Poem for January 2018: 'Song' by Aphra Behn

Song

by Aphra Behn

O Love! that stronger art than wine,

Pleasing delusion, witchery divine,

Wont to be prized above all wealth,

Disease that has more joys than health;

Though we blaspheme thee in our pain,

And of thy tyranny complain,

We are all bettered by thy reign.

      

What reason never can bestow

We to this useful passion owe;

Love wakes the dull from sluggish ease,

And learns a clown the art to please,

Humbles the vain, kindles the cold,

Makes misers free, and cowards bold;

’Tis he reforms the sot from drink,

And teaches airy fops to think.

When full brute appetite is fed,

And choked the glutton lies and dead,

Thou new spirits dost dispense

And ’finest the gross delights of sense:

Virtue’s unconquerable aid

That against Nature can persuade,

And makes a roving mind retire

Within the bounds of just desire;

Cheerer of age, youth’s kind unrest,

And half the heaven of the blest!

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180666

Aphra Behn, (14 December 1640? (baptismal date)–16 April 1689) was a British playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphra_Behn

British modernist author Virginia Woolf 1882-1943) paid tribute to her in A Room of One´s Own (1929): All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance.

Poem for December: 'The Oxen' by Thomas Hardy

 The Oxen

   By Thomas Hardy (1915;1917)

     Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
     “Now they are all on their knees,”

     An elder said as we sat in a flock

     By the embers in hearthside ease.

  We pictured the meek mild creatures where

     They dwelt in their strawy pen,

     Nor did it occur to one of us there

     To doubt they were kneeling then.

  
  So fair a fancy few would weave

     In these years! Yet, I feel,

     If someone said on Christmas Eve,

     “Come; see the oxen kneel,

     In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

     Our childhood used to know,”

     I should go with him in the gloom,

     Hoping it might be so.

  Horst Meller and Rudolf Sühnel, British and American classical poems,

      Georg Westermann Verlag 1966

      Annotations:

     barton – farmyard building, coomb – a valley between steep hills.

    Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English poet and novelist