Oh! That We Two Were Maying, poem by Charles Kingsley

OH! THAT WE TWO WERE MAYING (Excerpt)
by Charles Kingsley

Oh! that we two were Maying
Down the stream of the soft spring breeze;
Like children with violets playing
In the shade of the whispering trees.

MORE: Read “Oh! That We Two Were Maying” by Charles Kingsley in its entirety at poemhunter.com.

IMAGE: “Spring Violets on White” by Elena Elisseeva. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Kingsley (1919-1875) was a priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian, poet, and novelist. His novel Westward Ho! led to the founding of a town by the same name (the only place name in England that contains an exclamation mark).

May, poem by Hilaire Belloc

MAY
by Hilaire Belloc

This is the laughing-eyed amongst them all:
My lady’s month. A season of young things.
She rules the light with harmony, and brings
The year’s first green upon the beeches tall.
How often, where long creepers wind and fall
Through the deep woods in noonday wanderings,
I’ve heard the month, when she to echo sings,
I’ve heard the month make merry madrigal.

How often, bosomed in the breathing strong
Of mosses and young flowerets, have I lain
And watched the clouds, and caught the sheltered song —
Which it were more than life to hear again —
Of those small birds that pipe it all day long
Not far from Marly by the memoried Seine.

PAINTING: “The Seine at Port Marly” by Camille Pissarro (1872).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870–1953), born in France and raised in England, was a writer, orator, poet, satirist, and political activist. He has been called one of the Big Four of Edwardian Letters, along with H.G.Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton. Belloc observed that “the first job of letters is to get a canon,” that is, to identify those works which a writer looks upon as exemplary of the best of prose and verse. For his own prose style, he claimed to aspire to be as clear and concise as “Mary had a little lamb.” (Source: wikipedia.org.)

The Night Mail, poem by W.H. Auden

THE NIGHT MAIL (Excerpts)
By W.H. Auden

This is the night mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
 
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door…
 
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973), who published as was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. (Read more at Wikipedia.org)

The Night Mail, poem by W.H. Auden

THE NIGHT MAIL (Excerpts)
By W.H. Auden

This is the night mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
 
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door…
 
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers’ declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973), who published as was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature. (Read more at Wikipedia.org)

Erasure Poem of the Day, courtesy of Wave Books and Virginia Woolf

I visited the wonderful Wave Books site today and made attempt at an erasure poem — thanks to the site’s easy-to-use erasure poetry software. Try it yourself at erasures.wavepoetry.com. Today’s text came from The Voyage Out, a novel by Virginia Woolf. Find the source material for my erasure poem here.

HERE’S THE ERASURE POEM, “The Dance”:

The Garrick Year, novel by Margaret Drabble, Read by Paul Newman

In the photo at right, Paul Newman reads THE GARRICK YEAR, a 1964 novel by British author Margaret Drabble. Written when she was 24, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and married to an actor, THE GARRICK YEAR is an insider’s account of a young woman’s life in the theater.

I don’t know if Newman’s face expresses an “Oh, those Brits” reaction to the book or if he’s just squinting in the sun. (Where are your sunglasses, Paul?) Also don’t know if this shot was taken on a movie set or while Newman was racing one of his cars. (It was probably snapped on the set of the 1967 movie COOL HAND LUKE, since Newman looks as if he’s dressed for a chain gang.)

In 2009, Roger Angell wrote a “Summer Reading” piece in the New Yorker where he discussed his love for THE GARRICK YEAR (he rereads the book each summer) — and why he thinks it’s the prolific Drabble’s most “alive” novel. Read Angell’s article here.

Find THE GARRICK YEAR by Margaret Drabble at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Margaret Drabble is the author of 17 novels, including The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle’s Eye. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A CHRISTMAS CAROL (Excerpt)

by Charles Dickens

“Nephew!” returned the uncle, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”

“Keep it!” repeated Scrooge’s nephew. “But you don’t keep it.”

“Let me leave it alone, then,” said Scrooge. “Much good may it do you! Much good has it ever done you!”

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,” returned the nephew. “Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time…as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Illustration: Victorian Christmas Card (Cambridge University Library Special Collections)

Quietism, Poem by Adelle Stripe

QUIETISM

by Adelle Stripe

I listen to you
tap tap tap
on an underweight keyboard
 
gain some kind of comfort
from the rhythm
and your cough.
 
Outside the snow is falling
like moths burned by
a nitrate moon
 
and silence envelops
these once busy streets,
footsteps are cushioned
in the ginnel of dust
where the pink reflected halogen glow
is the tone of my cheeks
just half an hour ago.
 
Mogwai’s
“You Don’t Know Jesus”
plays a codeine drone
from the speakers downstairs
somnolence drifting up through the air,
condensation in fuzz guitar notes.
 
I open the window,
hang my legs off the sill,
let the snowflakes collect
on my Clara Bow lips; soft and sweet
I dream of vanilla
 
and listen to you
tap tap tap
on an underweight keyboard
on this February night
under stoned
Titian clouds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Adelle Stripe is a founding member of the Brutalist Poets and lives in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire. Her writing has appeared in Mineshaft, Chiron Review, and PEARL. She has released three poetry collections on Blackheath Books, and won Poetry Book of the Year 2009 at the 3:AM Magazine Awards. A new collection, Dark Corners of the Land, is due for publication in December 2012.

“Quietism” appears, along with other poetry by Adelle Stripe, in the Silver Birch Press release Silver: An Eclectic Anthology of Poetry and Prose – a collection of writing from 62 authors that centers around a “silver” theme. The 240-page book is available in paperback and Kindle versions at Amazon.com.

Happy Birthday, Neil Gaiman

“We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort. And that is why we write.” NEIL GAIMAN, The Graveyard Book

Photo: Kelli Bickman, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Note: Published in 2008, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman won the British Carnegie Medal and American Newbury Medal for the year’s best in children’s novel. It also won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, which honors science fiction and fantasy books. The idea for the story (Kipling’s The Jungle Book set in a graveyard) sprang into Gaiman’s mind when he saw his son riding his bike around a cemetery near the family’s home in England.