Status Updates From Poem for the Day: One

The Dead at Clonmacnois

...

Many and many a son of Conn the Hundred-Fighter
In the red earth lies at rest;
Many a blue eye of Clan Colman the turf covers,
Many a swan-white breast.

Thomas William rolleston
(May 1st 1857 — December 5th 1920)
based on an original poem in Irish by Angus O'Gillan

Parting in Wartime

How long ago Hector took off his plume,
Not wanting that his little son should cry,
Then kissed his sad Andromache goodbye —
And now we three in Euston waiting-room

Francis Comford
(March 30th 886 — August 19th 1960)

Song: To Celia

Ben Jonson
(June 11th 1572 — August 6th 1637

Shelley arrive to visit Byron at Ravenna on August 5th, 1821, and found inside Byron's "Circean Palace", the home of his lover Countess Guiccioli, there monkeys, five cats, eight dogs, an eagle, a crow, a falcon, five peacocks, two guinea hens and an Egyptian crane. "I wonder who all this animals were," Shelley wrote, "before they were changed into these shapes"

From Prometheus Unbound

(August 4th 1792 — July 89th 1822)

...Eventually, Sir Timothy and Harriets father felt obliged to give Shelley an annuity of £400 a year, to prevent him "cheating strangers" and leaving a trail of unpaid debts behind him —which Shelley did, nevertheless, escaping to Italy and being a total of some £25,000 in debt by the time of his death.

From The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
(Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

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

On April 25th 1912, Brooke wrote to Ka Cox: "I'm just passing through Potsdam. I've a fancy you may be, just now, in Grantchester. I envy you frightfully. That river and the chestnuts — come back to me a lot. Tea on the lawn.

On August 2nd 1787 Robert Burns wrote an autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore which is the main source of information on his early life.

The Waking

Theodore Roethke
(May 25th 1908 — August 1st 1963)

...In 1953, he married Beatrice Heath O'Connell, a student at Bennington College from the time he taught there. In that year too, several of Roethke's more autobiographical poems appeared in his collection The Waking,
Jay Parini describes Roethke as "a latter-day transcendentalist, finding spiritual correspondences in physical things".

On this day in 1805, John Johnson, William Cooper's cousin, recorded Lady Hesketh's fears concerning Blakes's rages and supposed madness: "I don't doubt," she told Johnson, that Blake "will poison [his patron Hayley] ... in his Turret or set fire to all his papers."

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

...

The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

Thomas Gray
(December 26th 1716 — July 30th 1771)

U(rsula) A (selam( Fanthorpe was born in London July 29th 1929. One of her early poetry collections is Neck-Verse. She lives in Gloucestershire.

The Windhover
To Christ our Lord

...

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-black embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold -vermilion.

Gerard Manley Hopkins'(July 28gh 1844 — June 89th 1889)

Poet and journalist Thomas Campbell born in Glasgow July 27th 1777.

"Hamlet, as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlains his Servants", entered on the Stationer's Register July 26th 1602.

Burns' posthumous son Maxwell born during Burns' funeral service, July 25th 1796.

July 24

Not to Sleep

Robert Graves
(July 24th 1895 — December 7th 1985)

On May 2nd 1963, Robert Graves wrote to James Reeves: "As a matter of record, I have never been so happy in my life as now: all the unhappiness of three years has peeled away. I wrote a poem two days ago beginning 'Not to sleep all the night gone, for pure joy...' which is one of the few poems of utter happiness ever written..this is mine,...

E. J. Armstrong, poet, born on July 23rd 1841