March / Jane G. Austin

March

There is no month so fair a type of life
In its first conscious strength and joy of strife
        As thou, wild moon of March!
Thou with they hurtling storms and soft blue sky
Within whose depths the great white cumuli
        Sleep under heaven's arch.

Thou with thy swift chill winds that snatch the breath
From pouting lips and swoop to grewsome death
        The sailor and his ship,
And then in sudden sunburst triumphing
Make rainbows in the shining drops that cling
        Upon his frozen lip.

I love thee well, nay, but I love thee not,
How can I tell if I do love or not,
        Unstable and untrue!
The raging lion now, and now the lamb,
The winter's blast, laden with springtide balm,
        O wild March, which is you?

A type of life, yea, of thy life, O friend!
And yet I know not thy life to the end:
        Thy life holds better things.
And March holds May, and May sweet summertime,
And summer dies and in its death sublime
        The grain of autumn brings.

~~
Jane G. Austin (1831-1894)
from Through the Year with the Poets: March, 1886

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Jane G. Austin biography

    Henri Camus, Storm at Pors-Loubous, France, March 2007. CC BY 1.0, Wikimedia Commons.

First Day of Spring / F.W. Harvey

First Day of Spring

{To A.E.S.)

We laid you fast in frozen clay
When Winter had enchained the land.
(Lad, was it but three weeks to-day?)
And now comes Springtime's messenger with golden tidings in his hand.

A mist blows off the thawing earth,
And drips from every budding tree.
The springs are loosed, and mad with mirth
Run lisping in the fallen leaves, or laughing in the sunlight free.

Oh you who loved the song so well,
Do you not hear the throstle's note?
Nor heed the lovesome light that fell
As warm five thousand years ago, when Solomon, the wise king, wrote?

"Sweet," wrote he. Yes, the light is sweet!
And maddening sweet to walk in Spring:
Yet is the pleasure incomplete
— How should the living understand the melodies that dead throats sing?

Thinker and poet clutch in vain
The secret of a laughing rill,
And Shakespeare's self could never gain
The message blown so mockingly by trumpet of a daffodil.

Dear lad, for you I will not call,
Nor let a foolish dread be born.
A thousand years is still too small
To learn the secrets you must learn, ere you arise on Doomsday morn.

For you have set your ear to earth
To list the growing of the flowers:
And catch the strains of Death and Birth:
And take the honey that is stored by all the flitting bee-like hours.

And you must put to memory
The silver music of the stars
That raineth down so silently,
And all the mighty harmony scrolled on the sky in ghttering bars.

The music that no man can make,
The colours that he cannot see,
These out of darkness you shall take
And nourish up your growing soul with manna of their mystery.

And then when you awake again
(And I have slept a little too),
How we shall rise to pace anew
An earth — where every dream is true, and nothing is unknown but pain.

~~
F.W. Harvey (1888-1957)
from A Gloucestershire Lad at Home and Abroad, 1918

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the United States] 

F.W. Harvey biography

Wolfmann, Skjee Kirke, Sandefjord, Norway, 2019. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Saint Patrick / Edwin Markham

St. Brendan's Cathedral, Galway.

CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Saint Patrick

    I

Wandered from the Antrim hills,
Wandered from Killala's rills,
Patrick heard upon the breeze
Voices from the Irish seas.
Folk of Fochlad called to him
From their forest deep and dim;
And in vision little hands
Beckoned from the Irish lands.
Where the western billows spoke
With the Druid groves of oak.
Evermore their cry did seem
Calling, calling, through his dream:
"Hasten with the flower of truth.
Walk among us, holy youth!"

Mary Immaculate of Lourdes

 Churc, Newton, MA 

CC BY-SA 4,0, Wikimedia Commons

    II

When he spread his dauntless sail
To the gladness of the gale,
Glowering demons, mile on mile,
Stood in league around the Isle,
Laughing out their crackling rage,
At the young, unfearing sage.
There with lifted cross he came,
Breathing low the Sacred Name,
And the demons, form by form,
Fled in fury down the storm.
Over the Isle his spirit went
Like fire across the firmament.
Kings at Tara caught the word. 

Churl and kern and chieftain heard.
Lo, the Druid's mystic rod
Fell down withered before God!

With the frost he kindled fire;
Drove the snakes from brake and briar,
Hurling out the writhing brood
With the lightning of his rood.
Once he stooped, and with his hand
Traced a cross upon the sand;
Then a wonder — from the ground
Sprang a stream with silver sound;
And a blind man kneeling there
Laved his eyelids, whispering prayer.
Then on his relighted eyes
Rushed the splendor of the skies —
Flashed the water's glancing bubble —
Gleamed the gold across the stubble —
Shined the roads that have no ends —
Smiled the faces of old friends.


    Ill

Holy Cross Chapel, Salt Lake City.

CC By-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

And when Patrick fell on sleep,
Twelve the days were, still and deep —
Twelve the days, with never a night,
Never a cloud across the light.
Angels chanted out the hours
Leaning from their sky-hung towers;
Like a garden blown to bloom
Was the sweetness round his tomb. . . .

Fable, legend, all are true:
More than these did Patrick do!
For he cleared the serpent den,
Hiding in the hearts of men;
Letting Love's bright fountain spring
Into sweetest murmuring.
Yes, the wise, heroic breed
Bring us miracle indeed.
On the dark he left God's smile,
Lighting up Ierne's Isle;
And forever lives his name
As the rose upon her fame.

~~

Edwin Markham (1852-1940)
from The Shoes of Happiness, and other poems, 1915

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Edwin Markham biography

March / Hart Crane

March

Hart Crane. The Great Whatsit.

Awake to the cold light
of wet wind running
twigs in tremors. Walls
are naked. Twilights raw —
and when the sun taps steeples
their glistenings dwindle
upward . . .

                    March
slips along the ground
like a mouse under pussy
willows, a little hungry.

The vagrant ghost of winter,
is it this that keeps the chimney
busy still? For something
still nudges shingles and windows:

but waveringly,— this ghost,
this slate-eyed saintly wraith
of winter wanes
and knows its waning.

~~ 

Hart Crane (1899-1932) 

from Collected Poems, 1933

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]

Hart Crane biography

"March" read by Thomas D.

A March Night / Ethelwyn Wetherald

A March Night

A wild wind and a flying moon,
        And drifts that shrink and cower;
A heart that leaps at the thought, How soon
        The earth will be in flower!

Behind the gust and the ragged cloud
        And the sound of loosening floods,
I see young May with her fair head bowed,
        Walking in a world of buds.

~~
Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857-1940)
from Lyrics and Sonnets, 1931

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada, the United States, and the European Union]

Ethelwyn Wetherald biography

     Ross, Full moon rising over snowfields. March 2006. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

A Thought for March 1860 /Charles Tennyson Turner

A Thought for March 1860

Yon happy blackbird's note the rushing wind
Quells not, nor disconcerts his golden tongue,
That breaks my morning dream with well-known song;
How many a roaring March I've left behind,
Whose blasts, all-spirited with notes and trills,
Blew over peaceful England! and, ere long,
Another March will come these hills among,
To clash the lattices and whirl the mills:
But what shall be ere then? Ambition's lust
Is broad awake, and gazing from a throne
But newly set, counts half the world his own;
All ancient covenants aside are thrust,
Old landmarks are like scratches in the dust,
His eagles wave their wings, and they are gone.

~~
Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-1879) 
from Sonnets, 1864 

 [Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Charles Tennyson Turner biography

Sara Lindgren von Bothmer, Blackbird singing for spring, 2019.

CC BY SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

First of March / Frederick Tennyson

First of March

    I.

Thro' the gaunt woods the winds are shrilling cold,
    Down from the rifted rack the sunbeam pours
    Over the cold gray slopes, and stony moors;
The glimmering watercourse, the eastern wold,
And over it the whirling sail o' the mill,
    The lonely hamlet with its mossy spire,
    The piled city smoking like a pyre,
Fetch'd out of shadow gleam with light as chill.


    II.

The young leaves pine, their early promise stay'd;
    The Hope-deluded sorrow at the sight
    Of the sweet blossoms by the treacherous light
Flatter'd to death, like tender love betray'd;
And stepdames frown, and aged virgins chide;
    Relentless hearts put on their iron mood;
    The hunter's dog lies dreaming of the wood,
And dozes barking by the ingle-side.


    III.

Larks twitter, martens glance, and curs from far
    Rage down the wind, and straight are heard no more;
    Old wives peep ont, and scold, and bang the door;
And clanging clocks grow angry in the air;
Sorrow and care, perplexity and pain
    Frown darker shadows on the homeless one,
    And the gray beggar buffeting alone
Pleads in the howling storm, and pleads in vain.


    IV.

The field-fires smoke along the champaign drear,
    And drive before the north wind streaming down
    Bleak hill, and furrow dark, and fallow brown;
Few living things along the land appear;
The weary horse looks out, his mane astray,
    With anxious fetlock, and uneasy eye,
    And sees the market-carts go madly by
With sidelong drivers reckless of the way.


    V.

The sere beech-leaves, that trembled dry and red
    All the long Winter on the frosty bough,
    Or slept in quiet underneath the snow,
Fly off, like resurrections of the dead;
The homy ploughman, and his yoked ox,
    Wink at the icy blasts; and beldames bold,
    Stout, and red-hooded, flee before the cold;
And children's eyes are blinded by the shocks.


    VI.

You cannot hear the waters for the wind;
    The brook that foams, and falls, and bubbles by,
    Hath lost its voice — but ancient steeples sigh,
And belfries moan — and crazy ghosts, confined
In dark courts, weep, and shake the shuddering gates,
    And cry from points of windy pinnacles,
    Howl thro' the bars, and 'plain among the bells,
And shriek, and wail like voices of the Fates!


    VII.

And who is He, that down the mountain-side,
    Swift as a shadow flying from the sun,
    Between the wings of stormy Winds doth run,
With fierce blue eyes, and eyebrows knit with pride;
Though now and then I see sweet laughters play
    Upon his lips, like moments of bright heaven
    Thrown 'twixt the cruel blasts of morn and even,
And golden locks beneath his hood of gray?


    VIII.

Sometimes he turns him back to wave farewell
    To his pale Sire with icy beard and hair;
    Sometimes he sends before him thro' the air
A cry of welcome down a sunny dell;
And while the echoes are around him ringing,
    Sudden the angry wind breathes low and sweet,
    Young violets show their blue eyes at his feet,
And the wild lark is heard above him singing!

~~
Frederick Tennyson (1807-1898)
from Days and Hours, 1854

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Frederick Tennyson biography

Glyn Baker, Early Spring in Crowsheath Wood, March 2015.

CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.