April's featured poem

  

The Penny Blog's featured poem for April 2024:

April in the Hills, by Archibald Lampman

To-day the world is wide and fair

With sunny fields of lucid air,

And waters dancing everywhere;

    The snow is almost gone

[...]

(read by Mckenzie Nicole Greenwood)

https://gdancesbetty.blogspot.com/2014/04/april-in-hills-lampman.html

Penny's Top 20 / March 2024

                                  

Penny's Top 20

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

  1.  Skating, William Wordsworth

  2.  Winter Song, Elizabeth Tollett

  3.  March Sunset, Hilda Conkling

  4.  St. Patrick's Day, Jean Blewett

  5.  Winter Streams, Bliss Carman

  6.  Barley Feed, AE Reiff
  7.  March, Patrick Kavanagh

  8.  February, George J. Dance
  9.  August, Edmund Spenser

10.  March, Edwin Arnold

11.  Amarant, AE Reiff
12.  March: An ode, A.C. Swinburne 

13.  The World's Body, AE Reiff

14.  The Lake Isle of Innisfree, W.B. Yeats
15.  Woods in Winter, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

16.  i thank You God for most this amazing, E.E. Cummings

17.  The Spring of the Year, Allan Cunningham

18.  A Morning Song (for the First Day of Spring), Eleanor Farjeon
19.  Easter, Joyce Kilmer

20. Silk Diamond, George Sulzbach

Source: Blogger, "Stats"  

i thank You God for most this amazing / E.E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~~
E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)
from XAIPE: Seventy-one poems, 1950

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

E.E. Cummings biography

"i thank You God for most this amazing" read by Echoes of the Vacillating Heart.

Easter / Joyce Kilmer

Easter

The air is like a butterfly
        With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
        And sings.

~~
Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)
from Trees, and other poems, 1914

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Joyce Kilmer biography

Public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

March / Patrick Kavanagh

March

There's a wind blowing
Cold through the corridors,
A ghost-wind,
The flapping of defeated wings,
A hell-fantasy
From meadows damned
To eternal April

And listening, listening
To the wind
I hear
The throat-rattle of dying men,
From whose ears oozes
Foamy blood,
Throttled in a brothel.

I see brightly
In the wind vacancies
Saint Thomas Aquinas
And
Poetry blossoms
Excitingly
As the first flower of truth.

~~
Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
from Ploughman, and other poems, 1936

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Patrick Kavanagh biography

Peieris, photo of Kavanagh monument, Dublin, 2012. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons.

The Spring of the Year / Allan Cunningham

The Spring of the Year

Gone were but the winter cold,
    And gone were but the snow,
I could sleep in the wild woods
    Where primroses blow.

Cold's the snow at my head,
    And cold at my feet;
And the finger of death's at my e'en,
    Closing them to sleep.

Let none tell my father
    Or my mother so dear,–
I'll meet them both in heaven
    At the spring of the year.

~~
Allan Cunningham (1784-1842)
from The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900, 1919 

[Poem is in the public domain worldwide]

Allan Cunningham biography

Gordon Griffiths, Spring Snow, 2013. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

St. Patrick's Day / Jean Blewett

"St. Patrick's Day in the Morning" greeting card, 1906; Wikimedia Commons.

St. Patrick's Day

There’s an Isle, a green Isle, set in the sea,
    Here’s to the Saint that blessed it!
And here’s to the billows wild and free
    That for centuries have caressed it!

Here’s to the day when the men that roam
    Send longing eyes o’er the water!
Here’s to the land that still spells home
    To each loyal son and daughter!

Here’s to old Ireland — fair, I ween,
    With the blue skies stretched above her!
Here’s to her shamrock warm and green,
    And here’s to the hearts that love her!

~~
Jean Blewett (1872-1954)
from The Cornflower, and other poems, 1906

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

Jean Blewett biography

"St. Patrick's Day" read by Jean Aked. Courtesy jeanakedpoetry.