Today’s Treasures – Poetry

Poetry can be sad, beautiful, meaningful, moving, romantic, inspirational, thought-provoking or funny – and sometimes all of these.  Springtime has inspired many beautiful poems:

Wordsworth wrote about the daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Cicely Mary Barker painted the Apple Blossom Fairy in words and pictures:

Up in the tree we see you, blossom-babies,
All pink and white;
We think there must be fairies to protect you
From frost and blight,
Until, some windy day, in drifts of petals,
You take your flight.

And Robert Browning, living in Italy in 1845 and homesick for England wrote ‘Home thoughts from Abroad’:

Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England – now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows –
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Which reminds us what a lovely part of the world we live in – especially during Springtime. Children pick buttercups and daisies; celandines carpet woodlands, followed by a purple haze of bluebells that fill the air with their delicate fragrance; pink campion and stitchwort decorate shady pathways; early purple orchids, stand tall, like soldiers surveying their realm; springtime heralds a rainbow of colours that paint woodland glades in a myriad of hues.

Apple blossom shakes confetti petals on newly mown lawns, catkins tremble on hazel branches, and primroses and cowslips sheltering in the hedgerows, open their petals to the warm spring sunshine.

Published in the May edition of the Whitchurch Gossip