Status Updates From Poem for the Day One

From Contemplation

...

Streamed with the set of the world's harmonies,
In the long draft of whatsoever sphere
He lists the sweet and clear
Clangour of his high orbit on to roll,
So gracious is his heavenly grace;
And the bold stars does hear,
Every one in his airy soar,
For evermore
Shout to each other from the peaks of space,
...


Francis Thompson
(December 18th 1859 — November 13th 1907)

Novelist and editor Ford Madox Ford, author of The Good Soldier and founder of the Transatlantic Review, born in Merton December 17th 1873. His poems 'Buckshee' express an old man's gratitude for a young woman's love.

The Last Word

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

...
On Arnold's death, Browning wrote: "I shall hold in veneration—to my own dying day—the memory of one of the noblest and best men I ever knew and loved."

Woman to Child

Judith Wright
(May 31st 1915 — June 25th 2000)

...The images I use and also my methods no doubt reflect my ties to the landscape I live in. I tend to use 'traditional'—i.e., biological—rhythms more than free or new forms...jAs a woman poe the biological aspect of feminine experiencer has naturally been of importance in my work also.

Everness

Jorge Luis Borges
(August 24th 1889 — June 14th 1986)
translated by Richard Wilbur
(March 1st 1921 —)

... Borges went over all of the translations done, by various hands, for that book, and delighted me by saying that, in one line of another sonnet, I had improved on the original. I am sure that, in so saying, Borges was merely giving further proof of his notorious love of the English language."

Nice Day for a Lynching

Kenneth Patchen
(December 13th 1911 — January 8th 1972)

...He held a succession of jobs until the success of his first poetry collection Before the Brave in 1936 led him to focus on his (thereafter prolific) writing—the flavour of which is indicated by the title of his 1945 collection An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air: Being Some Poems Old and New Against War and in Behalf of Life.

Prospice
...,
For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,
And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,
Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,
O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest!

Robert Browning
(May 7th 1812 — December 12th 1889)

From Vacillation
III

William Butler Yeats
(June 13th 1865 — January 28th 1939)

Yeats wrote "Vacillation" in his late sixties.

Emily Dickinson born n Amherst, Mass., December 10th 1830

Sonnet vii
How Soon Hath Time

John Milton
(December 9th 1608 — November 8th 1674)

Milton's father was a usurer, who made his money from loans and property. He supported Milton of years or study at home, after leaving Cambridge.

An Appeal to Cats in the Business of Love

Thomas Flatman
(February 21st 1637 — December 8th (1688)

...He became a barrister in 1626, but also acquired a reputation as a painter of miniatures—a self-portrait done when he was 38 is kept in the Victoria and Albert Museum. His Poems and Songs were published when he was 39 and include 'The Dying Christian to his Soul', a poem which Alexander Pope later imitated.

Down, wanton, down!

Robert Graves
(July 24th 1895,— December 7th 1985)

In later years, Robert Graves wrote how over-reliance on physical passions and lusts and "the blood sport of desire" leave a person trapped in a hellish and deadened world.

He Wishes For The Cloths of Heaven

W. B. Yeats
(June 13th 1865 — January 28th 1939)


... Yeats wrote about the treaty to Mrs. Shakespeare: "I am in deep gloom about Ireland...I see no hope of escape from bitterness, and the extreme party may carry the country. When men are very bitter, death and ruin draw them on as a rabbit is supposed to be drawn on by the dancing of the fox."

Poet Christina Rossetti born in London December 5th 1830.

Sonnets to Orpheus
IV

Rainer Maria Rilke
(December 4th 1875 — December 29th 1926)

translated.by Robert Bly
(December 23rd 1926 — )

Riner Maria Rilke, an Austrian, was born in Prague and deserted the military academy there to study art history. He was influenced by Tolstoy, whom he met in Russia, and by Rodin, whose pupil, Klara Westhoff, he married in 1901.

A Martin Sends a Postcard Home

...

Model T is a room with the lock inside—
key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted parts sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

Craig Raine
(December 3rd 1944 — )

The Charge of the Light Brigade

...

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air,
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke,
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre-stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not,
...

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(August 6th 1809 — October 6th 1892)

Sea Fever

John Masefield
(June 1st 1878 — May 12th 1967)

On December 1st 1902, Masefield wrote to his brother-in-law Harry Ross" "Spring quite impartially, I think the book deserves the recognition of a maritime people. It is something new, said newly."

From The Ballad of Reading Gaol
6

Oscar Wilde
(October 16th 1854 — November 30th 1900)

...Wilde took him to court for libel, lost the action and was tried and sentenced to two years in jail for homosexual offences, He was released in 1897, went into exile in France and published The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898 under the pseudonym Sebastian MeImoth, a martyr character in a novel by his great-uncle.

I Think Continually of those Who Were Truly Great

...
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in the worlds before our ears.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple liight
Nor its grave even demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
with noise and fog the flower of the spirit.

Stephen Spender
(September 28th 1909 —)

Infant Sorrow

William Blake
(November 28th 1757 — August 12th 1827)

1. ...From the start he disliked discipline and his father decided not to send him to school, "thinking it most prudent to withhold from him the liability of receiving punishment". Before the age of ten, Blake saw a vision of angels in a tree, "bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars."

Roman poet and satirist Homer, whose father was a manumitted slave, died November 27th 8 BC.

From King Lear
Act III Scene ii
...
You owe me no subscription: then: let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak and despis'd old man.
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join'd
Your big-engender'd battles 'gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! 'tis foul.

William Shakespeare
(April 23rd 1564 — April 23rd 1616)_

To Hell with Commonsense

Patrick Kavanagh
(October 21st 1905 — November 30th 1967)

...At the age of 35 he left for Dublin ("the worst mistake I made in my life") where he published a long poem, The Great Hunger, about Ireland and the harsh realities of peasant life ("locked in a stable with pigs and cows forever"), a poem that was subversive enough to gain him the attentions of the police...

Louisa
after accompanying her on a mountain
excursion

...

Take all that's mine 'beneath the moon',
If I with her but half a noon
May sit beneath the walls
Of some old cave, or mossy nook,
When up she winds along the brook
To hunt the waterfalls.

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

Buffalo Bill's

e. e. cummings
(October 14th 1894 — September 3rd 1962)

William Frederick Cody known as Buffalo Bill, was born in 1846 and died on January 10th 1917, and Cummings had read the report of his death in the New York Sun next day, An army scout and pony express rider, Buffalo Bill got his nickname from shooting 5,000 buffalo for a contract to supply meat for workers on the Kansas Pacific Railway.

From the Introduction to Songs of Experiencer

William Blake
(November 28th 1757 — August 12th 1827)

...The Bard is Blake himself. Bards were Celtic poet-prophets (not to be confused with Druids). Their craft was destroyed in Wales by Edward III and in Ireland by the Plantation of the seventeenth century. Blake sought the restoration of the bardic tradition.

To a Mouse (On turning her up in her nest with
the Plough, November, 1785)

...

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin'!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' fooggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin',
Baith snell an keen!


Robert Burns
(January 25th 1759 — July 21st 1796)

Thomas Chatterton, who Keats describes as "the purest writer in the English language:, born November 20th 1752.