September's featured poem

The Penny Blog's featured poem for September 2025:

The Dwarf, by Wallace Stevens

Now it is September and the web is woven.

The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,

The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind

[...]

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2010/01/dwarf-wallace-stevens.html

Penny's Top 20 / August 2025

     

Penny's Top 20

The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in August 2025:

  1.   A Song to Mithras, Rudyard Kipling

  2.  Large Red Man Reading, Wallace Stevens

  3.  Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas

  4.  Mid-August, Duncan Campbell Scott

  5.  As August Comes, Clinton Scollard

  6.  The Landscape, William Shenstone

  7.  August, Lizette Woodworth Reese

  8.  A Song in August, Francis Sherman

  9.  August, 1918, Maurice Baring

10.  From Piccadilly in August, John Freeman

11.   The Winter's Walk, John Hawkesworth

12.  Vowels, Arthur Rimbaud

13.  Tardy Spring, George Meredith

14.  The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

15.  Angel Standing in the Sun, AE Reiff

16.  Mnemosyne, Trumbull Stickney

17.  The Bright Extensive Will, AE Reiff

18.  Morning in August, James Herbert Morse

19.  Ganesha Girl on Rankin, Will Dockery

20. August, Folgore de San Geminiano

Source: Blogger, "Stats" 

August / Folgore de San Geminiano

from Of the Months

August

For August, be your dwelling thirty towers
    Within an Alpine valley mountainous,
    Where never the sea-wind may vex your house,
But clear life separate, like a star, be yours.
There horses shall wait saddled at all hours,
    That ye may mount at morning or at eve:
    On each hand either ridge ye shall perceive,
A mile apart, which soon a good beast scours.
So alway, drawing homewards, ye shall tread
    Your valley parted by a rivulet
        Which day and night shall flow sedate and smooth.
There all through noon ye may possess the shade,
    And there your open purses shall entreat
        The best of Tuscan cheer to feed your youth.

~~
Folgore da San Geminiano (?1270-1332?)
translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)
from The Early Italian Poets, 1861

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

[September]

Folgore da San Geminiano biography
Dante Gabriel Rossetti biography

Limbourg brothers, from Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 

ca. 1402-1416 (detail), Wikimedia Commons.

Morning in August / James Herbert Morse

Morning in August

Fragrant odor of the dawn,
Sweet incense to waking souls,
While the fresh dew spreads the lawn,
And your spirit day controls,
Let me, underneath this tree
Standing, be possessed of thee.

See the robin in a dream
Poising on a grassy bank;
Hear, beneath, the singing stream,
In a meadow dewy-dank;
See the mother-pearly tips
Of the pink-white sorrel's lips.

Now adown the hilly slope
Like a father steps the sun,
And the pretty blossoms ope
Wide their eyelids, one by one;
And they seem to stir and say
Lisped prayers unto the day.

He who sleeps at dawn is dead
To more wonders than he knows;
Let me forth and early tread
Where the sunlit water flows,
Where the elm at dewy dawn
Flings his shadow down the lawn.

Let me feel, and yet be still;
Let me take, and yet not give;
Drink, till I have drunk my fill;
Then anew go forth and live.
Man has little honeyed pleasure
Unmixed in his manhood's measure.

~~
James Herbert Morse (1841-1923)
from Summer Haven Songs, 1886

James Herbert Morse biography

Victoria Lee Croasdell, August Dawn in North Dakota, 2013.

CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Fern Hill / Dylan Thomas

Fern HIll

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
         Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
         Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
         Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
         And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
         And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
         Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
         The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
         On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
         I ran my heedless ways,
    My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
         Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
         Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
         Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

~~
Dylan Thomas (1914-1954)
from Deaths and Entrances, 1946

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

Dylan Thomas biography 

"Fern Hill" read by Richard Burton. Courtesy Richard Burton--topic.

From Piccadilly in August / John Freeman

From Piccadilly in August

Now the trees rest: the moon hath taught them sleep.
Like drowsy wings of bats are all their leaves,
Clinging together. Girls at ease who fold
Fair hands upon white necks and thro' dusk fields
Walk all content,— of them the trees have taken
Their way of evening rest; the yellow moon
With her pale gold hath lit their dreams that lisp
On the wind's murmurous lips.
                                                          And low beyond
Burn those bright lamps beneath the moon more bright,
Lamps that but flash and sparkle and light not
The inward eye and musing thought, nor reach
Where, poplar-like, that tall-built campanile
Lifts to the neighbouring moon her head and feels
The pale gold like an ocean laving her.

~~
John Freeman (1880-1929)
from Fifty Poems, 1911

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

John Freeman biography

Arthur Hacker (1858-1919), A Wet Night at Piccadilly Circus, 1910. Wikimedia Commons.

Mid-August / Duncan Campbell Scott

Mid-August

From the upland hidden,
    Where the hill is sunny
    Tawny like pure honey
    In the August heat, 

Memories float unbidden
    Where the thicket serries
    Fragrant with ripe berries
    And the milk-weed sweet.

Like a prayer-mat holy
    Are the patterned mosses
    Which the twin-flower crosses
    With her flowerless vine;
In fragile melancholy
    The pallid ghost flowers hover
    As if to guard and cover
    The shadow of a shrine.

Where the pine-linnet lingered
    The pale water searches,
    The roots of gleaming birches
    Draw silver from the lake;
The ripples, liquid-fingered,
    Plucking the root-layers,
    Fairy like lute players
    Lulling music make.

O to lie here brooding
    Where the pine-tree column
    Rises dark and solemn
    To the airy lair,
Where, the day eluding,
    Night is couched dream laden,
    Like a deep witch-maiden
    Hidden in her hair.

In filmy evanescence
    Wraithlike scents assemble,
    Then dissolve and tremble
    A little until they die;
Spirits of the florescence
    Where the bees searched and tarried
    Till the blossoms all were married
    In the days before July.

Light has lost its splendour,
    Light refined and sifted,
    Cool light and dream drifted
    Ventures even where,
(Seeping silver tender)
    In the dim recesses,
    Trembling mid her tresses,
    Hides the maiden hair.

Covered with the shy-light,
    Filling in the hushes,
    Slide the tawny thrushes
    Calling to their broods,
Hoarding till the twilight
    The song that made for noon-days
    Of the amorous June days
    Preludes and interludes.

The joy that I am feeling
    Is there something in it
    Unlike the warble the linnet
    Phrases and intones?
Or is a like thought stealing
    With a rapture fine, free
    Through the happy pine tree
    Ripening her cones?

In some high existence
    In another planet
    Where their poets cannot
    Know our birds and flowers,
Does the same persistence
    Give the dreams they issue
    Something like the tissue
    Of these dreams of ours?

O to lie athinking —
    Moods and whims! I fancy
    Only necromancy
    Could the web unroll,
Only somehow linking
    Beauties that meet and mingle
    In this quiet dingle
    With the beauty of the whole.

~~
Duncan Campbell Scott (1862-1947)
from Lundy's Lane, and other poems, 1916

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

Duncan Campbell Scott biography

Jared Rover, Cabot Trail Nova Scotia, August 2017. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.