The Daily Poem

Today’s poem may be one of the most poem-y poems Nash ever wrote. Happy reading.

In today’s poem Berry draws King Lear into his sabbath reflections. Happy reading.

Today’s poem typifies the earthy clarity that Welsh poet R. S. Thomas perfected in his verse. Happy reading.

Today’s poem traveled across many years and iterations to finally end up on the tongue of Samwise Gamgee in The Fellowship of the Ring. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is both metrical marvel and moving memorial. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a classical example of Frost’s virtuosity in crafting solid figures–here trees, climbing, etc.–that stubbornly defy allegorizing, but that simultaneously seem effortlessly to point beyond themselves. Happy reading.

Today’s poem couples a vanished past with a timeless present. Happy reading.

My old knee injury usually alerts me to changes in the weather, but in today’s poem Kooser offers a litany of other indicators. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is a tribute to the seasonal liftings-of-the-veil that reveal to us the beauty undergirding the world. Happy reading.

In today’s poem: the dignity of old age, and Charles Dodgson as the Victorian Weird Al. Happy reading.

John Donne muses on the ineffability of a chaste love and devises a brilliant (or, at any rate, novel) scheme for reuniting with his loved one in the next life. Happy reading.

Tolkien was no believer in the power of geo-political solutions to better the state of man, convinced that his duty was to fight “the long defeat” while awaiting God’s miraculous and unlooked-for deliverance–eucatastrophe. Though he would not publish the Lord of the Rings for another twenty years, this 1931 poem shows much of that thinking was already well-formed. Happy reading.

Emerson spent a lot of time observing the natural world. In today’s poem, he couples that pastime with an art form that specializes in human nature. Happy reading.

In today’s poem, a young Geoffrey Hill is looking for a story to believe in. Happy reading.

Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In...

In today’s poem, Shakespeare puts the theatre in political theater via a candid moment with the future King Henry V in Henry IV pt. 1, Act 1, Scene 2. Happy reading!

Today’s poem is a short meditation on grief made enduringly-famous after Orlando Gibbons set it to music. You can hear an arrangement of that piece here. Happy reading.

Today’s poem goes out to 6-year-od girls and their dads. Happy reading!

In today’s poem, a young Tennyson begins the long wrestling with grief.

Today’s poem may or may not be based on actual events. Happy reading!

In the latter years of his career and life, Donald Hall became something of an expert on growing old (his essay collections Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety are a breathtaking dissertation on the subject), and in today’s poem we get a glimpse of his early apprenticeship in the art. Happy reading.

In today’s poem, better is a dinner of herbs where love and memory are, than great riches. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is channeling Anne Shirley in the autumn of her years. Happy reading.

Today’s poem takes full advantage of the pantoum form’s naturally-contemplative structure–the repeating lines carrying us back and forth between past, present, and an undetermined future. Happy reading.

In today’s poem, Kenyon wrestles with the Solomonic thesis that “the end of a thing is better than its beginning.” Happy reading.

Noisy upstairs neighbors have been consternating mankind for as long as second-floors have existed. The all-too-familiar phenomenon has inspired novels, movies, Tom Waits songs, and even a poem or two–like today’s. Happy reading.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously argued that it is impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat. Dickinson, on the other hand, claims to know what caterpillars care (or don’t care) about. Happy reading.

Today’s poem is the first half of Randall Jarrell’s reverie about his Los Angeles childhood–and one of the most effortless examples of terza rima in all of English poetry.

Today’s poem is the satirical saga of an anachronistic naval battle. Heave ho and happy reading!

Nothing feels better and hurts worse than nostalgia. Happy reading.

Today’s brief poem goes out to teachers everywhere as they return to work. Good luck and happy reading.

“Poet Seamus Heaney described Holub’s writing as ‘a laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art.’ In 1988 poet Ted Hughes called Holub ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.’”

“To die, to sleep.” Sometimes the space between the two seems as slight as that intervening comma. Happy reading.

I might say today’s poem is all subtext–if it weren’t for all the text. Ambiguous praise, sincere romantic angst, just the right amount of bitter wit: this sonnet has it all. Happy reading.

This special, live edition of The Daily Poem was recorded at the Close Reads 10th Anniversary celebration last weekend in Concord, NC. Happy reading!

Best known as the author of The Yearling and Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings enjoyed a long side-hustle as an occasional poet. Happy reading.

Today’s poem comes from Guite’s excellent collection, Sounding the Seasons (now in a new edition with over 100 sonnets!). Blessed feast and happy reading.

Hayes has said he longs for a language that can circumvent idea and communicate pure emotion—in today’s poem that quest is dramatized in a powerful way. Happy reading.

Happy tenth birthday to the Close Reads podcast, and happy reading!

Today’s poem is one of “promises kept, and / promises / still to keep.” Happy reading.

Today’s poem looks forward to a long and prosperous “reign.” Happy reading.

This week’s poems are arranged around the themes of retrospection and anniversaries in honor of the Close Reads Podcast celebrating its tenth year. Today, we have Rhina Espaillat turning over rich soil. Happy reading!