Status Updates From Poem For the Day Two

Reluctance

...

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost
(March 26th 1874 — January 29th 1963)

An Arab Love-Song.

Francis Thompson
(December 18th 1859 — November 15th 1907)

... The manuscript languished for six months before the editor, Wilfred Meynell, read it and dedetermined to print it. Thompson proved untraceable, so Meynell published the poems anyway, hoping Thompson would get in touch. When he did, giving his contact address as a local chemist, the two became life-long friends.

Andrew Marvelll, MP, petitioned the House of Commons for the release of Milton from prison, December 17th 1660.

Variation on the Word Sleep

...
word that will protect you
from the grief at the centre
of your dreams, from the grief
at the centre. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in


Margaret Atwood
(November 18rh 1939 — )

Born in December
for Nancy Marshall

Muriel Rukeyser
(December 15th 1913 — February 12th 1980)

...She argued compellingly for poetry's vital role in society and had an unflinching vision of the world" "Pay attention to what they tell you to forget." Her poetry insists upon the relationship between the world and the individual, and is informed by a life of political engagement.

The earth is blue like a orange

Paul Éuard
(December 14th 1895 — November 11th 1952)

translated by Mary Ann Caws

... The poem "The earth is blue like an orange'. ('La terre est bleu come one orange;) is often upheld as the archetypal surrealist poem.

A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy's Day,
Being the Shortest Day

...
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing
in whom love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness.
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

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

Love

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

...Though Browning outlived his wife by 28 years, he never remarried. A certain Lady Ashburton once proposed to him but he declined, assuring her that his heart lay buried in Florence, and any marriage would be for the benefit of his young son.

High Flight (An Airman's Ecstasy)

John Gillespie Magee Jr
(June 9th 1922 — December 11th 1941)

Within a year, Magee had gained his wings and was sent to Wales to complete his advanced training. 'High Flight' was written on September 3rd 1941, when Magee flew a high altitude test flight in a Spitfire. He sent the poem in a letter to his parents with the note, "I am enclosing a verse I wrote the other day, ...

He Loves Me

Mark Van Doren
(June 13th 1894 — December 10th 1972)

One of Van Doren's favourite students at Columbia was Thomas Merton, a budding poet who became a Catholic and entered a Trappist monastery after graduating...

Methought I Sw My Late Espousèd Saint

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

Woodcock is almost undoubtedly the subject of this sonnet; the Greek for Katherine, katharos, means pure, and supports the emphasis on purity in the poem. Milton went completely blind in 1651 and thus never saw his wife.

Musée des Beaux Arts

...
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry
Bur to him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on,

W. H. Auden
(February 21st 1907 — September 29th 1973)

From The Wreck of the Deutschland

...
Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west;
Since, tho' he is under the world's splendour and wonder,
His mystery =must be unstressed, stressed;
For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand,

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

The Balance Wheel

Anne Sexton
(November 9th 1928 — October 4th 1974)

..Sexton's doctor was psychiatric Dr Martin Oren, only one year older than her, and a good friend to her throughout her life. He noticed her latent creative ability early on, and strongly encouraged her to write herself to health.

A Birthday

Christina Rossetti
(December 5 1830 — December 29th 1894)

...On sending her poems to her publisher she wrote: "I must beg that you will not fix upon any [poems] which the most imaginative person could construe into love personals...you will feel how more than ever intolerable it would be to have my verses regarded as outpourings of a wounded spirit."

Scots poet William Drummond died December 4th 1649.

The Vagabond

...

Let the blow fall soon or late,
let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope not love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above,
And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson
(November 13th 1850 — December 3rd 1894)

The Winter Palace

Philip Larkin
(August 9th 1922— December 2nd 1985)

... In later life he declined the invitation to succeed John Betjeman as Poet Laureate, shunning public and media attention in favour of a quiet life. Eric Hamburger described him as "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket."
Larkin died on this day at the age of 63; just as he had predicted, the very same age at which his father had died.

Lines for Winter
for Ros Krauss

Mark Strand
(April 11th 1934 — )

Mark Stand grew up in the States and South America. He spent a yer as a Fulllbright Lecturer at the University of Brazil, where he was deeply influenced by Latin American poets and he is ow regarded s one of the foremost translators of Latin American Poetry into English.

From Astrophil and Stella
XXXI

Sir Philip Sidney
(November 30th 1554 — October 17th 1586)

The poem above is from Sidney's best-known work, the sonnet-sequence, Astrophil and Stella. Though here the 'archer' primarily refers to Cupld, there are several other references to arrows and arrow-heads in the sequence, which many commentators have linked to the silver arrow-head in the Sidney family coat of arms.

I Look into My Glass

Thomas Hardy
(June 2nd 1840 — January 11th 1928)

'I Look into My Glass', the last poem in the collection, was inspired hy an experience in October 1892" "Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle, and of the sad fact that the best of parents could do not better for me."

My Papa's Waltz

Theodore Roethke
(May 25th 1908 — August 1st 1963)

... Otto died from cancer just two months later. Three years later Theodore Roethke wrote: "A great story could be written about my father, for in many ways he was a truly great man. I have never found anyone remotely like him in life or literature."

Anniversary
for Barbara Davis

Nin Cassian
(November 27th 1924 — )

translated by the poet

... "Life is not only a succession of anniversaries. The in-between times can be difficult and challenging. But I'm not afraid of ageing. I feel rather that advancing through the decades is a kind of triumph, especially if it carries with it some achievements. Anyway, art and poetry proved to be my best investments!"

Aubade

...
Torn off unused—nor wretchedly brecause
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always, Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon, nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

Philip Larkin
(August 9th 1922 December 2nd 1985)

To Emilia V

Percy Bysshe Shelley
(August 4th 1792 — July 8th 1822)

By June 1822, however, Shelley wrote to. John Gisborne; " The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno ... I think one is always in love with something or other, the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits encased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image ...