top of page

Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Nov 23, 20222 min read

A Poem Welcoming Winter to North Arkansas in the Style of A. E. Housman


How about this? Enjoy the poem first. Then, read about the inspiration.


Welcoming Winter in North Arkansas

(In the style of A. E. Housman)


Ugliest of days, this season now

With torn brown leaves left on the bough,

But most the trees tortured and bare

Look like dead rabbits stripped of hair,


Or peacocks plucked of pride and feather,

And, really, now, what’s with this weather?

Yesterday was late Spring nice

Today, my birdbath’s solid ice!


What tomorrow holds, I cannot know.

It could be mist, dense fog, or snow.

Like woodland beasts in forests deep,

I wish I’d spend winters asleep.


Though it may be hard to believe, I had no intention of making this poem even similar to Housman's Loveliest of Trees. I had an idea that I might write a poem about the ugliness of the tree outside my window with its gnarled limbs bare except for a few straggling leaves that are full of holes and torn around the edges. I expected to keep my Nature poem short and song-like to stick with the themes of the poetry book I am working on now. However, I kept coming back to the "now" and "bough" rhyme, and finally thought, "Well, hell...," and I went and looked at Housman's poem. Of course, I am the type of person that, once I look at something good, I must try and imitate it. After all, something made his poem classic--And we all remember that great quote of Oscar Wilde's, " Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." We do tend to forget the second part, "...that mediocrity can pay greatness," but that would suggest that all imitations are done by those with mediocre talent. That cannot be true can it? Hmm...


Anyway, here is Housman's poem. See how mediocre you think my imitation compared to his greatness.


A Shropshire Lad 2: Loveliest of trees, the cherry now


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.


Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.


And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.



Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

bottom of page