Status Updates From Poem for the Day One

Auld Lang Syne

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

Burns contributed this song to James Thomson's Scots Musical Museum, writing to Thomas in September 1793 that it was "the old song of olden times, and which has never been in print, not even in manuscript, until I took it down from and oldman's singing"....

If

...
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
and treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools:

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

Song

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

...She broke off the engagement when he returned to the Catholic faith — and never married. "Grown old before my time," as she put it, she suffered from ill-health most of her life, and was operated on for cancer. She died later, according to one report, whilst "in the act of prayer".

Thomas Babington Macaulay, poet, historian and statesman, died on December 28th 1859.

From Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele

Charles Olson'(December 27th 1910 — January 10th 1970)
based around 'Le Bonheur' by Arthur Rimbaud
(October 20th 1854 — November 10th 1891)

...Towards the end of his life he concentrated on his long poem Maximus (he himself was Maximus, all 6 feet 8 inches of him). He died of cancer at the age of 56.

Jodrell Bank

Patric Dickinson
(December 26th 1914 — January 28th 1994)

...
For three years after the war he was Poetry Editor for the BBC Home Service. HIs poetry collections include This Cold Universe (1949) and Selected Poems (1968). He was also a playwright and a translator and with his wife Sheila Shannon edited anthologies such as Poems to Remember (1958).

Innocent's Song

Charles Causley
(August 24th 1917 — )

Charles Causley comments: "I wrote this poem for a private Christmas card at the time of the Cold War when such phrases as 'the peaceful use of atomic energy' for me rang particularly thin. There is a clear reference to the Christian Feast of the Holy Innocents (28 December) or Childermass...

From Idea
61

Michael Drayton
(1563 — December 23rd 1631)

...
The authorities took offence at Drayton's first published work, metrical paraphrases from the Bible, entitled The Harmony of the Church (1592), and gave orders for it to be destroyed. Drayton went on to write odes, dramas, mythological poems,, historical tales and patriotic poems such as 'The Battle of Agincourt'.

I Never Even Suggested It

...
Passivity can be a provoking modus operandi:
Consider the Empire and Gandhi.
Silence is golden, but sometimes invisibility is golder,
Because loved ones may not be able to make bricks without straw but often
they don't need any straw to manufacture a bone to pick or blood in
their eye or a chip for their soft white shoulder.
...


Ogden Nash
(August 19th 1902 — May 19th 1971)

The Good-morrow

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

On this day in 1614, Donne wrote to his friend Sir Henry Goodere to tell him he would be printing "forthwith" a collection of his poems "not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies".

American poet Denise Levetofr , who was born in Ilford, Essex died on December 20th 1997.

Museum Place

Rlichard Wilbur
(March 1st 1921 — )

What the poem conveys, I hope , is that artists. are less gravely reverential about art than its custodians are. The usual shorter form of Toulouse-Lautrec is Lautrec rather than Toulouse, but 'Lautrec' has the defect of not ruining with 'shoes'."

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)