Summer Rain / John Davidson

Summer Rain

The flowers with dust disgraced
     Droop in garth and plain;
But the summer tempests haste
     With lustral rain.

The banded vapour rolls,
     Shadowing hill and town;
Anon the thunder tolls,
     The showers come down.

Margents where the salt winds pass,
     The freshened sea-pinks fret;
The roses change to hippocras
     The heaven's pearly sweat;

And the flowers all shine and all the grass
     Like jewels newly set,
Sapphire bright and chrysolite,
     And emeralds dripping wet.

Like smoke from a happy hearth,
     Out of the meads and the bowers.
The spicy dust of the moistened earth
     And the rainy scent of the flowers
Translate to silence sweet the mirth
     Of the silvery ringing showers.

~~

John Davidson (1857-1909)
from The Last Ballad, and other poems, 1899

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

John Davidson biography

The Summer Rain / John Askham

The Summer Rain

The cloudy fountains are unsealed,
And barren hill, and thirsty field,
And drooping vale, and famished plain
Drink long, deep draughts of Summer rain.

The flowers rejoice, and upward hold
Their cups of ruby, pearl, and gold;
Each drop distilled to perfumes rare,
With incense loads the humid air.

The wood with sweet, soft music rings.
And a baptismal anthem sings;
On every leaf, and tree, and stem.
Sparkles a new-created gem.

The cornfields 'neath the blessing bow;
To their full height the rivers grow;
The willows by the brooklet's side
Lave their dank tresses in the tide —

Drink to their fill the secret springs,
As every stream due tribute brings,
Till the cool reservoirs below
With limpid treasures overflow.

In bye-way and in busy street,
Like pattering of children's feet,
With precious blessings in its train
Comes the refreshing Summer rain.

~~
John Askham (1825-1894)
from Descriptive Poems, 1866

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

John Askham biography

September 1913 / W.B. Yeats

September 1913

What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

~~
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
from Responsibilities, and other poems, 1914

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

William Butler Yeats biography

"September 1913" read for Canada the Unknown Country.

September Idyl / Arthur Symons

September Idyl: In the Hammock: Chameane. 

A sky of green and gold, tremulous, delicate,
Starred with pale blue, and bright with little voices; wind
Lifting the golden outer fringe, autumn has thinned;
A yellow leaf drops rustling, and another: wait,
The leaves begin to whisper, and the voices cease:
I hear the silence; but a voice flutters again,
A little, fluting voice, soft, piercing, as the rain;
I close my eyes, and all my body sways with peace.
Delicate, tremulous, seen under eyelids closed,
The sky of green and gold sways over me, and seems
To fill the languid soul with the desire of dreams;
But the sky fades, and only inner eyelids, rosed
With filtered sunlight falling, shadow as they pass
Not even dreams; until a trailing hand perceives,
Sudden, the earth again, in the crisp touch of leaves,
And the arresting slender fingers of the grass.

~~
Arthur Symons (1865-1945)
from Poems, 1902

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

Arthur Symons biography

The trees have never seemed so green / Robert Hillyer

from Days and Seasons

IX

The trees have never seemed so green
Since I remember,
As in these groves and gardens of September,
And yet already comes the chill
That bodes the world's last garden ill,
And in the shadow I have seen
A spectre,— even thine,
O Vandal, O November.
The wind leaps up with sudden screams
In gusts of chaff.
Two boys with blowing hair listen and laugh.
We hear the same wind, they and I,
Under the dark autumnal sky;
It blows strange music through their dreams.
Keenly it blows through mine,
Singing their epitaph.

~~

Robert Hillyer (1895-1961)

from The Five Books of Youth, 1920 

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

Robert Hillyer biography

Penny's Top 20 / August 2015

Penny's Top 20
The most-visited poems on  The Penny Blog in August 2015:

  1.  Autumn, Walter de la Mare
  2.  Bear Mountain Morning
  3.  Penny, or Penny's Hat, George J. Dance
  4.  She Sleeps Tight, Will Dockery
  5.  Esthetique du Mal, Wallace Stevens 
  6.  Morning on the Lièvres, Archibald Lampman
  7.  Garden, H.D.
  8.  The Summer Sea, Nathan Haskell Dole
  9.  Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?, William Shakespeare
10.  Twenty-old and Seven-wild, Annie Campbell Huestis

11.  In Summer Time, Paul Lawrence Dunbar
12.  Velardena Sunset, Grace Hazard Conkling
13.  In the Fields, Charlotte Mew
14.  The Soul of Summer, Edward Sapir
15.  Autumn, T.E. Hulme
16.  Spring Morning, A.A. Milne
17.  The Darkling Thrush, Thomas Hardy
18.  The Old Year, John Clare
19.  Defeat, Constance Woodrow
20.  Fall, Leaves, Fall, Emily Brontë


Source: Blogger, "Stats"

Doggerel, and other doggerel: new collection by George J. Dance

George J. Dance, proprietor of  The Penny Blog and the Penny's Poetry Pages wiki, is pleased to announce the publication of his first poetry collection, Doggerel, and other doggerel.

Doggerel contains roughly 50 short poems, written over 44 years (1972-2015). The book also contains translations of works by Tu Fu ("Spring Scene"), Arthur Rimbaud ("Romance Novel," "Sensation," "Vowels"), and Heinrich Heine ("Lorelei's Song").

Poems that can be sampled on  The Penny Blog include "Spring Again," "Round the Mercury," "Mars & Avril," "May," "Only the Lonely," "June," "Lucky Penny," "July," and "Light of Day."

Doggerel, and other doggerel is published by Lulu.com. For a substantial discount, you now have the option to order the book at Amazon.com as well.

Update, January 2025: Logos and other logoi, the companion volume to Doggerel and other doggerel, is now also on sale at Amazon.com.