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 This
week the month of March begins, and so I thought that it would be
interesting to look at how poets have dealt with the subject of
wind.
Turns out to be a pretty rich lode, actually. Because March winds
are traditionally regarded as aggressive - "March comes in like
a lion, and goes out like a lamb" - I wanted to concentrate on that
sort of wind.
PERDITA
daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;
William Shakespeare: The Winters Tale
Act IV, Scene III, 118
John
Heywood (c.1497- c.1580) wrote A Dialogue Conteining the Number
in Effect of All the Proverbes in the English Tongue in 1549,
the earliest collection of English colloquial sayings. This includes
"An ill wind that bloweth no man to good". Heywood maintained his
Roman Catholicism, in spite of all the troubles: in 1564 he fled to
Belgium, where he died: he left his property in England in the hands
of his son-in-law, John Donne, the father of the poet.
 Ernest
Dowson (1867-1900) was one of the most gifted of a group of gifted
English poets and artists in the 1890s, who were called the Decadents.
Among this group were William Butler Yeats and Aubrey Beardsley.
In 1891 he met and fell in love with a waitress named Adelaide Foltinowicz,
who declined his offer of marriage: perhaps in part because she
was 12 years old at the time! In this year he also wrote his best-known
poem (other sources give 1896 as the publication date!), with the
catchy title Non
Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae, better known by
its refrain:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
The Latin title is a quotation from Horace's Odes, Book IV,
Ode 1, line 3, and is usually translated:
I am not what I was in the reign of the good Cinara.
In the third stanza of this poem is this couplet:
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng.
In
1894 Dowson's father died, his mother committed suicide, and he discovered
in himself the symptoms of tuberculosis. In 1896 he published Verses,
and in 1899, after his friend, R. H. Shepard, brought him back
from France where he had been discovered penniless, wretched, and
addicted to absinthe,
he published Decorations. These two books established his
reputation as a poet: in the words of Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia
of Literature, "His lyrics, marked by meticulous attention
to melody and cadence, are polished and often charming. Yeats acknowledged
that much of his own technical development was due to Dowson, whose
influence can also be traced in the early work of Rupert Brooke."
Another of his poems also has a title drawn from one of Horace's Odes
(Book I, Ode 4, line 15):
vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
(Life's brief span forbids us to enter on far-reaching hopes.)
which
contains the following stanza (it has nothing to do with our subject,
but I thought you'd like it, anyway! (Of course, The Editor of The
Mediadrome may take it out, in which case you'll never know!)
They are not long, the days of wine and roses;
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
 Edwin
Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) had New England right (it works
for Cambridge, England, too!):
Here
where the wind is always north-northeast
And children learn to walk on frozen toes
Robinson's
poetry attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who
gave him a sinecure at the U.S. Customs House in New York, which he
held from 1905 to 1909 — a precursor of the Poet Laureateship!
John Masefield (1878-1967) was a poet who loved the sea, and he
had been apprenticed aboard a windjammer that sailed around Cape
Horn. It is scarcely surprising that many of his poems speak of
the wind.
I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And:
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
Ezra
Pound (1885-1972) was aware of an anonymous English poem that dates
from about 1250 AD and begins:
Sumer
is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
and
penned the subsequent piece under the title Ancient Music:
Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Following
this, we have the old nursery rhyme, of course:
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will poor robin do then,
Poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn,
And keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing,
Poor thing!
George
Borrow (1803-1881) was not really a poet; but he was a linguist, and
is best known for his writings about the Gypsies, at first in England,
and later in Spain. In Lavengro, published in 1851, one of
his Gypsy characters says:
"There's night and day, brother, both sweet things;
sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things;
there's likewise a wind on the heath.
Life is very sweet, brother;
Who would wish to die?"
"There's the wind on the heath, brother;
if I could only feel that,
I would gladly live for ever."
Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
But
that was in Ode to the West Wind, of which he says, "thou breath
of Autumn's being", so that will have to wait for a few months! So
will Tennyson's
Sweet and low, sweet and low,
Wind of the western sea,
Low, low, breathe and blow,
Wind of the western sea!
 So,
anyway, you can see that the wind has been a subject that has inspired
poets over the centuries, and it still does. So what am I going to
select for this week? I think that I can't leave out John Masefield,
and I think it has to be Sea Fever. My second choice is W.
B. Yeats, A Prayer for my Daughter. The third selection is
by Shirley Gash, The Four Winds. At the time of writing, she
was 10 years old and lived in New Zealand. It is from a book I have
referred to before: Miracles:
Poems by children of the English-speaking world collected
by Richard Lewis, and published in 1966 by Simon and Schuster.
Sea
Fever
A
Prayer For My Daughter
The
Four Winds
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