A much terser view of the subject than Andrew Marvell’s, with his green thoughts in a green shade, but it has its own charm and originality. The author is Ivor Gurney (1890-1937). This fascinating and tragic figure, composer as well as poet, was, like his better-known contemporaries Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, caught up in the First World War. Though he survived being gassed and shell-shocked in 1917 (and indeed saw his first collection, Severn & Somme, published that year), he suffered from a severe nervous breakdown in 1918 and from 1922 was confined to an asylum, where he continued his creative work. He died of tuberculosis.
He had studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams and his 5 Elizabethan Songs (1920) are highly regarded. The Elizabethan poets and Walt Whitman were among his inspirations. Lesley Duncan

THE GARDEN

The ordered curly and plain cabbages
Are all set out like school-children in rows;
In six short weeks shall these no longer please,
For with that ink-proud lady the rose, pleasure goes.

I cannot think what moved the poet men
So to write panegyrics of that foolish
Simpleton - while wild-rose as fresh again
Lives, and the drowsed cabbages keep soil coolish.

After yesterday’s spirited disquisition on money and avarice, here is the seventeenth-century Metaphysical master George Herbert in more familiar mode. This little poem on mortality communicates a tranquillity of belief that the clergyman poet did not always show. The spelling is original. -- Lesley Duncan

VERTUE

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and skie,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
They root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

George Herbert’s sonnet was written in the seventeenth century before the advent of paper money but it still may have a message for our materialistic times. Herbert (1593-1633) was a clergyman and one of the leading Metaphysical poets of that era. The spelling is original. Lesley Duncan

AVARICE

Money, thou bane of blisse and source of wo,
Whence com’st thou, that thou art so fresh and fine?
I know thy parentage is base and low, -
Man found thee poore and dirtie in a mine.

Surely thou didst so little contribute
To this great kingdome, which thou now hast got,
That he was fain, when thou wert destitute,
To digge thee out of thy dark cave and grot.

Then forcing thee, by fire he made thee bright:
Nay, thou hast got the face of man; for we
Have with our stamp and seal transferred our right;
Thou art the man, and man but drosse to thee.

Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich;
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.

After yesterday’s spirited disquisition on money and avarice, here is the seventeenth-century Metaphysical master George Herbert in more familiar mode. This little poem on mortality communicates a tranquillity of belief that the clergyman poet did not always show. The spelling is original. -- Lesley Duncan

VERTUE

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and skie,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
They root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie,
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Onely a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

Can anything novel be said about the nature of love, that most hackneyed but irresistible of subjects? John Mole’s little poem is as unpretentious as his name but makes the reader pause to consider his argument. The piece comes from New Poems 1976-77, a PEN anthology of Contemporary Poetry, edited by Howard Sergeant. -- Lesley Duncan


THREE LOVES

Immediate love given
retrieves no light
from the dark places;
its touch is too sudden
and without weight.

Love held back
between delicate faces
is darker still;
too much time passes
in each shy smile.

Only love intent
as light on the sea
finds a trick
which dazzles, the accident
of You and Me.

Robert Burns used the images of roses in some of his best-known songs (“O my luve’s like a red, red rose” . . . “A rosebud by my early walk” . . . “Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose”) and indeed wild roses spill from the hedgerows of rural Ayrshire at this time of year. Here they feature again in a little known composition from Burns’s last years. -- Lesley Duncan

Scottish Song

O bonie was yon rosy brier,
That blooms sae far frae haunt o’ man;
And bonie she, and ah, how dear!
It shaded frae the e’enin sun.

Yon rosebuds in the morning dew
How pure, amang the leaves sae green;
But purer was the lover’s vow
They witness’d in their shade yestreen.

All in its rude and prickly bower
That crimson rose how sweet and fair;
But love is far a sweeter flower
Amid life’s thorny path o’ care.

The pathless wild, and wimpling burn,
Wi’ Chloris in my arms, be mine;
And I the warld nor wish nor scorn,
Its joys and griefs alike resign.