ANOTHER Blog About Poetry

I know I post a lot about poetry. Just for fun I plugged poetry into that box up there in the left corner. Even I was a bit surprised at how many posts came up. (I can think of at least one that didn't, though.*)

But what the heck, it is National Poetry Month. It is the birthday of William Wordsworth. He is the author of one of my favorite poems......

"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."

I cannot read that poem nor think of daffodils without remembering the first time I saw a host of golden daffodils. It was in the mid 1970's driving through eastern Virginia. In my memory it was much like this picture - a field of daffodils with an old building and some woods beyond.
Naturalization was a big thing at that time - the buzz word for throwing gobs of bulbs out and then planting them wherever they landed. It was something I was keen to try. Could the field of daffies I saw be such a successful naturalization? I was enchanted. (But I never did get around to trying it myself.)

So many favorite poems I have blogged about. Here is one not mentioned before:

"I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,-- I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?"

Sudden Light by Dante Gabriel Rossetti


(* Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman, October 24, 2010)