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
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 […]
March 7 W R Rodgers
STORMY DAY The contrast between Nature’s joy and ‘what man has made of man’finds a more modern context in ‘Stormy Day’ by W.R.Rodgers. Here the exhilaration of a windy day is checked by a reminder of the Second World War. Sparse rhyme supplements the basic device of alliteration, a deliberate choice of words with the […]
March 6 William Wordsworth
THE TABLES TURNED Wordsworth sought to redress the balance between academic study and a first-hand experience of Nature as sources of wisdom in “The Tables Turned”:- Up! up! my friend, and quit your books; Or surely you’ll grow double: Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun […]
March 5 William Wordsworth
LINES WRITTEN IN EARLY SPRING His sister Dorothy, an emotional collaborator in his experience of Nature, as her ‘Journal’ reveals, and Edward, a nephew, as far as I remember, were his companions. Nature, he thought, seemed full of life and joy; why was not mankind similarly happy? I heard a thousand blended notes, While in […]
March 4 William Wordsworth
Pre-eminently the poet of Nature ( with a capital ‘N’ ), Wordsworth particularly delights in Springtime, and besides voicing this joy he expounds his philosophy of natural wisdom in the simplest words he can find – another deliberate aim of this poet: TO MY SISTER It is the first mild day of March: Each minute […]
March 3 William Wordsworth
LINES WRITTEN IN MARCH The joyous scene, recollected in tranquillity, later at a time of leisure, reproduced its poetic feeling, and hence the poem. Another joyous scene is recalled in the lines “Written in March” while resting on the bridge at the foot of Brother’s Water, also in the Lake District: The cock is crowing, […]
March 2 William Wordsworth
DAFFODILS March, in English poetry, also inevitably recalls Wordsworth and daffodils. In our January programme I hazarded a simple definition of poetry as “an expression of feeling in musical language” . Wordsworth, who knew what he was talking about, prefaced his ‘Lyrical Ballads’ of 1798 with the following account of the poetic process, as he […]
March 1 Edmund Spenser
As February was formerly reckoned to be the last month of the year, so March was the first, dedicated to Mars, the god of War, resuming control after the compulsory truce of Winter, but also to the peaceful occupation of seed-sowing. Here is the leader of Spenser’s Pageant: First sturdy March, with brows full sternly […]