Status Updates From Poem for the Day One

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.

The Old Man's Comforts
and how he gained them

...

You are old Father William the young man cried,
And life must be hastening away;
You are cheerful, and love to converse upon death,
Now tell me the reason, I pray.

Robert Southety
(August 12th 1774 — March 21st 1843)

Spring

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

... "of such poetry you seem to me to have added the difficulty of following several entirely novel and simultaneous experiments in versification and construction, together with an altogether unprecedented system of alliteration and compound words;—any one of which novelties would be startling and productive of distraction from the poetic matter..."

From Lessons of the War

To Alan Mitchell
Vici duellis nupet idolens
Et militavi non sine gloria
Naming of Parts

...

This is the safety-catch, which is always release
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
if you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
...

Henry Reed
(February 22nd 1914 — December 8th 1986)

Futility

Wilfred Owen
(March 18th 1894 — November 4th 1918)

...
All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets must be truthful.
If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names, but if the spirit of it survives — survives Prussia — my ambition and those names will have achieved themselves fresher fields than Flanders ,.."

Come to the Edge

Christopher Logue
(November 23rd 1926 — )

Christopher Logue writes: "The poem was witten in — I think — 1968. Michale Kustow curated an exhibition of Apollinaire's work at the ICA and asked me for a poem to go on a poster to advertise the show.
"I cannot say that the poem was the result of my reading Apollinaire, more by the idea of the man, his life, as much as his poetry. A daring figure."

From Hamlet
Act III Scene I

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and momentWi
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

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

Sonnet 30

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
...

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

Ode (We are the Music Makers)

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
(March 14th 1844 — January 30th 1881)

...He was born in London, and at the age of 19 started work in the British Museum, ending up in the zoological department, specializing in ichthyology. This ode and some of his other "Victorian escapist verse" appeared in his book Music and Moonlight published in 1874. He died of influenza in his 39th year.

Binsey Poplars
felled 1879

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

... I am sorry to say that the aspens that lined the river are everywhere felled."

Gabriele D'Annunzio, Italian poet and political leader who lost an eye in air combat in 1916, was born March 12th 1863.

Say not the Struggle Nought Availeth

Arthur Hugh Clough
(January 1st 1819 — November 13th 1861)

..in the Spring of 1941, Churchill spoke of how the United States were "very closely bound up with us now" and he recited from Clough's poem, remarking how its sentiments were "apt and appropriate to our fortunes tonight" and would be so judged "wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies".

Sir John Denham, Irish poet and architect (who had Sir Christopher Wren as his deputy), was captured in the Civil War at Farnham Castle, became a Knight of the Bath at the Restoration, and died March 10th 1669.

The Greater Cats

...

Yet oh what powers to deceive!
My wit is turned to faith,
And at this moment I believe
In love, and scout at death.
I came from nowhere, and shall be
Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally:
I am a lion, a stone, a tree,
And as the Polar star in me
Is fixed my constant heart on thee.
...

Ah, may I stay forever blind

Vita Sackville-West
(March 9th 1892 — Joe 2nd 1962)

Little Elegy
for a child who skipped rope

X.J. Kennedy
(August 21st 1929 —)

X.J. Kennedy once referred to himself as "one of an endangered species: people who still write in meter and rime". He published with his wife Dorothy the magazine Counter/Measures, in defence of traditional poetry.

Not Waving but Drowning

Stevie Smith
(September 20th 1902 — March 7th 1971)

..."I love death, I think it's the most exciting thing. As one gets older one gets into this — well it's like a race, before you get to the waterfall, when you feel the water slowly getting quicker and quicker, and you can't get out, and all you want to do is get to the waterfall and over the edge. How exciting it is!

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

Elizabeth Barrett Browing
(March 6th 1808 — June 29th 1861)

...On September 12th 1846, she secretly married him, eventually settling in Florence, giving birth to a son in her 45th year.

On March 4th, 1673 a warrant was issued signed by 13 magistrates for John Bunyan's arrest for unlicensed preaching

Love

George Herbert
(April 34rd 1593 — March 3rd 1633)

Of the role of the country parson, Herbert wrote, "Love is his business and aime"; he himself was revered by his contemporaries as "holy George Herbert", a kindly, saintly man with a love of music.

March 2

From The Ship of Death
5

D.H. Lawrence
(September 11th 1885 — March 2nd 1930)

..."Do I fear the invisible dark hand of death, "Lawrence had once asked, "plucking me into darkness, gathering me blossom by blossom from the stem of life into the unknown of my afterwards? I fear it only in reverence and with strange satisfaction."

William Dean Howells, poet, novelist, critic and US consul in Venice, born in Martin's Ferry, Ohio, March 1st 1837

Time is ...

I fear time's tumbril hurrying us
—bare wee foetuses
hardly rubbed with God's pleasure —
to the place of execution.
"Stay!" My beloved, Giacometti above,
Renoir below,
spirit shining, horse to horse,
leaps in the way.
An angel rapes a neutron in her brain:
"Celebrate! Our rescue remedy is
...

Alan Beam
(Feb 29th 1948 — )

The Soldier

Rupert Brooke
(August 3rd 1887 — April 23rd 1915)

... The grave is in an olive grove in the far south of Skyros, a Greek heaven with air and sun and sights and sounds to rival any English delights, although somewhat encroached on of late by Greek naval emplacements. Rupert Brooke in his brief life showed enormous energy and enthusiasm.

The Lesson

Edward Lucie-Smith
(February 27th 1933 — )

... I wasn't close to my parents and today have very few memories of my father as a result. The poem is essentially about the difference between what one is supposed to feel and wha one actually does feel, when faces with some sort of 'shaping' event. I thing I wrote the poem itself sometime in the 1950s, and it reflects my then interest in strict verse forms."

To My Mother

George Barker
(February 26th 1913 — October 7th 1991)

.... 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".