression of the truth that "men are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They exist in fragments."

From Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollectons of Early Childhood

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 — April 23rd 1850)

in her Grasmere Journal for March 27th 1802, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy wrote: "A divine morning. At breakfast Wm. wrote part of an ode [above]. Mr Oliff sent the dung and Wm. went to work in the garden, We sate all day in the orchard."

A. E. Housman born March 26th 1859

The Destruction of Sennacherib

...

And there lay the rider, distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail;
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances uplifted, the trumpet unblown,

George Gordon, Lord Byron
(January 22nd 1788 — April 19th 1824)

William Morris, poet, craftsman and socialist, born March 24th 1834.

Imagination

John Davidson
(April 11th 1857 — March 23rd 1909)

.... Yeats described him in the British Museum Reading Room in about 1894. "I am writing verse," Davidson told him. "I had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case...

Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe, German court official, theatre director, novelist, poet and dramatist (author of the poetic drama Faust), died March 22nd 1832.