Judi’s Reviews > Poem for the Day One > Status Update

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.