A Poem a Day

From “A Poem a Day” (anthology of poems)

Editor Karen McCosker (Westfield Maine) in her Foreword makes these remarks after telling the reader about her father who made a trip to visit her in Athens Greece even though he hated to fly, and loathed being away from his business and hometown where he knew everyone and everyone recognized him. They were visiting the Acropolis on a hot, windless day amid a crowd of other tourists- she feared her father

“…might lose the psychological surefootedness that being in his own terrain gave him, want to turn back, go home” When suddenly he began to recite lines from a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay

…..Euclid alone/Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they/Who, though once only and then but far away/Have heard her massive sandal set on stone…..

She goes on to write

“Recalling what he knew oriented my father.  The poem gave him breathing space in the crowd and time to recover from the anxiety of feeling off balance. Hearing the words he had memorized helped him make his way because they suggested an association between the strange place and the familiar poem, gathering up the distance between Athens and his upstate New York home.”

And

“I hadn’t realized until that morning in Athens how a single poem, even a few lines learned by heart can transform the person who needs to hear those words at a particular time; how they can make what otherwise might be abandoned possible”

“Lately, at 3am. My insomnia in overdrive and a long road ahead, I call on poetry for the most dire, yet commonest of reasons: to convince me I am not alone, that there have been other victims of such extended after hours introspection, that someone somewhere is also trying to make sense of a life”.

Given the Present times in the USA (2017) and indeed globally here is a poem you might enjoy -after reading guess when it was written! (answer at the bottom of the page)

On the Times

Now is England all in fight;/Much people of conscience light;/ Many knights and little of might;/Many laws and little right;/Many acts of parliament/And few kept with true intent;/Little charity and desire to please/Many a veteran pennyless;/And many a wonderful deception/By unprudent and ill advice;/Great show and small wages;/many gentlemen and few pages (servants);/Wide gowns and large sleeves;/ prosperity and flagrant thieves;/Many boast about their clothes,/But well I know they are not short of oaths (curses)

NB. I have adjusted the some of the spelling

 

*The poem (Anonymous) was written circa 1450 AD just after the end of the Hundred Years War and just before the beginning of the Wars of the Roses