Snowdrops in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery, 2022

Three poems this week! First up, Mr Wordsworth with ‘To a Snowdrop’. I find that I like Wordsworth more as the years go by, for his close observation and for the air of melancholy that often pervades his poems like the scent of jonquils (daffodils) mentioned here.

Lone Flower, hemmed in with snows and white as they
But hardier far, once more I see thee bend
Thy forehead, as if fearful to offend,
Like an unbidden guest. Though day by day,
Storms, sallying from the mountain-tops, waylay
The rising sun, and on the plains descend;
Yet art thou welcome, welcome as a friend
Whose zeal outruns his promise! Blue-eyed May
Shall soon behold this border thickly set
With bright jonquils, their odours lavishing
On the soft west-wind and his frolic peers;
Nor will I then thy modest grace forget,
Chaste Snowdrop, venturous harbinger of Spring,
And pensive monitor of fleeting years!

And how about this one by A.E Stallings? Goodness, what a dance of images, but not altogether very cheerful. This really reminds me of the snowdrops in our local cemetery.

Snowdrops
A.E. Stallings

Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund Hall

For E.M.

Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:
what news of the underground,
the weather in Hell?

Your toes are tickled
by the beards of the dead, their
slanted stones deckled

and foxed with lichen-
rings of shaggy galaxies.
In flocks you beckon

me to read shallow-
graven names on time-thumbed tomes.
Soon you’ll sallow, snow-

drop: now so new, yet
your hair’s already waxed white
from that oubliette

you hunkered in, torn
between last year and this; or
is it a tricorn

hat you hold instead
in green-gloved hands, as you stand
shaking your bowed head?

But we can’t finish up on such a Gothic note, so here is something much more cheerful, from Alfred Lord Tennyson no less. I suspect that it has cropped up on the blog before, but you can never have too much of a good thing. Welcome indeed, February Fair Maid’. You can feel the hope and the exuberance in these words, and we could all do with a bit of both, I’m sure.

Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid,
Ever as of old time,
Solitary firstling,
Coming in the cold time,
Prophet of the gay time,
Prophet of the May time,
Prophet of the roses,
Many, many welcomes,
February fair-maid!