Monday, November 11, 2024

How Sleep the Brave / William Collins


Ode

How sleep the brave who sink to rest
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallow'd mold,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall awhile repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there!

~~
William Collins (1721-1759), 1746 
from Poems, 1898

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]


"How Sleep the Brave" read by Joshua David Robinson. Courtesy  Lincoln’sCottage .

Sunday, November 10, 2024

The Death of the Flowers / William Cullen Bryant


The Death Of The Flowers

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread.
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light, and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race, of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side:
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

~~
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
from Poems, 1848

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

William Cullen Bryant biography

Librivox, "The Death of the Flowers." Courtesy Poems Cafe.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

November / George J. Dance




Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Rain, November 1889.
Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
November

        dying land
            crying sky
                cold, cold tears

~~
George J. Dance

Creative Commons License
"November" by George J. Dance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Sunday, November 3, 2024

The Thrush / Edward Thomas


The Thrush

When Winter's ahead,
What can you read in November
That you read in April
When Winter's dead?

I hear the thrush, and I see
Him alone at the end of the lane
Near the bare poplar's tip,
Singing continuously.

Is it more that you know
Than that, even as in April,
So in November,
Winter is gone that must go?

Or is all your lore
Not to call November November,
And April April,
And Winter Winter — no more?

But I know the months all,
And their sweet names, April,
May and June and October,
As you call and call

I must remember
What died into April
And consider what will be born
Of a fair November;

And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not,

While you love what is kind,
What you can sing in
And love and forget in
All that's ahead and behind.

~~
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
from Poems, 1917.

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Edward Thomas biography

"The Thrush" read by B W Thornton.

See also: "On a Thrush Singing in Autumn," by Lewis Morris

Saturday, November 2, 2024

November's featured poem


>The Penny Blog's featured poem for November 2024:

For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon

[...]
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
[...]

(read by Laurence Fox)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2011/11/for-fallen-lawrence-binyon.html

Friday, November 1, 2024

Penny's Top 20 / October 2024

                                          

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in October 2024:


  1.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens
  2.  Skating, William Wordsworth
  3.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens
  4.  October, George J. Dance
  5.  On a Thrush Singing in Autumn, Lewis Morris
  6.  Autumn's Orchestra, Pauline Johnson
  7.  The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams
  8.  A Remembrance of Autumn, Adelaide Procter
  9.  Logos, George J. Dance
10.  Vowels, Arthur Rimbaud

11.  October, Louise Driscoll
12.  Sagacity, William Rose Benét
13.  October, Edwin Arnold 
14.  October, Dinah Maria Craik
15.  September, VizantOr*
16.  The March, J.C. Squire
17.  4 autumn American Haiku, Jack Kerouac
18.  The Splendor of the Days, Jean Blewett
19.  Mowing, Robert Frost
20. Autumn, Francis Ledwidge

Source: Blogger, "Stats"