School / Winifred Welles

School

His seat was by a window. So he dreamed.
How could he study while the sunlight gleamed
In small, sweet shapes, like wild things tame enough
To dart to him and touch his hands for love?
While there were profiles carved in every cloud
To mark as grim or ludicrous or proud,
And agile shadowings to writhe and crawl
Like ghostly spiders up and down the wall,
He could not help but turn their way to look.
His eyes, that would not follow down his book
The muddy trudgings of deliberate words,
Reflected blue and silver flights of birds.
You would not think there was so much to trace
Of wonderment on just a window space.
But once, when a frail scrap of paper moon
Enchanted him from ten o'clock, till noon,
They moved him to the middle of the room.
He learned his lesson then for very gloom,
Until, came glowing to a nearby chair,
A little girl with sunset in her hair.
His soul recolored. The forlorn dreams came
To warm themselves once more at this new flame.
He pushed aside the dusty Greek. He had
A different way to read the Iliad.
While through cold ashes others groped to learn,
He lit the towers of Troy and saw them burn.

~~
Winifred Welles (1893-1939)
from The Hesitant Heart, 1919

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

Winifred Welles biography

 "School" read by A stranger to a stranger.

The School Boy / William Blake

The School Boy

I love to rise in a summer morn, 
    When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
    And the skylark sings with me:
    O what sweet company!

But to go to school in a summer morn,-
    O! It drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
    The little ones spend the day
    In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
    And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
    Nor sit in learning's bower,
    Worn through with dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy
    Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
    But droop his tender wing,
    And forget his youthful spring!

O father and mother if buds are nipped,
    And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
    Of their joy in the springing day,
    By sorrow and care's dismay,-

How shall the summer arise in joy,
    Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
    Or bless the mellowing year,
    When the blasts of winter appear?

~~
William Blake (1757-1827)
from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

William Blake biography

"The School Boy" courtesy Bruce Wall / Poetry Refit.

September's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured  poem for September 2026:

The Names, by Billy Collins

[...]

I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,

Then Baxter and Calabro,

Davis and Eberling, names falling into place

As droplets fell through the dark

[...]

(read by Billy Collins)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-names-billy-collins.html

Penny's Top 20 / August 2026

   

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in August 2026:

  1.  Afterglow, George J. Dance

  2.  4 poems, Tom Hendricks

  3.  In Memory of a Happy Day in February, Anne Brontë 

  4.  Bus Ride on a Summer Night, George J. Dance

  5.  August, Annette Wynne

  6.  Poem for Kathy, Will Dockery

  7.  Morning of My Life, Will Dockery

  8.  On Mulberry Drive, Will Dockery

  9.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens

10.  August, Edmund Gosse

11.  Love-in-Idleness, Jane G. Austin

12.  "The Orient, Half Morocco, 8vo", Ruth Comfort Mitchell

13.  A Summer Night, Robert Hillyer

14.  The Upstairs Room, Weldon Kees

15.  Tired of Waiting, Will Dockery

16.  At the Gates of Dawn, George J. Dance

17.  Summer, Richard Chenevix Trench

18.  In August, Ethelwyn Wetherald

19.  Silk Diamond, George Sulzbach

20. Ode to Sport, Pierre de Coubertin

Source: Blogger, "Stats" 

Summer / Richard Chenevix Trench

Thomas Sidney Cooper (1803-1902), Heat Showers in August, 1857. Wikimedia Commons.

from The Seasons

Summer

Now seems all nature to conspire,
As to dissolve the world in fire,

Which dies among its odorous sweets,
A Phoenix on its funeral pyre.

Simoom breathes hotly from the waste,
The green earth quits its green attire;

Floats o'er the plain the liquid heat,
Cheating the traveller's fond desire —

Illusion fair of lake and stream,
Receding as he draweth nigher.

Ice is more precious now than gold,
Snow more than silver men desire.

'Tis far to seek unfailing wells
For tender maid or agèd sire;

Men know the worth of water now,
And learn to prize God's blessing higher;

The shallow pools have disappeared,
Caked into iron is the mire.

Through clouds of dust the crimson sun
Glares on the earth in lurid ire;

The parchèd earth with thirsty lips
Is gasping, ready to expire.

Oh happy, who by liquid streams
In shady gardens can retire,

Where murmuring falls and whispering trees
Sweet slumber to invite conspire;

Or where he may deceive the time
With volume sage, or pensive lyre.

~~

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.

("Summer" begins at 2:51.)

In August / Ethelwyn Wetherald

In August

Now when the grove is stifled to the core,
    And all the parchèd grass is summer-killed,
    I think of vehement March, and how she filled
These arid roadsides with a murmurous pour
Of rushing streams from an exhaustless store.
    This breathless air to tropic slumber stilled,
    Recalls those early passionate winds that thrilled
The spirit, blending with the water’s roar.

Just as in rich and dusty-leavèd age
    The soul goes back to brood on swelling buds
    Of hope, desire, and dream, in childhood's clime,
So I turn backward to the spring-lit page,
    And hear with freshening heart the deep-voiced floods,
    That to the winds give their melodious rhyme.

~~
Ethelwyn Wetherald (1857-1940)
from Tangled in Stars, 1902

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

Patrick Roper, Dry fields during heatwave, August 2018. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

See also: "A March Night" by Ethelwyn Wetherald

Ethelwyn Wetherald biography

"The Orient, Half Morocco, 8vo" / Ruth Comfort Mitchell

"The Orient, Half Morocco, 8v0"

Courtesy Internet Archive.

She bought a book, once, with the butter money —

A wild, undreamed of, reckless thing to do!
(So much to manage for the winter schooling;
That split in Hannah Mary's Sunday shoe. . . .)

The cover bravely flaunted gold and scarlet,—
Gave hint and promise of the hidden feast,
Fine-grained and limber, sleek beneath the fingers,
Frankly symbolic of the gorgeous east.

She wrapt it up and laid it in the bureau;
She knew she wouldn't get to read it soon,—
Not while she had the harvesters to cook for,
Tho' maybe ... of a Sunday afternoon. . . .

How often, then, her thoughts went winging to it,
Thro' all the cumbered days she had to wait,
Till, in a scanty hour of hard-won leisure,
She entered shyly thro' the latticed gate:

Dim harims . . . sultans . . . yashmaks . . . cloudy nargillehs,—
Strange sounding words from far-off story lands;
The farm-house fades; the Wishing Carpet bears her
To Kairowan, across the golden sands.

Since then, thro' all the somber woof of living,
For her the mystic Orient weaves its spells;
Faintly, at dawn, down thro' the dairy pasture,
She seems to hear the chime of temple bells.

Now she can see across the piles of mending —
(There is a window in her prison tower!)
Beyond the baking and the baby tending 

The Mueddin calls across the sunset hour.

When the fierce August sun in grudging mercy,
Threatening worse torments for the morrow, sets,
The battered barns, the tanks, the gilded hay cocks,
Are distant domes and towers and minarets.

The sullen farmer, summoned in to supper,
Weary and silent as he slouches down,
To her fresh eyes becomes a mighty Caliph
Whose minions tremble at his slightest frown.

Subtlest of all — of course they do not mark it —
She in herself is gently touched with grace —
The swifter carriage of her toil-warped figure,
The ghost of girlhood in her furrowed face.

Sometimes they have to call her twice, and sharply;
(They see her, and they think that she is there!)
Thro' all the homely clamor, she is hearing
Oh, very near and clear, The Call to Prayer!

~~
Ruth Comfort Mitchell (1882-1954)
from The Night Court, and other verse, 1916

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

Ruth Comfort Mitchell biography