Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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Another version of the poem uggests that “Friday’s child will never part”, meaning that they are loyal to their family and God, or that they will bloom where they are planted, never straying too far from home. educators registered for Poetry Possibility, a series of teacher-training workshops supporting the delivery of poetry in schools. For centuries, people have also tried to make predictions about the days of the week and how they relate to other important (and mundane) events.

Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’
So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran Now other metaphorical shapes appear. The sun is “God’s ball”: it also has a mysterious, special “fringe”. The metaphors are given more space and separation in the original, but there’s something to be said for the clustering in the shortened version. The sun after all is no simple object. No one can hold it steady. It can change shape radically as the eye perceives it at different times of day and through various kinds of weather.There’s a human narrator, but s/he bows out after three lines. Of the two crows, one has a single, though essential, line: “Where sall we gang and dine today?” The other, having reconnoitred the scene already and worked out the feeding strategy, replies in vivid, uncompromising detail. Anthropomorphism of this kind can be justified on the grounds that the invented bird-talk reflects real, observable bird behaviour regarding food, territory and judicious co-operation. This week’s poem is from a chapbook of intense yet rangy ecopoems, Watershed by Ruth Padel. Connecting the lively and varied angles of reflection on the subject of water, realism is the primary value, but it’s expressed without being wrung of its own magical dimension. The work has the characteristic balance of literary artistry, casual grace and scientific knowledge that distinguishes Padel’s work. That the term watershed itself denotes a physical phenomenon as well as being a popular colloquialism for a crucial moment is indicative. And in perhaps the most ridiculous poem of all, Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe writes about when is the best day to cut one’s nails, asking “ would bid yong folks beware on what day they par’d their nayles”?: Observation and detachment, sympathy and distaste, forge the inner conflict the poem confronts in its last lines. “I want them gone. I want to be absolved” is a line hard and glittering in its frankness, and in depicting the incompatibility of the two desires. This is followed by an immediate shift to the niggling practicalities – “Shall I give some coins to each of them?” It is at the level of finding an answer to this kind of question, moral and pragmatic, that the urge to action begins to die of exhaustion: “If it were only one, or just one day … ”

It’s just a short poem, but it has had a huge impact on parents through the generations, hoping to gain some insight into the future that beholds their precious child. The shared absence the poem records is not necessarily the result of death. Perhaps a child has left home? That form of bereavement, popularly tagged “empty nest syndrome”, might have been quietly set up in the earlier reference to the birds no longer singing, no longer coming to the window sill to be fed. In its very reticence to describe the nature of the loss, the poem shows us it was a radical one. Wisely, the last verse doesn’t seek or foresee “closure”, but observes simply that after more “such days”, the weather will change, perspective will be returned. And so the scene is almost set for words to flow again. Mist primarily looks inwards, into a room, and into the state of mind of a couple sitting by a view-less window. Unlike the trenchantly political The Autumn Outings, it denotes a private loss that includes being lost for words. Literary allusion takes on a typographical turn when the tadpoles in the water’s “sandy shallows” are seen as “hundreds / and hundreds of fat commas swept / from the compositor’s workbench …” The metaphor may connect the double life of the amphibian with the coexistence of type and text, print and language. It may also allude to one of the translations in Rowan Williams’s collection, In the Days of Caesar by Waldo Williams. The latter is a beautiful poem, intensely of and for Wales and the Welsh people, but suggesting a transformation that seems boundless. This is the last stanza: We are an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. Our sponsors and supporters include: Bookmark (formerly Forward Worldwide), the late Felix Dennis, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the John Ellerman Foundation. We're grateful to these organisations for supporting our work.

Naomi Foyle’s 10th chapbook, Importents, responds to a range of political catastrophes, local and global. The title poem finds its bearings in the UK around the time the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson, won the 2019 general election. For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”. In a modern version of the Days of the Week poem, Bruce Larkin pokes fun at the original Monday’s Child poem, pointing out different childhood ailments: Monday’s Child is Ill Prose poetry is a genre that particularly interests the poet-theologian Hannah Stone. Her passion for the genre is reflected in previous anthology publications, a chapter in the essay collection Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice and three unpublished pamphlets in preparation – among them, the enticingly named Twenty-Nine Volumes. National Poetry Day celebrations have got bigger and bigger each year, with more and more people joining in.

In the following poem from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 25, the author makes predictions about which days of the week are best for a couple to get married.His poem, Le Crapaud, an inverted sonnet, has its own sour fun with voice and tone, but Forshaw goes further, seizing the opportunity for a rich brew of English and American-English slang, with terms such as “gob”, “dekko”, “buggered off”, “old toady-boyo”, clobbering the ear with melancholy-merry gusto.

The possibilities of “knowing” and “thinking we know” expand towards knowing what someone else is thinking. In this case the speaker imagines the interlocutor’s continuing perplexity contains a sense of the magical. The indivisibility of “how things are” and “how we make them out to be” isn’t a bothersome philosophical problem, but, for the fresh explorer of reality, a power-attracting force, “a curse or some sort of spell”. An unexpected question mark at the end of stanza four indicates a gentle respect for the interlocutor: the insight into their thoughts and emotions isn’t simply presumed. This week’s poem, recalling the experience of wild camping on Dartmoor, was Sean Borodale’s response on 13 January to a local landowner case against the use of the moorland for this purpose. In a prose-note to the poem, Borodale wrote: “Wild camping is a frail, frayed remnant of deeper engagement, and the writing of this poem is an appeal against the belief that powerful landscapes are only for the wealthy, to be reserved for specific kinds of recreation – hunting, shooting – or as passing photo opportunities.” In a version of Monday’s Child published in Harper’s Weekly in 1887, it is Friday’s Child who is full of woe, not Wednesday’s Child. Send a poem to a friend or loved one. Or use #NationalPoetryDay to share any poems more widely. Find an event near youThe Hot Poets are inviting people to submit and share their haiku poetry through social media - eight themes over the next eight weeks, starting with REFUGE. 50 of the best contributions, each week, will be turned into films for COP '23. Schools Wednesday Addams from the Addams Family is a modern example of this archetype, and some children’s charities are inspired by this interpretation of “Wednesday’s Child”. Meanwhile, a protective circle is drawn round the beauty of the lover, sealing it from censure, shame, regret. In the transcendent moment of adoration, Eros may be a transgression, and the last four lines, part incantation, part blessing, command love not to “near / the sweetness here”. As at the beginning of the poem, the “lunar beauty” exemplifies only itself. The poem was probably written in April 1930. Among the subsequent small changes he records, Mendelson notes that in Auden’s lover Chester Kallman’s copy of Poems (1934), Auden revised the first line to “Your lunar beauty”, but that this change isn’t made in any further printings. The initials JC appear in Kallman’s copy: the identity of JC is unknown.