It’s National Poetry Month Again! If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 13th annual round-up of daily doses of verse! If you are new, here’s the scoop. Every day of the month I will feature poets and their poems. I aim to be as broad and inclusive as possible in style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices.
I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too. As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims. Yours may be different. But I am open to—eager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers. I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts. I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff. Please feel free to turn me on to some.
Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your own best stuff be it personal, political, or polemical. I don’t and can’t promise to use everything. E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.
Probably the best known April Fools Day poem for adults was written by the leading English writer G.K. Chesterton, a lay theologian, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, critic, and Christian apologist. A self-described orthodox Christian, he composed this poem, rife with the irony and paradox for which he was best known, shortly before abandoning High Church Anglicanism for Catholicism. He was born on May 29,1874 and died on June 14, 1936.
The Aristocrat
The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What’sitsname (it isn’t far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t brag himself.
O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack
your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What’sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that’s played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn’t keep his word.
—G.K. Chesterton
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