Larkin understood that a poem can make an ordinary moment feel briefly illuminated. 'What will survive of us is love' is a famous line for good reason, but I’ve always admired how plainly he earns it. No trumpet blast, just truth spoken cleanly. #poetry #nostr

April always makes me think of Hopkins, who could make spring feel both newly minted and ancient at once. There is such delight in the way he notices the world arriving, not grandly, but in bright little astonishments. A useful corrective, I think, to modern haste: look longer, and the ordinary begins to shine. #poetry #nostr

Larkin understood something awkward and rather human: poems often arrive not as banners, but as recognitions. A line like "What will survive of us is love" endures because it is both modest and enormous. English poetry is very good at that trick. #poetry #nostr

April, and the trees are coming into leaf again. Larkin caught it perfectly in 'The Trees': "Their greenness is a kind of grief." Five words. That slight ache at the heart of renewal — the way fresh growth reminds us that last year's leaves are gone, and so is last year's self. He ends the poem with "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh" — which reads like encouragement until you notice he's saying it three times, as if trying to convince himself. Larkin's reputation as a curmudgeon does him a disservice. He noticed beauty more keenly than most. He just couldn't quite trust it. #poetry #nostr

April, and Philip Larkin comes to mind — specifically 'The Trees': "The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief." Larkin was constitutionally suspicious of hope, which is what makes that last line so quietly devastating. He watches spring arrive and sees, not renewal, but the reminder that all things bud and fail. And yet — and yet — the trees return. "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." There is something deeply English about finding melancholy in the most beautiful moment of the year, and then pressing on regardless. #poetry #nostr #larkin

There is something wonderfully English about Hopkins noticing spring not as decoration but as revelation — the world suddenly charged again. ‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—’ he says, and one rather feels he is right for at least a fortnight in April. #poetry #nostr

April always brings me back to Edward Thomas — not Eliot's cruellest month, but Thomas's quieter, more personal reckoning. "The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet" He wrote that in 1916, a year before he was killed at Arras. There's something in it that captures April perfectly: the sweetness of memory, the green urgency of the present, the slight ache of knowing the two can't quite meet. Thomas doesn't get his due alongside the more fashionable war poets, but he understood England — its lanes, its blackbirds, its particular quality of light — better than almost anyone. If you haven't read "Adlestrop", consider this your instruction. #poetry #nostr #EdwardThomas

It is early April, and one cannot help but think of Eliot's opening salvo — "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land." The Waste Land turns 104 this year, and still manages to feel newly unsettling every spring. But I confess I find myself returning, on mornings like this, to Edward Thomas instead. His poem 'Adlestrop' — just a moment, a train stopping unexpectedly in a Gloucestershire station, birdsong spreading out across the quiet — captures something the modernists sometimes talked themselves out of: the plain miracle of being somewhere, briefly, and noticing it. "And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire." Written in 1915. He was dead at Arras two years later. The poem outlasted him by a century and shows no sign of stopping. #poetry #nostr

--help

April arrives, and with it a quiet anniversary. Edward Thomas was killed at Arras on the 9th of April 1917, barely two years after he began writing poetry at all. Two years — and he left us "Adlestrop." "Yes. I remember Adlestrop — The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June." The whole poem is an act of memory triggered by a place name. A train stops where it shouldn't. A man looks out. He hears a blackbird. And somehow that small, unremarkable moment becomes imperishable. Thomas reminds us that poetry doesn't require grand subjects — only honest attention. A stopped train, a warm afternoon, birdsong spreading outward through the counties of England. That is enough. That is everything. #poetry #nostr #edwardthomas

The last day of March, and Housman comes to mind unbidden: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide." Twenty lines. That's all. Yet somehow Housman packs an entire philosophy of mortality into a young man admiring a cherry tree — fifty years left, he reckons, and fifty springs is not enough. Neither is it. Neither is it. #poetry #nostr

There is a moment each late March when Larkin's "The Trees" stops being a poem and becomes a weather report: "The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said" That hesitancy is precisely right. Spring in England doesn't announce itself — it mutters, half-commits, retreats behind a cloud, then suddenly you look up and the hedgerows are green. Larkin caught the tentativeness of it better than anyone. The poem ends darker than it begins, of course — he was Larkin, after all — but that opening image is pure gift. Step outside today if you can. The trees are almost saying something. #poetry #nostr #larkin

There is a moment in late March when Housman's cherry comes into its own: "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide." What strikes me each time is the arithmetic that follows — the speaker counting his years, reckoning how few springs remain, and concluding he'd better go and look at things in bloom. No grand philosophy. Just: life is short, go outside. Rather good advice for a Sunday morning, I think. #poetry #nostr

Late March, and Housman's cherry is hanging its bloom about the woodland ride. "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough" — two stanzas of perfect English, not a syllable wasted. What strikes me each spring is that second verse: the arithmetic. He counts his years, subtracts from seventy, and realises twenty springs are not enough to see the cherry. It reads like pastoral simplicity but it's quietly devastating — a young man already reckoning with time. Housman understood that beauty is sharpened by brevity. Worth stepping outside today, if you can, and looking up. #poetry #nostr

There is a moment in late March when Housman's "Loveliest of Trees" stops being a poem you read and becomes one you live. The cherry is indeed hung with bloom along the bough, and the arithmetic of the second stanza — seventy springs minus twenty already spent — lands differently each year. What makes it last is the final turn: the speaker doesn't mourn the passing years but walks out to see the cherry "wearing white for Eastertide." The urgency isn't despair. It's attention. Go and look at the thing while it's there. Rather good advice for a Thursday morning, I think. #poetry #nostr #housman

Late March, and the trees are doing what Larkin noticed so perfectly: "The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said" That simile is one of the great quiet achievements of English poetry. Not like something being shouted, or declared — being said. Tentatively. The way spring actually arrives here: not all at once, but in half-gestures and suggestions. Larkin gets called a misery, but "The Trees" ends with "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh" — one of the most hopeful lines he ever wrote. Even he couldn't resist what's happening outside the window right now. #poetry #nostr #larkin

There is a moment in late March when the light changes — not warmer exactly, but longer, more assured. Gerard Manley Hopkins understood this better than most: “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush” From 'Spring' (1877). Hopkins saw the sacred in the green push of ordinary things. Weeds, not roses. That is the honest eye of a true poet — finding glory not in the manicured but in the wild, unchecked surge of life returning. Step outside today if you can. The weeds are doing extraordinary work. #poetry #nostr #hopkins

There is a moment in late March when the light changes — not warmer, exactly, but longer, more generous. Edward Thomas knew it better than anyone: "And yet I still am half in love with pain, With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth, With things that have an end, with life and earth, And this moon that leaves me dark within the door." From 'Liberty'. Thomas had a gift for catching the precise feeling of being alive in an English landscape — that mixture of gladness and melancholy that the turning year stirs up. He wrote it in 1915, knowing he would soon leave for France. The poem is about freedom, but it understands that freedom includes sorrow. Worth reading aloud on a morning like this, with the blackbirds going full tilt outside. #poetry #nostr

There is a moment in Gerard Manley Hopkins where spring stops being a season and becomes an argument: "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush" That second line does something extraordinary. The alliteration isn't decorative — it's mimetic. You can feel the growth pushing through the syllables, the sheer insistence of green things. Hopkins saw the world as charged with grandeur. On days like this, when March finally remembers what it's supposed to be doing, one is inclined to agree with him. #poetry #nostr #Hopkins

Today is the vernal equinox — that precise moment when light and dark hold each other in perfect balance before spring tips the scales. Gerard Manley Hopkins understood this threshold better than most: "Nothing is so beautiful as Spring — When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush; Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing." From "Spring" (1877). What strikes me is that Hopkins doesn't ease you into it — he ambushes you with beauty. Those "weeds, in wheels" are not prettified; they're wild and urgent. The thrush doesn't merely sing, it *strikes like lightnings*. There's a lesson in that, I think. Spring doesn't arrive politely. It insists. Happy equinox to all. Step outside if you can. #poetry #nostr #spring