A Poem for Every Spring Day Read online

  When man first flew beyond the sky

  He looked back into the world’s blue eye.

  Man said: What makes your eye so blue?

  Earth said: The tears in the ocean do.

  Why are the seas so full of tears?

  Because I’ve wept so many thousand years.

  Why do you weep as you dance through space?

  Because I am the mother of the human race.

  13 April • The Song of Wandering Aengus • W. B. Yeats

  Many of Yeats’s poems draw on ancient mythology and Irish tradition. Here he draws on the figure of Aengus, a god of love and youth – but for Yeats he becomes an old figure, pursuing his past.

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire aflame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And someone called me by my name;

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done,

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  13 April • Baisakhi • Anon.

  Celebrated on 13 or 14 April, Baisakhi is the festival of Sikh New Year, which commemorates the founding of the Sikh community in 1699 in an event known as the Khalsa. This anonymous poem is filled with names unique to the Sikh religion: Amrit is a syrup sacred to Sikh which is drunk at religious observances such as baptisms, and the Five Beloved Ones were the first men to be baptized into the Sikh faith in 1699. Baisakhi is regarded as the most important festival for Sikhs, though it is celebrated as a harvest festival by people of other faiths in the Punjab region.

  Crystals of sugar

  swirl

  as the sword

  stirs Amrit.

  Listening to the tale

  of the Five Beloved Ones,

  who dodged death

  by giving their lives

  to God.

  14 April • The Woods and Banks • W. H. Davies

  Mid-April marks the arrival of cuckoos. They are said to arrive on St. Tiburtius’s day, which is today: Cuckoo Day. W. H. Davies – an extraordinary writer, who lived for many years as a homeless person – here celebrates the unique call that gives the cuckoo its name: cuckoo, cuckoo!

  The woods and banks of England now,

  Late coppered with dead leaves and old,

  Have made the early violets grow,

  And bulge with knots of primrose gold.

  Hear how the blackbird flutes away,

  Whose music scorns to sleep at night:

  Hear how the cuckoo shouts all day

  For echoes – to the world’s delight:

  Hullo, you imp of wonder, you –

  Where are you now, cuckoo? Cuckoo?

  14 April • O Captain! My Captain! • Walt Whitman

  This poem was written in 1865 by Walt Whitman in response to the assassination of the American president Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was shot on 14 April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor. He died the next morning. It is an ‘elegy’, meaning a poem of mourning for the dead, and the entire piece is an extended metaphor, imagining America as a ship, and Lincoln as the ship’s captain.

  O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

  The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

  The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

  While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

  But O heart! heart! heart!

  O the bleeding drops of red,

  Where on the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.

  O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

  Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

  For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

  For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

  Here Captain! dear father!

  This arm beneath your head!

  It is some dream that on the deck,

  You’ve fallen cold and dead.

  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 anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

  From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

  But I with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.

  15 April • Ode on the Loss of the Titanic • Geoffrey Hill

  Early on the morning of 15 April 1912, RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank in the icy waters of the north Atlantic. Over 1,500 people died – almost three-quarters of the passengers and crew on board at the time. It is fixed in the popular imagination as one of the worst, most shocking maritime disasters of all time. Geoffrey Hill’s short lines on the Titanic themselves swirl and swell like an angry ocean.

  Thriving against façades the ignorant sea

  Souses our public baths, statues, waste ground:

  Archaic earth-shaker, fresh enemy

  (‘The tables of exchange being overturned’);

  Drowns Babel in upheaval and display;

  Unswerving, as were the admired multitudes

  Silenced from time to time under its sway.

  By all means let us appease the terse gods.

  15 April • The Convergence of the Twain • Thomas Hardy

  The RMS Titanic was lavishly furnished, creating the ‘waste of riches’ Hardy refers to when it sank. The poem concentrates on the ‘Twain’ of the title, the ship and the iceberg, and how they came to collide (or ‘converge’).

  I

  In a solitude of the sea

  Deep from human vanity,

  And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

  II

  Steel chambers, late the pyres

  Of her salamandrine fires,

  Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

  III

  Over the mirrors meant

  To glass the opulent

  The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb,

  indifferent.

  IV

  Jewels in joy designed

  To ravish the sensuous mind

  Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

  V

  Dim moon-eyed fishes near

  Gaze at the gilded gear

  And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’ …

  VI

  Well: while was fashioning

  This creature of cleaving wing,

  The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

  VII

  Prepared a sinister mate

  For her – so gaily great –

  A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

  VIII

  And as the smart ship grew

  In stature, grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  IX

  Alien they seemed to be:

  No mortal eye could see

  The intimate welding of their later h
istory,

  X

  Or sign that they were bent

  By paths coincident

  On being anon twin halves of one august event,

  XI

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

  16 April • Will Ye No Come Back Again? • Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne

  The Battle of Culloden was fought on 16 April 1746, between a British Loyalist army under the command of the Duke of Cumberland and a Scottish Jacobite force under the command of Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’). Stuart was the ‘Young Pretender’ to the British crown, which had been seized from his grandfather King James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This battle, the last one fought on British soil, ended Stuart’s efforts to take up the throne of Great Britain and forced him to flee Scotland, never to return. This poem laments his failed attempt and calls for his return to Scotland.

  Will ye no come back again?

  Will ye no come back again?

  Better lo’ed ye canne be,

  Will ye no come back again?

  Bonnie Charlie’s now awa,

  Safely owre the friendly main;

  Mony a heart will break in twa,

  Should he ne’er come back again.

  Ye trusted in your Hieland men,

  They trusted you, dear Charlie;

  They kent you hiding in the glen,

  Your cleadin’ was but barely.

  English bribes were a’ in vain;

  An’ e’en tho’ puirer we may be,

  Siller canna buy the heart

  That beats aye for thine and thee.

  We watched thee in the gloaming hour,

  We watched thee in the morning grey;

  Tho’ thirty thousand pounds they’d gie,

  Oh there is nane that wad betray.

  Sweet’s the laverock’s note and lang,

  Lilting wildly up the glen;

  But aye to me he sings ae sang,–

  Will ye no come back again?

  Will ye no come back again?

  Will ye no come back again?

  Better lo’ed ye canne be,

  Will ye no come back again?

  16 April • The Skye Boat Song • Sir Harold Boulton

  Written in the late nineteenth century and set to music many times since, ‘The Skye Boat Song’ paints a romantic image of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight to the island of Skye after his army’s defeat at Culloden. Although vanquished that day, the poem ends on a rousing patriotic note – one far more assured than the rhetorical question which concludes the previous entry.

  Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing

  Onward, the sailors cry!

  Carry the lad that’s born to be King

  Over the sea to Skye.

  Loud the winds cry, loud the waves roar,

  Thunderclaps rend the air.

  Baffled our foes stand by the shore.

  Follow they will not dare

  Many’s the lad fought on that day

  Well the claymore could wield,

  When the night came silently lay

  Dead on Culloden’s field.

  Burned are our homes, exile and death

  Scatter the loyal men.

  Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath

  Scotland will rise again!

  17 April • from The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot

  T. S. Eliot remains one of the most important English poets in history. He’s also probably one of the most difficult to understand, with much of his poetry filled with unusual words, complex references and even foreign languages! He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. His great poem The Waste Land has many famous lines – not least its opening characterization of the month of April, as well as the enigmatic line: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’.

  I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  Winter kept us warm, covering

  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

  A little life with dried tubers.

  Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

  And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

  And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

  Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

  And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,

  My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

  And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

  Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock,

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  Frisch weht der Wind

  Der Heimat zu,

  Mein Irisch Kind,

  Wo weilest du?

  ‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

  ‘They called me the hyacinth girl.’

  – Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

  Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

  Oed’ und leer das Meer.

  17 April • Waste Land Limericks • Wendy Cope

  Eliot’s The Waste Land has inspired many works of literature since it was published, but perhaps none as directly as these poems by Wendy Cope. The limerick is a playful form, associated with naughty humour and poking fun at people. In these poems, Cope plays around with Eliot’s weighty words, creating a completely different type of poetic experience.

  I

  In April one seldom feels cheerful;

  Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;

  Clairvoyantes distress me,

  Commuters depress me –

  Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

  II

  She sat on a mighty fine chair,

  Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;

  She asks many questions,

  I make few suggestions –

  Bad as Albert and Lil – what a pair!

  III

  The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;

  Tiresias fancies a peep –

  A typist is laid,

  A record is played –

  Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

  IV

  A Phoenician named Phlebas forgot

  About birds and his business – the lot,

  Which is no surprise,

  Since he’d met his demise

  And been left in the ocean to rot.

  V

  No water. Dry rocks and dry throats,

  Then thunder, a shower of quotes

  From the Sanskrit and Dante.

  Da. Damyata. Shantih.

  I hope you’ll make sense of the notes.

  18 April • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud • William Wordsworth

  This poem opens with a multitude of natural images: clouds, vales, hills and – most famously – daffodils. While Wordsw
orth writes at length on the sight of the daffodils, he never mentions their smell. This is unsurprising, as Wordsworth actually suffered from anosmia and had barely any sense of smell at all!

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  Continuous as the stars that shine

  And twinkle on the milky way,

  They stretched in never-ending line

  Along the margin of a bay:

  Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

  Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

  The waves beside them danced; but they

  Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

  A poet could not but be gay,

  In such a jocund company:

  I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  18 April • Paul Revere’s Ride • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  On the eve of the American Revolutionary War (or what we Brits call the American War of Independence), 18 April 1775, Paul Revere rode from Boston to Lexington to warn rebel leaders that British soldiers were on the march and coming to arrest them. His dramatic ride is immortalized here by the American poet, Henry Longfellow.