by Allie Esiri
Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain’d his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the evensong;
And, having prayed together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die,
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer’s rain;
Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be found again.
15 March • from Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
In the Roman calendar the Ides of March is a date which corresponds to 15 March in our calendar – each month had an Ides which signified, roughly, its midpoint. On the Ides of March 44 bc Julius Caesar, the great statesman and general, was assassinated in the Roman senate. These lines come from the famous scene in William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, in which a soothsayer (or fortune teller) warns Caesar of imminent danger. Perhaps if they had offered some more information than just the rather cryptic ‘beware’, Caesar would have been more inclined to heed their advice. As it is, Caesar joins Macbeth and Antony in the pantheon of Shakespeare characters who should have listened more carefully to their prophecies.
CAESAR
Who is it in the press that calls on me?
I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,
Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak; Caesar is turn’d to hear.
SOOTHSAYER
Beware the Ides of March.
CAESAR
What man is that?
BRUTUS
A soothsayer bids you beware the Ides of March.
CAESAR
Set him before me; let me see his face.
CASSIUS
Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.
CAESAR
What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER
Beware the Ides of March.
CAESAR
He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass.
16 March • Go and Catch a Falling Star • John Donne
This poem at first hides its theme. It asks the reader to perform impossible tasks relating to mythological things and beings, and to go on lifelong travels. Only at the end of the second stanza is it revealed that these impossibilities are being used as a cynical, and rather bitter comparison to another ostensibly unfeasible endeavour: finding a true and fair woman
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find’st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
16 March • Toad • Norman MacCaig
The Scottish poet Norman MacCaig often wrote about the natural world and animals, such as the toad in this poem. This poem’s positivity is a refreshing way to look at a creature that is often regarded as ugly, or even scary.
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
Squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
Full of satisfaction in a man’s house?
You clamber towards me on your four corners –
Right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
I love you for being a toad,
For crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
And for not being frightened
I put you in my purse hand not shutting it,
And set you down outside directly under
Every star.
A jewel in your head? Toad,
You’ve put one in mine,
A tiny radiance in a dark place.
17 March • Ich Am of Irlaunde • Anon.
17 March is St Patrick’s Day. As St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, it is also a day on which people celebrate the culture and history of the ‘Emerald Isle’. St Patrick’s Day is thought to be the most widely celebrated national festival in the world. The song ‘Ich am of Irlaunde’ is a traditional medieval poem originating in around the year 1300. Reading and making sense of a poem like this can require some concentration, but it is also rewarding; it teaches us about the history of the English language itself.
Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich thee,
For of sainte charite,
Come an daunce wit me
In Irlaunde.
Translation
I am of Ireland,
and of the holy realm
of Ireland.
Good sir, I pray thee:
for the sake of holy charity,
come dance with me
in Ireland.
17 March • He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven • W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats is one of Ireland’s most revered poets and is remembered as one of the key figures of the twentieth-century literary movement known as modernism. Although he accomplished many great things in his career – not least winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 – he would have probably traded all his achievements for a reciprocation of his love for his muse. This is one of his shortest, and most heartbreaking, poems written to Maud Gonne, who sadly never agreed to marry him despite numerous proposals – and poems!
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
18 March • Spring Snow • John Foster
The cinquain (a poem of five lines with two, four, six, eight and two syllables on each line) is the perfect format for John Foster’s poem which concentrates on the fleeting beauty of snowflakes.
Snowflakes
Slip from the sky
Like soft white butterflies,
Brush the trees with their flimsy wings,
Vanish.
18 March • Meeting at Night • Robert Browning
This love poem was written around 1845, when Robert Browning was courting his future wife, the poet Elizabeth Barrett. The simple narrative of the poem focuses less on the meeting of the lovers, and more on the journey leading up to that meeting. We do not have much access to the narrator’s thoughts, but through the images of the sea and the landscape he passes, we experience a sense of mounting anticipation.
The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
An
d quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.
Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!
19 March • Historical Associations • Robert Louis Stevenson
Among Robert Louis Stevenson’s most famous works today are the novels Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He was also noted for his wonderful volume of poetry, A Child’s Garden of Verses. This imaginative poem is a series of reflections, or jumps between thoughts, as a child, playing with his uncle, travels far and wide through geography and history, and still gets home in time for tea.
Dear Uncle Jim, this garden ground
That now you smoke your pipe around,
Has seen immortal actions done
And valiant battles lost and won.
Here we had best on tip-toe tread,
While I for safety march ahead,
For this is that enchanted ground
Where all who loiter slumber sound.
Here is the sea, here is the sand,
Here is simple Shepherd’s Land,
Here are the fairy hollyhocks,
And there are Ali Baba’s rocks.
But yonder, see! apart and high,
Frozen Siberia lies; where I,
With Robert Bruce and William Tell,
Was bound by an enchanter’s spell.
There, then, awhile in chains we lay,
In wintry dungeons, far from day;
But ris’n at length, with might and main,
Our iron fetters burst in twain.
Then all the horns were blown in town;
And to the ramparts clanging down,
All the giants leaped to horse
And charged behind us through the gorse.
On we rode, the others and I,
Over the mountains blue, and by
The Silver River, the sounding sea
And the robber woods of Tartary.
A thousand miles we galloped fast,
And down the witches’ lane we passed,
And rode amain, with brandished sword,
Up to the middle, through the ford.
Last we drew rein – a weary three –
Upon the lawn, in time for tea,
And from our steeds alighted down
Before the gates of Babylon.
19 March • Three Good Things • Jan Dean
This is a perfect poem to put under your pillow and read at day’s end.
At day’s end I remember
three good things.
Apples maybe – their skinshine smell
and soft froth of juice.
Water maybe – the pond in the park
dark and full of secret fish.
A mountain maybe – that I saw in a film,
or climbed last holiday,
and suddenly today it thundered up
into a playground game.
Or else an owl – I heard an owl today,
and I made bread.
My head is full of all these things,
it’s hard to choose just three.
I let remembering fill me up
with all good things
so that good things will overflow
into my sleeping self,
and in the morning
good things will be waiting
when I wake.
20 March • A Morning Song • Eleanor Farjeon
Around 19–21 March is the Vernal Equinox, which is the start of spring. These words were written in 1931 by Eleanor Farjeon, but became well known as a hymn after they were set to a Gaelic tune.
Morning has broken
Like the first morning,
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird.
Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
Praise for them, springing
From the first Word.
Sweet the rain’s new fall,
Sunlit from heaven,
Like the first dewfall
In the first hour.
Praise for the sweetness,
Of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness
From the first shower.
Mine is the sunlight!
Mine is the morning
Born of the one light
Eden saw play.
Praise with elation,
Praise every morning
Spring’s re-creation
Of the new day!
20 March • from Pippa Passes • Robert Browning
This poem from Browning’s verse drama Pippa Passes is a poem about beginnings – about dew-pearled mornings, and a year about to blossom. Pippa celebrates the simple wonders of nature, finding a connection between the snail resting on a thorn and the idea of God in heaven.
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn:
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!
21 March • Spring • Christina Rossetti
Spring is the season of life, birth and rebirth. But poetry often finds reminders of things in their opposites, and even life can serve to be a reminder of death. In Rossetti’s simple song of spring, the poet cannot resist seeing the season of spring as a time ‘that passes by’ all too soon.
Frost-locked all the winter,
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
What shall make their sap ascend
That they may put forth shoots?
Tips of tender green,
Leaf, or blade, or sheath;
Telling of the hidden life
That breaks forth underneath,
Life nursed in its grave by Death.
Blows the thaw-wind pleasantly,
Drips the soaking rain,
By fits looks down the waking sun:
Young grass springs on the plain;
Young leaves clothe early hedgerow trees;
Seeds, and roots, and stones of fruits,
Swollen with sap put forth their shoots;
Curled-headed ferns sprout in the lane;
Birds sing and pair again.
There is no time like Spring,
When life’s alive in everything,
Before new nestlings sing,
Before cleft swallows speed their journey back
Along the trackless track –
God guides their wing,
He spreads their table that they nothing lack, –
Before the daisy grows a common flower
Before the sun has power
To scorch the world up in his noontide hour.
There is no time like Spring,
Like Spring that passes by;
There is no life like Spring-life born to die,
Piercing the sod,
Clothing the uncouth clod,
Hatched in the nest,
Fledged on the windy bough,
Strong on the wing:
There is no time like Spring that passes by,
Now newly born, and now
Hastening to die.
21 March • Flowers and Moonlight on the Spring River • Yang-Ti, translated by Arthur Waley
The emperor Yang-Ti ruled the Sui Dynasty in China from 604 to his death in 618. Despite his infamous reputation as one of China’s most cruel and tyrannical sovereigns, he was also a sensitive soul, capable of writing such beautiful, meditative lines such as these, which transport us to an exotic world, and evoke the simultaneous radiance and transience of nature. Whether he was the best poet of his generation we’ll never know, as Yang was known to execute any writers who he feared might be superio
r to him.
The evening river is level and motionless –
The spring colours just open to their full.
Suddenly a wave carries the moon away
And the tidal water comes with its freight of stars.
22 March • Spring • William Blake
Blake’s collection of poems Songs of Innocence and Experience is celebrated as a great experiment in poetry, where he offsets the plain songs of joy of ‘Innocence’ with the complicated reflections found in ‘Experience’. But even in the simpler poems we find Blake playing around with rhythms, such as the three-syllable rhymed lines in this poem about spring.
Sound the Flute
Now it’s mute.
Birds delight
Day and Night;
Nightingale
In the dale
Lark in Sky,
Merrily,
Merrily, Merrily, to welcome in the Year.
Little Boy,
Full of joy;
Little Girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise,
Merrily, Merrily, to welcome in the Year.
Little Lamb,
Here I am;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft Wool;
Let me kiss
Your soft face:
Merrily, Merrily, we welcome in the Year.
22 March • The Trees • Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin’s work was famously melancholy, yet this poem deals with an optimistic subject: the approach of spring.
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
23 March • Sonnet 98 • William Shakespeare
