Poetry Archive
An archive of my sporadic contributions to Poetry Friday. For the schedule of hosts, check here.
This week’s host is the amazing Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm, whose daily original poems are a source of great delight to me! (Oh my goodness—I posted this last night and now, early on the 17th, West Coast time, I have awakened to discover Amy’s Poetry Friday roundup today contains a beautiful gift for me—a poem! Most wonderful wonderful, out of all hooping. Thank you so much, Amy—what a gorgeous gift.)
(This archive is a work in progress. I’m still working backward through 2006.)
June 2006
“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney
“Portrait by a Neighbor” by Edna St. Vincent Millay—“Before she has her floor swept/ Or her dishes done,/ Any day you’ll find her/ A-sunning in the sun!”
“Patterns” by Amy Lowell (a poem I first encountered as a teen in Madeleine L’Engle’s Meet the Austins)
One for newborn Rilla: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
“Childhood” by Rilke
And while they’re not technically Poetry Friday contributions, I want to include these poems in my archive so I can find them easily: our family “Where I’m From” poems. Mine, Jane’s (age 11), and, in a special gift to me, my father’s.
August 2006
Jane’s pick: “I Stood Tiptoe upon a Little Hill” by Keats
September 2006
“The Author to Her Book”—Anne Bradstreet
“Ho Ro, My Nut-brown Maiden” (scroll way down)
“Moving” by Randall Jarrell—“Never again will Orion / Fall on my speller through the star /Taped on the broken window by my cot…”
January 2007
Rigs o’ Rye—a Scots ballad I quoted in Little House in the Highlands, a story-poem I dearly love. “This lad he was a gallant bold, / a brave young lad nineteen years old;/He’s made the hills and valleys roar,/ and the bonnie lassie, she’s gone with him…”
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”—a Keats poem we encountered in Swallows and Amazons
February 2007
On the Sonnet—Yes, it’s Keats again
“Oh happy living things!”—Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge
March 2007
“So the world woos”—one of my favorite poems: “Letters from a Father” by Mona van Duyn
April 2007
“A Green Cornfield”—Christina Rossetti
March 2007
Sisters—an original poem courtesy of wee Rilla
April 2007
Good Friday, 1613—“Riding Westward” by John Donne
“Thou little tricksy Puck”—my girls’ favorite poem, because it’s about their brother: Thomas Hood’s “A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Five Months”
June 2007
“Forests at the bottom of the sea”—Whitman’s “The World Below the Brine”
“That has made thee mine forever”—Bonnie Mary o’ Argyle
July 2007
“What is the grass?”—Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
“For my heart’s a boat in tow”—Loch Tay Boat Song, my favorite Scottish ballad
August 2007
“I wonder if the gardener knows”—Rachel Field’s “The Little Rose Tree”
September 2007
“The music in my heart I bore”—Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” and selections from his sister Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal of their tour in Scotland, which served as research for my Martha books
October 2007
“Let fall one by one”—Heaney’s “Clearances,” chosen on the heels of a “Tolland Man” quote from the previous day’s Helixes post
August 2008
“The water is wide”—another Scots ballad
October 2008
“Understanding”—the poem by Sara Teasdale; the prayer by St. Francis of Assisi
“We must love one another or die”—Auden’s “September 1, 1939”
April 2009
“Fortify your inner life”—some Seamus Heaney
May 2009
“Oh for a bee’s experience”—during the height of my honeybee obsession, a bee trail and some Emily Dickinson
August 2009
“The Triangle Factory Fire”—a Robert Pinsky poem
And not part of Poetry Friday, but related to the post above:
September 2009
“The Fairy Tales of Science”—a rambly post inspired by Ransome’s Winter Holiday, with only a snippet of “Locksley Hall”
November 2009:
“Like little mice”—“Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, plus bonus picture of Johnny Depp
January 2010
“We are not really at home”—from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, “The First Elegy”
October 2010:
Poetry Friday, we meet again—a reposting of my poem, “Lena, Waiting for the Mail”
November 2010:
“Spend all you have for loveliness”—one by Sara Teasdale; one by me
Sestina—an original poem written in 1993
The Huck Edition—an original poem, “Olympian Heights,” courtesy of my 22-month-old son