Henry Eliot, one of my Substack go-to gurus on reading matters, did a round-up of Easter poems last week.

Brilliant idea. I'm always aware that I spend too little time on poetry. I'm too impatient, I think. Poetry needs more effort than prose, and I generally feel I don't have enough time to grapple with it. At the same time, I feel I'm missing out.

So this was a lovely, bite-sized way to answer that need.

It wasn't one of the "set texts", but Eliot also included a reference to George Herbert’s Easter Wings, first published in 1633. It’s a "shape poem", written to be printed side-on, so that the lines form the shape of angels wings. Who knew?



Some of the poems definitely had me diving down rabbit holes, so here, for safe-keeping (because that's what Book Notes are there for) are the results of those burrowings:

MAUNDY THURSDAY

We started with the opening of Dante's 1321 epic, The Divine Comedy. Which begins on Maundy Thursday. Did you know that? Yes? I didn't. Sometimes my ignorance astonishes me.

One day, one day, I will tackle this in its entirety. When I do, this capacious site will be the place to go.

In the meantime, I read the opening section (Canto 1) -- the bit that begins, "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost..." -- at least four times.

-- Once with the Eliot-recommended version by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (which many still really rate, although for a look at other translations, see here).

-- Then with the original Italian. You can listen along here. I wouldn't be able to tackle the Italian totally unaided, but I was actually surprised by how accessible it is, given its vintage.


From the Italian version

-- Then with the parallel text that's here (this is the Temple Classics version, edited by Israel Gollancz and published in 1900, but I'm not sure whose translation it is).

-- And finally, with this recording in English by Vincent Di Stefano (whose translation it is, as well, I think). I really liked this version. Atmospheric sound effects, but not overdone; a good voice; and an easily comprehensible translation.

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GOOD FRIDAY

I was slightly disconcerted to find that Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward, by John Donne (1613), gave me more trouble, linguistically, than Dante's Italian...

Fortunately, there are people to help: Oliver Tearle, for example, or this helpful site that gives you a version in simplified English... I'm not proud...

But we also had Thomas Hardy's Unkept Good Fridays (1927), which turned out to be my favourite poem of the weekend. I was moved by its reminder of all the unnamed and unremembered injustices in the world, with which the Big Death of Good Friday stands in eternal solidarity:

There are many more Good Fridays
Than this, if we but knew
The names, and could relate them,
Of men whom rulers slew
For their goodwill, and date them
As runs the twelvemonth through ...


Ragusa, January

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EASTER SATURDAY

Easter Even, by Christina Rossetti (1862), is a beautiful expression of quiescence:

There's nothing more that they can do
For all their rage and boast...

There's nothing more that they can do
For all their passionate care...

The first half ends with a warning of frustration for the evil-doers and a promise of hope for the faithful. Wrong will be righted. But for the moment, we wait...

Loveliest of Trees, by A. E. Housman (1896), is short enough to be quoted in full:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

One of the oddest things about living in New Zealand, I found, wasn't celebrating Christmas in the summer (that was wonderful: Christmas in the sun!), but rather celebrating Easter in the autumn...


Our NZ cherry, blossoming in November...

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EASTER SUNDAY

Easter, by George Herbert (1633), was nice and easy. Just happily celebratory:

... The Sunne arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th' East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With Thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.


The Easter Sunday sun about to rise in Kuching yesterday

Easter Day, by Oscar Wilde (1881), was interesting for the lovely contrast it offers between the pomp and exaggerated grandeur we project onto our religious figures and the simplicity of Christ himself:

... My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
"Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise My feet, and drink wine salt with tears."

And Wilde has been back on my agenda since our sojourn in Sicily...

Easter, by Joyce Kilmer (1914), is brief and simple. This is it, in its entirety:

The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings.

Which all goes to show you don't need to get all long and complicated to be effective...



This little poem is doubly poignant when you read Kilmer's bio. He was a Latin teacher before he enlisted in the US Army in 1917. He is noted for his war poetry, and also for his courage in action. He was killed in July 1918 by an enemy sniper, and is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery, Fere-en-Tardenois, France.


Joyce Kilmer

Easter, 1916, by W.B. Yeats (1916), was slightly harder work. And yet there are lines from this poem that we all know: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." But, with a little bit of guidance, it was easy to gauge Yeats's anguished, ambivalent response to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Ireland, and Britain's swift and brutal response. "'I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me,' Yeats said, months later..." And he moves us in turn.

And, finally, a simple but very resonant one. Christmas is Really for the Children, by Steve Turner (2003):

Christmas is really
for the children ...

Easter is not really
for the children
unless accompanied by
a cream filled egg.
It has whips, blood, nails,
a spear and allegations
of body snatching.
It involves politics, God
and the sins of the world.
It is not good for people
of a nervous disposition ...

I didn't know Steve Turner, but I'm certainly now interested.

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All in all, I've enjoyed this little excursion into the realms of poetry, and feel inspired to venture further. We'll see how that goes...