Status Updates From Poem for the Day: One

Playwright Lady Augusta Gregory, Yeats' associate, died May 22nd 1932

Christopher Smart died in a debtors' prison, May 21st 1771

Magnificat
for Sian, after thirteen years

...

when we met, I tell you
it was a birthday party, a funeral
it was a holy communion
between women, a Visitation

it was two old she-0goats butting
and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold


Michéle Roberts
(May 20th 1949 — )

Slough

...

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
and paint their nails.

come, brined bombs, and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
the cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

John Betjeman
(August 28th 1906 — May 19th 1984)

Novelist and cerebral poet George Maricith died May 18th 1909.

Oft in the Stilly Night

Thomas Moore
(May 28th 1779 — February 25th 1852)

Thomas Moore was born in Dublin, the son of a Catholic grocer. His Poems of 1801 and his talent as a singer were his e entrée into high society. He married Betsy Dyke, and actress, and they lived in Wiltshire. His Irish Melodies brought him an income of £500 a year.

Feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich, who wrote the polemical poem 'The Phenomenology of Anger', was born in Baltimore May 16th 1929.

Because I could not stop for Death

Emily Dickinson
(December 10th 1830 — May 15th 1886)

...Some of her verses circulated privately in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a largely condescending group who pitied her eccentricity.

1. A tull tippet is a neck and shoulder scarf made of fine netting

Psalm 23
A psalm of David

King Davied
(Died c. 990 BC)

... Psalm 23 was written about two and a half thousand years ago, and is one of the 73 psalms (out of the 150) that have been attributed by scholars to King David himself. On Saul's death, David ruled over Judah from about 1010 BC to 990 BC, annexing Jerusalem in the process, where he built a palace on Mount Zion and installed there the Ark of the Covenant.

The way we live

Kathleen Jamie
(May 13th 1962 — )

Kathleen Jamies's travels, mainly in the East, are reflected in her collections The Way We Live (1987) and The Autonomous Region (1993) and in her travel book The Golden Peake (1992).
Jamie was born in Renfrewshire and now lives in Fife. Her collection the Queen of Sheba was published in 1994.

The Owl and the Pussycat

...

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lived on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
...

Edward Lear
(May 12th 1815 — January 29th 1888)

Sir Edward Dyer buried May 11th 1607.

Two in the Campagna

...

I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul's spring,—your part, my part
In life, for good and ill.

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

Time

Mary Ursula Bethell
(October 6th 1874 — January 15th 1945)

...The poet D'Arcy Cresswell wrote: "New Zealand wan't truly discovered ... until Ursula Bethell, 'very earnestly digging', raised her head to look at the mountains," and Peter Simpson wrote that "Ursula Bethel felt herself to be a transplanted English-woman for whom her garden ... was both a reminder of her exile and a compensation for it.

Edmund Wilson poet, author and critic, born in New Jersey May 8th 1895. His third wife was the novelist Mary McCarthy.

American poet and librarian Archibald MacLeish born May 7th 1892

From Ode to a Nightingale

...

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful death,
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou are pouring forth thy soul abroad
...
John Keats
(October 3ast 1795 — February 23rd 1821)

She was a phantom of delight

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 ‚— April 23rd 1850)

According to Justice Coleridge, Wordsworth said that 'Phantom of Delight' "was written on 'his dear wife', of whom he spoke in the sweetest manner; and a manner full of the warmest love and admiration, yet with delicacy and reserve," and Wordsworth noted: "it was written from my heart, as is sufficiently obvious."

From Love's Labour's Lost
Act IV Scene iii

.... Burbage ys ciome, and sayes ther ys no new playe that the quene hath not seene, but they have reyved an old one, Cawled Loves Labore Lost, which for wytt and mirthe he says wi please her exceedingly."

To be a Slave of Intensity

Kabir
(c. 15th Century)
Translated by Robert Bly
(December 23rd 1926 — )

Kabir wrote in Hindi. Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill translated him into Victorian English, themselves working from a Bengali translation. Robert Bly, working from the Tagore-Underhill book, has adapted the poems for today's reader, His Kabir Book was published by the Beacon Press in Boston in 1977.

Poet ruth Fainlight born in New York May 2nd 1931. She married the novelist Alan Sillitoe in 1959.

Happy the Man

John Dryden
(August 9th 1631 — May 1st 1700)
translating Horace (65 — 8 BC), Odes, Booke III, xxix

...At the Revolution of 1688 he lost his court position as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, returning first to the writing of plays and later to translations of Horace, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Boccaccio and others.

Byzantium

...

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break blotter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea.

William Butler Yeats
(June 13th 1865 — January 28th 1939)

Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, died Aril 29th 1933.