Chaucer too celebrates this month, together with his favourite flower, the daisy. In a Prologue to his “The Legend of Good Women”, after explaining his devotion to reading and study, he anticipates by four hundred years Wordsworth’s abandonment of books for Nature, as related in our March programme. Chaucer writes: And as for me, though […]
Author: Peter Wood
May 3 Edmund Spenser
From the Fairie Queene Edmund Spenser Milton looked back with respect to “our sage and serious poet, Spenser”, as he called him; and Spenser’s Queen of the months shares with Milton’s May the characteristics of the classical goddess, Flora: Then came fair May, the fairest maid on ground, Decked all with dainties of her season’s […]
May 2 John Milton
L’Allegro John Milton In his pictorial poem “L’ Allegro” or the lively man, he hails the goddess of Mirth and considers her possible parentage, perhaps the offspring of love and wine or, more wisely, of the West Wind and Dawn: But come thou goddess fair and free, In heaven yclept Euphrosyne, And by men, heart-easing […]
May 1 John Milton
Song on a May Morning John Milton Now the bright morning star, Day’s harbinger, Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her The flowery May that from her green lap throws The yellow cowslip, and the pale primrose. Hail bounteous May that dost inspire Mirth and youth and warm desire; Woods […]
March 10 Thomas Hardy
WEATHERS And finally for this month of many weathers a poem in which Hardy contrasts summer sunshine and winter rain: This is the weather the cuckoo likes, And so do I; When showers betumble the chestnut spikes, And nestlings fly: And the little brown nightingale bills his best, […]
March 9 Thomas Hardy
BEENY CLIFF In March 1913, over forty years after his adventure in “Lyonesse”, the ageing poet, now a widower, looked back with nostalgic regret, sharpened by a subsequent estrangement, to those happy days of early love. O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright […]
March 8 Hardy
In March 1870 Thomas Hardy, then an architect, was commissioned to go to the church of St Juliot in Cornwall to take particulars for a proposed re-building. There he met the Rector’s sister-in- law, Emma Gifford, who later became his wife. The excitement of this venture, and its happy outcome are expressed in the poem […]
April Poems Index
Title/From Begins Poet Calendar of Nature – April Next came fresh April, full of lustyhed, Edmund Spenser April April, April, Laugh thy girlish laughter William Watson Canterbury Tales Whan that April with his shoures soote Geoffrey Chaucer Tewkesbury Road It’s good to be out on the road, John Masefield Sea Fever I must go down […]
April 8 Browning
Robert Browning spent much of his life in Italy and in eighteen forty-five, in April ,during his first journey to that country, he gave us his “Home Thoughts, From Abroad” which lead us from April to May. HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England […]
April 7 Hardy
Disasters at sea have inspired many a poem, few more chilling than Thomas Hardy’s, which embodies his own peculiar sense of fate in recording the disaster of the fourteenth of April nineteen hundred and twelve when the Titanic, on her maiden voyage to America, struck an iceberg. THE CONVERGENCE OF THE TWAIN By Thomas Hardy […]