The Spring and the Fall

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. At that site you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Laura Salas.

You can visit her here at Writing the World for Kids


(Sunlight and Shadow, Newbury Marshes, Massachusetts
by Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904, American artist)

“Love is a circle that doth restless move / In the same sweet eternity of love.” ~ Robert Herrick (1591-1674), the greatest of the English Cavalier poets

THE SPRING AND THE FALL

In the spring of the year, in the spring of the year,
I walked the road beside my dear.
The trees were black where the bark was wet.
I see them yet, in the spring of the year.
He broke me a bough of the blossoming peach
That was out of the way and hard to reach.

In the fall of the year, in the fall of the year,
I walked the road beside my dear.
The rooks went up with a raucous trill.
I hear them still, in the fall of the year.
He laughed at all I dared to praise,
And broke my heart, in little ways.

Year be springing or year be falling,
The bark will drip and the birds be calling.
There’s much that’s fine to see and hear
In the spring of a year, in the fall of a year.
’Tis not love’s going hurt my days,
But that it went in little ways.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), American poet

The Song of Songs

(Passion Flowers and Hummingbirds by Martin Johnson
Heade, 1819-1904, American artist)

One of the most beautiful lyric love poems in Western literature is The Song of Songs, also known as The Canticle of Canticles or The Song of Solomon. It is found in the Hebrew Bible and in the Christian Old Testament.

The poem is made up of some twenty-five distinct verses. “Scholars differ on the question of their possible interrelation and unity,"  write Amy and Leon Kass in their collection of readings on courting and marriage, Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar. “Although the Song of Songs contains no explicit divine or religious references, Jewish and Christian interpreters over the centuries have read the text theologically. For example, Jewish mystical readers see in the images of erotic longing the expression of the soul’s longing for God. . . . Christian tradition has interpreted the song as an allegory of the love of Christ for his bride, the Church, or as symbolizing the experience of God’s love in the individual human soul.”

The editors raise an interesting question, “whether and how the passionate, sensuous love of man and woman may be related, not merely symbolically, to the love for and from the divine.”

from THE SONG OF SONGS

Hark! my beloved!
Behold, here he comes
springing across the mountains,
leaping across the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young stag.
Here he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattices.
My beloved speaks; he says to me,
“Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come away!
For see, the winter is past,
the rains are over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of pruning the vines has come,
and the song of the dove is heard in our land.
The fig tree pours forth its figs,
and the vines, in bloom, give forth fragrance.
Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one,
and come away!”

Weather

(Sunlight and Shadow, Newbury Marshes, Massachusetts
by Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904, American painter)

We’ve just gone through a lot of weather here on the Eastern Seaboard. Hurricane Earl is gone now and all is peaceful again.

WEATHER

Dot a dot dot dot a dot dot
Spotting the windowpane.

Spack a spack speck flick a flack fleck
Freckling the windowpane.

A spatter a scatter a wet cat a clatter
A splatter a rumble outside.

Umbrella umbrella umbrella umbrella
Bumbershoot barrel of rain.

Slosh a galosh slosh a galosh
Slither and slather a glide

A puddle a jump a puddle a jump
A puddle a jump puddle splosh

A juddle a pump a luddle a dump
A pudmuddle jump in and slide!

~ Eve Merriam (1916-1992), American poet and playwright

The Sound of the Sea

(Approaching Thunderstorm near Bristol, Narragansett
Bay, R.I., 1859 by Martin Johnson Heade, 1819-1904,
American painter)

“Until I saw the sea / I did not know / a sea breathes in and out / upon a shore,” wrote the poet Lillian Moore (1909-2004).

THE SOUND OF THE SEA

The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain's side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul:
And inspirations that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet