March / Annette Wynne

March

March is windy, March is wild,
Hurries like an eager child;
Puffing mouth and ruddy face,
Rushing in a windy race;
A breath or two he stops, and then
He's puffing madly off again.

March is windy, March is wild,
A rushing, blowing, puffing child.
And why does March go rushing so?
He's trying to catch spring, you know.

~~
Annette Wynne (1889-1952)

from For Days and Days: A year-round treasury of child verse, 1919

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

Annette Wynne biography

A.M. Mailick (1869-1946), Children running, ca. 1908 (detail). Wikimedia Commons.

Spring / Richard Chenevix Trench

Spring

Who was it that so lately said,
All pulses in thine heart were dead,

Old Earth, that now in festal robes
Appearest, as a bride new wed?

O wrapt so late in winding-sheet,
Thy winding-sheet, oh! where is fled?

Lo! 'tis an emerald carpet now,
Where the young monarch, Spring, may tread.

Dwight Wiliam Tryon (1849-1925),
Early Spring in New England, 1895.
Wikimedia Commons.

He comes, — and, a defeated king,
Old Winter, to the hills is fled.

The warm wind broke his frosty spear,
And loosed the helmet from his head;

And he weak showers of arrowy sleet
From his strongholds has vainly sped.

All that was sleeping is awake,
And all is living that was dead.

Who listens now, can hear the streams
Leap tinkling down their pebbly bed;

Or see them, from their fetters free,
Like silver snakes the meadows thread.

The joy, the life, the hope of earth,
They slept awhile, they were not dead:

Oh thou who say'st thy sere heart ne'er
With verdure can again be spread;

Oh thou who mournest them that sleep,
Low lying in an earthy bed;

Look out on this reviving world,
And be new hopes within thee bred.

~~

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1866)
from Poems, 1865

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Richard Chenevix Trench biography

"The Seasons" by Trench, read by Sonia for LibriVox. Courtesy Rhodoclassics.

("Spring" begins at 1:27.)

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.