June 7 Dylan Thomas

At once more modern, published actually in 1952, and with the immediacy of a child’s joyful exhilaration in a rural setting, imaginatively realised, is Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”, a striking evocation of the freshness and wonder of a child’s vision of his earthly paradise: Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs […]

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June 6 Edward Thomas

A contemporary and acquaintance of Brooke, one of the group attracted and encouraged by Sir Edward Marsh, who published their poems in his biennial anthologies was Edward Thomas, who here hauntingly renders June’s midday stillness in his poem, Adlestrop. Yes. I remember Adlestrop – The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up […]

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June 5 Rupert Brooke

Another Georgian poet, Rupert Brooke, took an idyllic view of the countryside, `and, as we have seen, was much attracted by water and river scenery, viewing fish with particular appreciation. He combines this interest with playful but telling satire of an anthropomorphic view of God and the Future Life in his poem, HEAVEN Fish (fly-replete, […]

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June 4 Edmund Blunden

FOREFATHERS Edmund Blunden’s “Forefathers”, written in the earlier years of our own century, owes something to these earlier poems, but adds a feeling of fellowship and continuity with the older generation: Here they went with smock and crook, Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade, This poem is still protected by copyright. Read the […]

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June 3 Oliver Goldsmith

Another poet of the eighteenth century, Oliver Goldsmith, expresses a similar regard for rural life and character in his “The Deserted Village”, looking back to his childhood in Lissoy, a village in West Meath in Ireland; which he idealises as ‘Sweet Auburn’, with a veteran of the Spanish wars, Thomas Byrne, as the village schoolmaster. […]

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June 2 Thomas Gray

Tranquillity induced by the quiet of a Summer evening is the emotional setting for “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray: The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly oe’r the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. […]

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