“To think to know the country and not know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten thousand lizards out of snow!” Robert Frost, A Hillside Thaw
Although I admit to sometimes dreaming about warm, sunny places during our long Northern winters, I would not chose to trade my home locale with anyone—anywhere, anytime (except for an occasional week or two in New Mexico).
I truly wonder if friends who live in warm places ever experience springtime euphoria—that crazy, headlong, potentially mindless and blithery joy known as SPRING FEVER, when poetry floods one’s soul! Perhaps that euphoria is common in four season climates around the world. Certainly in the USA, where April has been designated as NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!
Anticipating April, while loving every remaining moment of tumultuous Wisconsin March, here are some snatches of poems from kindred souls—in addition to the above lines from one of my most beloved kindred spirit poets, Robert Frost. Also I’ll plug in some of my watercolor renderings. The marriage of a poem and a painting is called Ekphrasis.
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“The Skies can’t keep their secret!
They tell it to the Hills –
The hills just tell the Orchards –
And they – the Daffodils!” Emily Dickinson, #191
“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore . . . .”
William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innesfree
“Now as I was young and easy under the apple bough
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green . . . .”
Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill
“O April, full of breath, have pity on us!
Pale where the winter like a stone has been lifted away, we
emerge like yellow grass.
Be for a moment quiet, buffet us not, have pity on us,
Till the green come back into the vein, till the giddiness pass.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay, Northern April
These are only a whisper of the many poems and poets whom I read again and again—immersed in the introspections, nuances, innuendoes, and life metaphors gleaned from a sensitivity to the turning of the year. I believe that sensitivity is shared by most poetic four-season souls!
Margaret L. Been, Spring 2015