Status Updates From Poem for the Day One

Absence

Elizabeth Jennings
(July 18th 1926 )

...Elizabeth Jennings writes: "When I re-read my past work I can see a development; to such an effect, indeed, that some of them no longer seem to be any part of me. But of course, once a poem is published it ceases to have much to do with oneself. Art is not self-expression while, for me, "confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms."

my love

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

On this day in 1917, Cummings wrote to his mother that Paris had "the finest girls God ever allowed to pasture in this fresh earth". A virgin at 22, he became attached to Marie Louise Lallemand, a Parisian whore, who is thought to be associated with his poem 'goodby Betty, don't remember me".

From Holy sonnets
14

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

This sonnet reflects the Protestant belief that faith is entirely in God's give, and that man as a fallen creature is incapable of good works.

Song

John McGrath
(June 1st 1935 — )

...years, he dedicated his book The Bone Won't Break to "The Resistance, to those who have had their lives distorted or destroyed so others could consume, to those who insist that co-operation rather than individual possessiveness is the better principle for the future happiness of humanity; may they survive and that principle bring more joy to the lives of more people,"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in her husband Robert's arms on June 29th 1861, 15 yerars of happy marriage since her escape from her father and Wimpole Street.

Bermudas

...
A temple, where to sound His name.
Oh, let our voice his praise exalt
Till it arrive at Heaven's vault,
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may
Echo beyond the Mexique Bay."
thus sang they, in the English boat,
An holy and a cheerful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
Will falling oars they kept the time.

Andrew Marvell
(March 31st 1621 — August 16th or 18th 1678)

Adlestrop

Edward Thomas
(March 3rd 1878 — April 9th 1917)

Walter de la Mare, in the foreword to Thomas' Collected Poems, wrote that with his death "a mirror of England was shattered of so pure and true a crystal that a clearer and tenderer reflection of it can be found no other where than in these poems...England's roads and heaths and woods, its secret haunts and solitudes, it houses, ...

Home From Abroad

Laurie Lee
(June 26th 1914 — May 13th 1997)

... In 1936, "June came in full blast, with the heat bouncing off the sea as from a buckled sheet of tin'; he witnessed the first stirrings of the Spanish Civil War in Castillo; a Falangist boy of about twenty had been shot through the head an his body left sprawled on the river bank.

John Anderson My Jo

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

Burns himself did not live to an old age, dying of rheumatic heart disease in his 37th year. Ten thousand people followed his coffin to the grave,

Different

Clere Parsons
(1908 — 1931)

He was born in India, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service.

From The Voyage
for T. S. Eliot

Robert Lowell
(March 1st 1917 — September 12th 1977)
based on a French poem by Charles Baudelaire
(April 9th 1821 — August 31st 1867)

A ceaseless innovator, Lowell collected his translations in the volume Imitations, containing many purposeful inaccuracies. The adaptations thus produced give many clues to the way Lowell approached poetic sources.

American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in acton n 1916, was born in New York City June 22nd, 1888.

From The Tempest
Act V Scene I

Ariel. where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry;
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

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

All You Who Sleep Tonight

All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right,
and emptiness above —

Know that you aren't alone.
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.

Vikram Seth
(June 20th 19052 — )

From The Brook

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

1. A water-fowl with a distinctive white spot on its forehead, an extension of the beak, suggesting baldness and giving us the phrase 'bald as a coot'.

To Jane: The Keen Stars Were Twinkling

Percy Bysshe Shelley
(August 4th 1792 July 89th 1822)

This poem was written for Jane Williams, with whom Shelley became increasingly infatuated. She and her husband lived with Shelley and his wife Mary in Italy at the Casa Magni in Lerici in the summer of 1822. Shelley was unable to borrow 70 to 80 guineas to buy Jane a harp from Paris, and gave her a guitar instead.

From In a Gondola

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

At the age of 33, Browning began a romance with Elizabeth Barrett, who inspired his love poems. Among his most popular poetry in his life were Men and Women and The Ring and the Book. His last poems, Asolando, were published on the day of his death. He was buried on December 31st 1889 in Westminster Abbey.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes married June 16th 1956.

The Promised Garden
for Suzanne

Theo Dorgan
(September 21st 1953 — )

Theo Morgan writes, "In the Gaelic tradition, 'Gáirden Phárthais; or the Paradise Garden is a recurrent image derived not only from the Garden of Eden but also from Oriental ideas of the magical garden of transformations, an idea which finds its point of pure expression in the Sufi idea of the Garden as a place of human perfection.

From The Blubáiyát of Omar Khayyam of Naishapúr

...

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the Field,
He knows about it all—HE knows—HE knows!

Edward FitzGerald
(March 31s5 1809 — June 14th 1883)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats
(June 13th 18656 — January 28th 1939)

... Another admirer of this poem was Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote to Yeats from Samoa to say that it had laid him under a spell, "it is so quaint and airy, simple and artful, and eloquent to the heart."

She Walks in Beauty

George Gordon, Lord Byron
(January 22nd 1788 — April 19th 1824)

... When we returned to ... the Albany, he ... desired Fletcher to give him a tumbler of Brandy, which he drank at once to Mrs Wilmot's health ... the next day he wrote those charming lines upon her."

Conception

Death did not come to my mother
Like an old friend.
She was a mother, and she must
Conceive him.

Up and down the bed she fought crying
Help me, but death
Was a slow child
Heavy. He

Waited. When he was born
We took and tired him, now he is ready
To do his good in the world.

He has my mother's features.
He can go among strangers
To save lives.

Josephine Miles
(June 11th 1911 — May 12th 1985)